Welcome back to Projections, the only movie newsletter that stopped at 32-bit.
I haven’t owned a video game console since 2006. I haven’t had a sustained session playing a game in nearly as long. Let that not be a reflection on my attitude toward gaming. I think it’s just dandy. I was full-blown addicted in the ’90s. In fact, some of my strongest movie-coded memories are entwined with video games. It was during marathon sessions of Jet Moto, Cool Boarders, Tekken 3, Crash Bandicoot, and Tomb Raider when I listened to various movie soundtracks and scores. The interspersed dialogue that could be found on the early Tarantino soundtracks, as well as Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam, were gateways to the inextricable relationship between movies and music, which would become the two lighthouses of my cultural life.
So when I think of video games, I closely associate them with movies. Though not for the reasons many others do—I missed the wave of boundary-pushing mainstream video game storytelling. I never played The Last of Us or Mass Effect or Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid or BioShock. And as a completionist type, I’ve taken a “What can you do?” attitude toward these huge gaps in my cultural knowledge. In the interim, gaming has leapt to the forefront of both the way young people spend their time entertaining themselves and how the entertainment industry evaluates how to siphon the most time and money from consumers. So I do understand the appeal, I just got addicted to movies and my career, and then had a family. There just isn’t time to give Baldur’s Gate 3 a whirl. I wouldn’t say I’m rethinking that position, but I do feel an information crunch hurtling toward me, and that’s for a simple reason: video game movies are the future.
