Valve: We Should Make The Half-Life Movie

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Valve, make a movie? As their own Gabe Newell puts it: “Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible.” Not so fast. In an interview with Gabe Newell, PC Gamer learned that after they fended off a ton of script concepts for a Half-Life movie, Valve believes that nobody can make a Half-Life 2 game better than them.

Regarding the upcoming Sam Raimi-invovled World of Warcraft movie, Newell said that as a WoW player himself, he would be much more inclined if Blizzard had made the WoW movie. He feels that fans don’t like the “slicing and dicing” that goes on when movies are made of popular franchises. He gives Harry Potter as an example, but I think we get the idea.

According to Gabe, after Half-Life 1 came out (and was recognized as one of the best games of all time – my note) they had tons of movie pitches from directors and writers who wanted to make a Half-Life movie. In the words of Mr. Newell, “their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst.” According to Gabe, these movie pitchmen didn’t capture the feel of Half-Life that kept fans entertained.

Gabe is on to something with this. Look at the Doom movie. The Doom movie was an attempt at what people think Doom fans want (see – the awful first-person sequence near the end) but it really wasn’t what we love about Doom, and it wasn’t even a good movie. If you look at the Resident Evil movies, they have nothing to do with the games and but they’re darn fine popcorn action movies.

Back to Mr. Newell. He said that after seeing a few awful pitches for Half-Life movies, somebody at Valve suggested that they “make it themselves”. Newell said “Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible.” Now, according to Newell, their attempts with the TF2 trailers and plot stuff (like the “Meet the (class)” videos) are Valve testing the waters of making movies.

Of course, you can’t talk about movie studios making their own feature films without meaning a few notable examples. Chris Roberts, developer of Wing Commander fame, attempted to launch his Hollywood directing career with a mediocre Wing Commander movie. Squaresoft also produced an uber-expensive CGI film dubbed Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It wasn’t related to any Final Fantasy game (well, is any Final Fantasy game related to any other Final Fantasy game), but carried the name and “tone” of the game. It didn’t do so well at the box office though, and almost bankrupt Squaresoft.