And since we're in the midst of celebrating all things summer and all things gaming, what better time to honour – and shame – the games of the biggest summer blockbusters of all time.

The Star Wars Series (1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002, 2005)

The Movies: Star Wars needs no introduction. The most powerful force in popular culture of the past generation, its six movies were released across four decades, the first in 1977, the last in 2005. Some of them are great! Some of them, not so great.

The Games: There are just too many Star Wars games to mention here. Though, remarkably, for all the franchise's success, very few have been directly related to the events of the movies. And the best of those by far were Lucasarts Super Star Wars series, released in the mid-1990's for the Super Nintendo. Re-telling the events of the original trilogy through a combination of 2D platforming and vehicle sections, they stand as an example of movie licenses done right (even if they were a little late).
The Dark Knight (2008)

The Movie: The Dark Knight sits at #4 on the all-time box office charts, having taken in a whopping $1,001,921,825. It also holds the all-time record for the biggest opening weekend in cinema history, making $155,340,000.

The Game: Despite the immense interest in both the film and the franchise brought about by this movie (and, admittedly, the death of co-star Heath Ledger), in a rare showing there was never a console Dark Knight game. Well, there was never one released.

Pandemic's Australian studio were working on a tie-in game, which was destined to be an open-world title (GTA meets Splinter Cell), but publisher mismanagement and quality concerns led to the game's (and the studio's) demise.
Jurassic Park (1993)

The Movie: Just squeaking into the top 10-grossing movies of all time, Jurassic Park saw Steven Spielberg bring Michael Crichton's novel about dinosaur cloning gone mad to the big screen. With spectacular results. Sure, it wasn't as gritty as the source material, and those kids were annoying, but it still ranks as one of the most visually impressive films of all time.

The Games: While there have been many games based on the franchise over the years, at the time of the original film's release, only two tie-in titles were put out, one for the Super Nintendo, one for the Genesis. And in a rare move, both games were completely different. The Mega Drive game was a woeful platformer, while the SNES game was a surprisingly brilliant title, blending top-down exploration with first-person combat sections.
The Lion King (1994)

The Movie: Many would argue that The Lion King was Disney's last truly great in-house movie, and it's box office takings bear that out, as at #24 it's the highest-ranked Disney cartoon on the list of the top-grossing films of all time. A simple tale of a cub's difficult journey to adulthood, it's given surprising depth and maturity from some excellent casting and bleak visuals.

The Game: Lion King had a lot to live up to, following Shiny's amazing Aladdin title, but for the most part it lived up to those lofty expectations. The art and animation was handled by Disney, while the game was worked on by none other than Westwood Studios, of Command & Conquer fame.
ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982)

The Movie: Spielberg's film about an alien that comes to spread love, and not destruction, is still fondly-remembered, even if that fondness is restricted to a silly catchphrase about phones and the fact Drew Barrymore was in it.

The Game: Oh boy. When you want to talk about crummy games based on movies, they don't get much worse than ET. Rushed out in a matter of weeks so it could cash in on the film, the game bore little resemblance to the movie, and was a sales disaster. Things were so bad, in fact, that in 1983 Atari - reeling from the video game market crash it helped create with games like ET - filled a truck full of ET cartridges and buried them in a hole somewhere in the New Mexico desert.
The Back To The Future Series (1985, 1989, 1990)

The Movies: Marty McFly. Awesome Nike sneakers. Time-travelling locomotives. The Back to the Future series was perhaps the best example of the feel-good 80's blockbuster, with Michael J Fox and his time-travelling companion, the bonkers Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) managing to screw with the space-time continuum not once, not twice, but thrice.

The Games: For a movie trilogy that wasn't exactly big on action, Back to the Future somehow spawned around half a dozen games. Here, we're paying tribute to the worst, a vertically-scrolling game for the NES where you, as Marty McFly (apparently) have to run up a street collecting clocks, all the while avoiding men carrying panes of glass. And...that's about it.
The Pirates Of The Caribbean Series (2003, 2006, 2007)

The Movies: Based on a theme park ride of all things, Pirates of the Caribbean was one of the surprise hits of 2003, so much so that two further movies were released in 2006 and 2007. A fourth film is in pre-production. Johnny Depp steals the show as slightly camp pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, though we're equally fond of Bill Nighy's portrayal of fish-faced Davey Jones, partly because he's Bill Nighy, and partly because he's Bill Nighy with a giant pet squid.

The Games: Not much to speak of here. A game based on the third film, At World's End, came and went without troubling many people. More interesting is the game based on the first film. Or shall we say, "based on", since it has absolutely nothing to do with the events of the movie. It was, in fact, the sequel to PC Pirates! clone Sea Dogs, and was hastily repackaged to cash in on the first movie. And was about as successful as you'd expect such a venture to be.
The Transformers (2007, 2009)

The Movies: Michael Bay & Steven Spielberg (we're seeing that name a lot in here) team up to bring the most beloved cartoon series of the 1980s to life. Despite both being poor films - the second especially so - they're cashing in on 80's nostalgia and feature giant robots fighting, so it's no surprise the two films have already grossed over $1 billion combined.

The Games: The Transformers franchise has always been marred by poor video game adaptations, and these two films are no exception. Both tie-ins have been sub-par, generic action titles, only notable for the fact they managed to get the original Megatron voice actor to reprise his role, rather than Hugo Weaving, who voices the Decepticon leader in the films. Our advice? Go play the 2004 Transformers game, based on the Armada universe and developed by Melbourne House. It's actually good.
Independence Day (1996)

The Movie: One of the biggest summer blockbusters of the 1990's, ID4 may have featured silly characters and a silly plot by aliens to destroy humanity, but it had a memorable scene involving the White House, alien face-punching and a drunk Randy Quaid as the hero, so shut up. It's a great flick.

The Game: Sadly, the same can't be said of the adaptation, which appeared on the PS1 and Saturn. You fly an F-18 around shooting aliens, your view constrained by a technical cop-out squishing the playing area between an alien mothership and the ground, and...that's it. No face-punching. No smoky alien body snatching. No motivational speeches. Shame.
The Indiana Jones Series (1981, 1984, 1989, 2008)

The Movies: Ah, the Indiana Jones trilogy (there was never a fourth movie, got it?)!! Harrison Ford plays an adventurous archaeologist who has to stop Nazis (and creepy Indians) from taking over the world. While opinions are divided on the second film, the first and third go down as all-time classics, with Last Crusade also known as "the last good thing George Lucas ever did".

The Games: There have been a ton of Indy games released over the years, but like many older film franchises, not many dealt directly with the plot of the movies (LEGO Indy doesn't count as it was released so long after the fact). Lucasart's adventure game take on Last Crusade did, however, and being a Lucasarts adventure game, is pretty damn good. For some reason Last Crusade always gets forgotten in the wake of the later, superior Fate of Atlantis (also a Lucasarts adventure game), but it's worth checking out regardless.
The Jaws Series (1975, 1978, 1983, 1987)

The Movie: Jaws is remembered not just for the fact it made whole generations afraid to go near the water, but also because it was the very first "summer blockbuster." Spielberg's story of a giant shark terrorising a seaside community was so successful it spawned three sequels, which contrary to popular belief, are all good, Jaws 3 for the dream team of Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr., Jaws 4 for teaming Oscar-winner Michael Caine with...Mario Van Peebles.

The Games: There have only been a few Jaws games, one on the PS2 which was terrible, and one for the NES, pictured above. Which was also terrible. Though terrible in a good way, as it's based loosely on the events of Jaws 4, meaning you can play the game narrating the events in your best Michael Caine accent. It would have helped if either of the games was even remotely scary.
The Spider-Man Series (2002, 2004, 2007)

The Movies: Spider-Man is the king of the summer blockbuster this decade, and held the record for the biggest opening weekend of all time until beaten last year by The Dark Knight. A modern depiction of Marvel's classic comic character, the Spider-Man movies have benefited from not only amazing special effects, but a sexy, memorable cast as well. Who could ever forget the way James Franco eats that pie?

The Games: Each modern Spider-Man flick has spawned adaptations, but these for the most part have been terrible. With the exception of Spider-Man 2, on the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. It took the key appeal of Spider-Man - his web-slinging - and applied it to an open city, giving us a watered down version of Grand Theft Peter Parker. Successive titles have failed to strike the same balance between action and exploration that this game managed so well.

1975, Jaws — "It was the Village East theater in Birmingham, Alabama. And we rode in my sister's husband's Trans Am…I have certain flashes of scenes, like the scene where Roy Scheider pulls the license plate out of the stomach of the shark. I remember that. They're just flashes. I remember it being very scary. My brother was traumatized, to this day. I loved it." — Twisted Metal and God of War creator David Jaffe, born in 1971

Video games all but smell of popcorn. They have been influenced by the movies, arguably more so than they have been by any other art form, save for other games. And the movies that influence them most appear to be the biggest, the summer blockbusters.

Play a game or simply visit a game development studio — watch for the posters, the action figures or listen to the mentions in casual conversation — and the influence of summer movies is apparent. A week can't go by without noticing the sway big movies have on creators. Last Wednesday, while showing Kotaku his game The Saboteur, Pandemic designer Tom French cited Indiana Jones' bigness and coolness of action as an influence on his game's anti-Nazi adventure. Over the weekend as I neared the end of Ghostbusters: The Video Game — itself an offspring of summer movies — I saw a late-game scene in which one of the heroes flees from a massive rolling boulder.

"[Summer movies] are touchstones in a sense they are generational touchstones," Stephen Alexander, veteran gaming artist at 2K Boston told Kotaku. "Games tend to reference them a lot, because the people who are making them are making them for people who are like themselves. Or they make the assumption, that because I like this, the audience will like this."

Prints of Aliens and Star Wars can be lifted from Gears of War and Halo, Star Fox and Final Fantasy. Also, the Indiana Jones films and Predator. T2 and Tron. Jaws. Top Gun. Independence Day.

1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark — "Indiana Jones meant nothing to me. It looked like a boring Western. I had no interest in it. I remember watching the review on Siskel and Ebert in the house with my parents — the whole family was over — and I was like, ah that seems kind of cool, whatever. My dad said, 'Yeah let's go see that.' …It was sold out, so we sat in the car, which I think was this 1970s-era brown Cadillac. And we just sat there for two hours, hanging out as a family, waiting for the next show to start. Eventually we got in, and, I'm not shitting you, it changed my life. It changed my fucking life. This is what I want to do. To live in that world and to be in that world, not so much Indiana Jones' world — though that would be great — but the world of creativity and escapism and summer excitement in terms of film and video games… It just opened the world of geekdom and film-loving and it affects me to this day." — David Jaffe

Summer movies touch everyone, not just game creators. But they may have a stronger grip in a community where it's not uncommon for a development studio to shut down for the afternoon so the team can catch the latest summer flick at a rented theater. That was a mandatory outing just a few Fridays ago, for 2K Boston, when they went to see Up.

"The great thing about the blockbusters is having the common vocabulary," 2K Boston designer Bill Gardner said. "Who doesn't talk about the Predator's cloaking device, whatever the hell it's called? And the T1000 and all that stuff, constantly touching on these reference points."

In the lingua franca of video games, George Lucas is king. "Star Wars pops up all the time," Gardner's colleague at 2K Boston, Stephen Alexander, said. "And that's where a lot of games draw from because it is such an iconic journey to go on and it has such emotional resonance and pays off so well."

But game creators don't borrow from all the summer hits of the '80s and '90s. Alexander may see some Goonies in Zelda, but he guesses that's just him. Ferris Bueller's Day Off doesn't seem to have informed many games. Back to the Future's influence, if it exists, is subtle.

1982, E.T. — "I remember seeing it at the Brooklyn Mall theater and [film company people] handing out the buttons and I was just like, 'Oh my god, I got a button.' And now the PR department is like, 'Big fucking deal, we made a million buttons.' But to a kid in Alabama who was in love with the movies, especially Spielberg and Spielberg's movies, this was like the Holy Grail." — David Jaffe

For all the love E.T. gets, it's had only a light touch on games. Alexander has a theory why. "The real power of E.T. was that emotional bond between E.T. and Elliott," he argued. "Emotional resonance is something that games are still wrestling with… I haven't seen too many games that have managed to pull that off." Ico is the only game he can think of that fits.

The more bombastic, escapist summer movies exert the most influence. They are, according to developers like Alexander and Gardner, parallel works to video games: They share the goal of escapism. The best blockbuster movies and the best blockbuster games take you out of yourself, on a ride.

1983, Return of the Jedi — "[My mom] had come to check me and my neighbor out of sixth grade. We were going to go to like the first show at one o'clock. …I was so excited, I couldn't keep my mouth shut. The word got out and my math teacher, Mrs. Vance, who to this day I don't forgive, basically had a shit fit about it and ended up calling my mom and stuff. It became this big deal and she wasn't going to let me — whatever the fuck — graduate sixth grade. Ultimately, I ended up going to the movie, and I remember waiting in line. It was all the people who show up for a summer movie the first day. It was a big deal. …And I remember, after that point, really trying to recreate that for the rest of my junior high and high school experience. I remember hoping — hoping so bad — that Willow would have this huge line and it never really did." — David Jaffe

Some developers bristle at this or at least laugh off the overwhelming influence that summer movies have. Alexander and Gardner's boss, Ken Levine, said as much to me in January 2007: "Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is Lord of the Rings and Aliens or variations of that. There's great things in that, but you need some variety… Look, I just steal from other sources."

Aliens is the one that gets the eye-rolls a lot. Another drop-ship? Another group of space marines? Another tough-talking black sergeant? Another drab color palette? "When it came out, Aliens' visual design was so amazingly fresh and almost mind-blowing, it's not surprising that so many people have taken it and used it to make their space game," Alexander said. "It is a rich ground to place a game in, but it seems like people have gotten a little bit lazy in using this visual language at this point."

But don't blame the summer movies alone for this, Alexander said. "A game creator has a brilliant flash of inspiration and they mimic something from Aliens, for example, and it's incredibly successful and then other creators mimic that game. I don't know that it's everybody drawing from the same source. I think games are maybe borrowing too much from each other in some ways. You fall into the 'it worked once — let's not be risky — and do it again.'"

1989, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — "When Last Crusade opened I was such a total fucking geek. I didn't care. I was in high school. The cement had dried on what kind of geek I was going to be. My brother, with me and a couple of my buddies, we all had logos of Last Crusade painted on the back of our cars like it was homecoming." — David Jaffe

There's another draw the summer films have for game creators and the publishers they work for: Bigness.

There's spectacle that surrounds the release of the film expressed in long lines, big ads, talk-show guest appearances, commercials, souvenir cups, national — international — media attention. It's natural to want that.
"The spectacle around the summer blockbusters is something to envy," Gardner said. "You want to break into the mainstream and get people talking, but when you come down to it, as envious as I may be, I try to focus on what we're doing right more than anything else. When it comes down to it, I don't know if we'll every be able to emulate that type of hype."

Still, while the siren song of summer movie status can be hard to resist, it can cause problems when game companies misuse the model. Taking the rate of explosions from a Michael Bay movie and injecting it into a game won't make the game as exciting as the Bay movie. Even a summer movie fanatic like David Jaffe knows this. Borrowing a key scene — the visuals, the audio — doesn't play to gaming's core strength, interactivity. So developers should best bear their influence with caution. A little nod here or there can be a nice touch, of course.

2005, God of War — "God of War is the game I always wanted to make. And there's a huge influence of Raiders of the Lost Ark in God of War. Pandora's Box is the Greek mythology version of the Ark of the Covenant. Actual moves that Kratos does in God of War are directly an homage to what Indy does in Raiders of the Lost Ark. When Indy kicks over that statue when he's in the Well of the Souls, it's the exact same animation — obviously Harrison Ford or the stuntman did it for real — we had Kratos mimic what he did with his body with the giant column when he first gets to Athens." - David Jaffe

So maybe the summer movie blockbusters are safe from video games ripping them off wholesale. And maybe games will continue to find their own way to develop as a unique medium. In fact, games have already been seen to be exerting their own influence on the summer films: see the sidescrolling action sequence in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones or the increasingly video-game-like action scenes and car chases in so many other summer films, like Terminator Salvation and The Bourne Ultimatum.

That doesn't mean some creators won't want you to feel that summer movie feeling when you settle down in front of one of their games.

2009, Eat Sleep Play — "There is a literal aspect to the influence these things have had. But then, more importantly, there is a philosophical impact that the summer movies have had from a standpoint of wanting to provide, for my audience — look I understand that we don't make movies, we don't reach as big of an audience — but I still take the responsibility of the audience we do speak to very seriously. And, as much as I look at the works of [Flow and Flower development studio] That Game Company or [Ico creator Fumito] Ueda when he does Shadow of the Colossus, I'm so okay leaving that level of emotion and that level of meaning to someone else. I want to be the guy who provides the escape. I want to be the guy who provides the video game equivalent of the summer blockbuster." — David Jaffe, co-founder of game development studio Eat Sleep Play

(Movie poster images via the Internet Movie Poster Awards site.)

[via Blues News]

We are proud to announce our upcoming documentary, E.T.'s March. Over the course of a week this March, we will go on a road trip from Auburn, AL, to El Paso, TX. From there, we will take the actual path those fourteen trucks took that fateful day, into the heart of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Along the way, we will take in the video game culture of our great country. The documentary will be released for free via the internet this summer.

Good luck guys! Hopefully this doesn't turn out to be another Al Capone's Vault.

E.T.'s March Official Site

We've all heard it before, the story of the Great Atari Landfill. According to legend, Atari 2600's E.T. game sold so terribly, that in an attempt to literally bury the stink-bomb, a landfill was created out of all the unsold copies.

Devoted researcher, DigitalMadman, has created a whole website on the study of this phenomenon and tackles his subject with a fervor that would make Agents Mulder & Scully jealous. Through interviews and meticulous research he has set out to prove that the legendary pile of plastic actually exists and reveals the real some truths behind of legend.

What now has become stuff of urban legend (and many people doubting the event even happened), Atari Inc. sent a reported 10 to 20 semi trucks loaded to brim with unsold/returned Atari game carts, unsold Atari consoles, and countless other related hardware from it's El Paso warehouse. Where was it's destination? The answer, Alamogordo, New Mexico. Where as the story goes, the trucks were emptied into the local landfill and the Atari materials had concrete poured on top of them. Where they remain buried to this day.

Coincidentally, Alamogordo happens to be just southeast of the infamous Roswell. Will DigitalMadman really find a huge pile of Atari excrement a scant 50 miles from the world's most famous alien landing pad? Perhaps it will finally give truth to the theory that there is more than one extra-terrestrial buried in the New Mexico desert. (Insert X-Files theme here) Flynn De Marco

The Atari Landfill Revealed [Digital Madman]