Valve games into films? Sign me up!

It has to be said that films based on video games don’t tend to get critically praised. Browsing Wikipedia shows that the highest Rotten Tomatoes score one has ever achieved is 43%, which is less than impressive. They are not, in general, the kind of films I pay to see.

But things might well change.

Cue J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot and Valve coming together to make films based upon Valve’s game series Half-Life and Portal. The announcement was made at the end of a keynote speech delivered by Abrams and Valve’s co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, entitled “Storytelling Across Platforms: Who Benefits Most, the Audience or the Player?”. The speech, part of the 2013 D.I.C.E (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) summit, took the form of a discussion between the two men as they talked about the strengths and weaknesses of films and video games as storytelling mediums.

Previously other Hollywood directors have approached Valve about making a Half-Life film; in Newell’s words, “…their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of.” Up until this point Valve had considered making their own HL film in order to do the series justice, and their work with the Team Fortress 2 ‘Meet the Team’ shorts was part of the experimentation process. The joint announcement by Abrams and Newell seem set to change this idea.

So when can we expect something? Though much talk has no doubt gone on between Newell and Abrams there’s still little in the way of concrete information available to the public. Like all things Valve undertakes the project will take time, so don’t expect a 2013 release(or even a 2014 one). Good things come to those who wait, however, and I for one am confident whatever Valve and Bad Robot Productions come up with will trump all the other video game movies in the market.

I guess Episode 3 can just wait a little longer…