Valve honcho Gabe Newell says the only way a Half-Life movie will ever be made is if Valve does the job itself and suggests that someday, it might actually happen.
Despite the hype, Hollywood and videogames have not been a match made in heaven. It’s a marriage that has so far produced, at best, a small handful of semi-watchable popcorn flicks, none of which have done justice to the source material. In Newell’s eyes, the reason is fairly simple: Hollywood types just don’t get it.
“As a WoW player, I would much rather that the WoW team made the movie, right?” he recently said in an interview with PC Gamer. “I like Sam Raimi, I’ve been a fan ever since Evil Dead came out, but I would rather see Blizzard making the movie.”
Not long after the launch of Half-Life, Valve had a “whole bunch of meetings” with people from the movie industry who were pitching ideas for turning it into a film. “And 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,” Newell said.
“That’s when we started saying ‘Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we’d have to make it ourselves.’ And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible’,” he continued. “But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that.”
Putting together a feature film is a huge undertaking, although Valve has displayed a definite flair for the cinematic with its Meet the Team trailers for TF2. I don’t think we should hold our collective breath waiting for it to happen but given what Hollywood has managed to do with some really great properties (I’m looking at you, Mr. Payne) I sure wouldn’t mind seeing the boys from Bellevue give it a try.
