Fan Films: The Very Best Video Game Movies

When video games receive film adaptations, they have a tendency to be looked upon by critics and fans alike as inferior to the source material, box office records notwithstanding. They range from Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter of the 1990s to the Uwe Boll's House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, and Alone in the Dark in the 2000s. The Resident Evil movie saga starring Milla Jovovich did not fair well critically either, despite receiving millions of dollars at the box office. To make up for these disappointments, people have started to turn toward the Internet for something better, something more true to what made video games earn a fan base in the first place. Enter fan films, short independent non-profit videos made exclusively for the Internet. The number of views these videos receive reflects how well the creators hit the right notes in translating the worlds depicted in the video games to the short films. If they are lucky, they would be receiving support and endorsement from the companies that develop and produce the games the fan films are based on. If they are even luckier, those companies would hire them. As examples of such successful fan films, here is a short list:

Street Fighter: Legacy

Made by an independent company known as Streetlight Films, this short film was co-directed by Joey Ansah and Owen Trevor, with Jon Foo and Christian Howard respectively staring as Ryu and Ken, the two main characters of Street Fighter, Capcom's popular fighting game franchise. Being Street Fighter fans themselves, they took the fighting styles, particularly as depicted in Street Fighter IV, to heart when doing the fight choreography. Since being uploaded on YouTube less than three years ago, views have reached around 4 million, with comments saying that this fan adaptation is superior to the 1994 Hollywood adaptation staring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia and the arguably far worse Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li released in 2009.

Street Fighter X Tekken: The Devil Within

Uploaded around the time Street Fighter X Tekken was released by Capcom last year, the theme in this film is that of powerful dark forces hidden within souls in the forms of the Satsui no hadou in Street Fighter's Ryu and the Devil Gene in Tekken's Kazuya Mishima and Jin Kazama. While the film revolved around battles between Ryu, Ken, and Kazuya and did not feature Jin until the very end, the people behind the fight choreography made sure that the different fighting styles of characters from two different fighting franchises as well as their personalities are represented accurately.


Portal: No Escape

Created and directed by Dan Trachtenberg, this unique short film is based on Portal, Valve's science fiction puzzle platformer. With expertise in digital graphics, special effects, and computer generated imagery (CGI), Trachtenberg's team had replicated the portal gun and the portal system from the game with fantastic results, something that is not easy for a fan film maker to pull off. Otherwise, his short yet technologically innovative fan film would not have been able to receive 12 million views.

Mortal Kombat: Rebirth

When this short film was first released on the Internet, few people knew what to make of it. As views climbed in the millions, some theorized that it was a trailer for a new film while others believed that it was a promotion for a new game. Both theories were odd given the fact that there hasn't been a single film release since the infamous Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and that the Mortal Kombat reboot was already released with critical and commercial success. It was later revealed that Kevin Tancharoen, whose career consisted of dance and musicals like 2009's Fame, was behind it's creation. He stated that he wanted to share his vision of what a Mortal Kombat movie would be like and to prove that, given enough resources, he can make it a reality. And sure enough, Warner Bros. hired him to officially write and direct the movie for them, as well as the first season of Mortal Kombat: Legacy, which was launched on the Machinima last year, with a combined 4 billion views, a feat that is unprecedented for an Internet based show. It is not known when Tancharoen's Mortal Kombat movie will be released, so season two of Mortal Kombat: Legacy will most likely be released sometime this year as a sort of hold over until then.

Escape from City 17 Parts 1 and 2

Made in mid 2009 by David and Ian Purchase of Toronto Canada (known professionally as the Purchase Brothers), this short film series is based on Valve's popular and critically acclaimed sci-fi first-person shooter Half-Life 2. More specifically, the series focuses on events during the later part of the game as well as its follow-up Half-Life 2: Episode 1 from the perspective of a few resistance fighters engaging in an uprising against the omnipotent alien Combine forces in the crumbling futuristic dystopia City 17. With previous experience filming Coca-Cola commercials, they made the film in a guerrilla style with no crew, a budget of $500 in Canadian dollars, costumes, used/broken airsoft guns, a previously owned HVX200 camera, and donated/previously owned software. When Valve Software, the developer and publisher of the Half-Life series, took notice and decided to get involved in the brothers' promotion of their film by having it premiere on the company's user community channel, Steam News. Upon seeing it, members said that they were 'blown away.' When Escape from City 17 - Part 1 was uploaded on YouTube in October 2009, it was viewed more that 1.5 million times in three days, then 2 million times in a week, and finally becoming the #1 Top Rated video on YouTube for about a month. Two years later, Part 2, made under half the budget as Part 1. With sound effects lifted directly from the game, the perfect replications of outfits worn by resistance fighters and Combine soldiers, and a story not featuring Gordon Freeman, the main protagonist of the series, standing out on its own, Escape from City 17 stands out as one of the most popular and well known films made by Half-Life fans.

Left 4 Dead Parts 1, 2, and 3

Based on Valve's popular multiplayer zombie shooter, this three-part fan film was started in 2010 by Colin and Conner McGuire (known on YouTube as ColinandConner). This home project took around two years to complete, with a limited budget. Part 1 lasts around six minutes; Part 2 lasts around fifteen; and Part 3 lasts around forty minutes, which brings the total of the whole project to an hour, the length of a standard episode for a TV show. While keeping the concept of a group of survivors fighting against hordes of zombies, each part got closer to the source material in terms of the objectives the characters set in accordance with their circumstances, such as getting a mint cola from a baseball arena for a pilot in exchange for an escape on his helicopter. With a combination of around fifteen million views, the three-part Left 4 Dead fan film is among the most successful.

While it is true that there are many fan films that are of lesser quality, the growing popularity of Internet-exclusive movies based on video games and made by independent film makers with a passion for their favorite video games is undeniable. Perhaps in the near future, the game and film companies would follow the examples set by these fan films, leading them to make better quality movies for the theaters while being respectful to both video game fans and the source material. I admit that this may be a naive prediction, but that prediction would be something most gaming fans are willing to look forward to.