Wuthering Heights. Great Expectations. 1984. Treasure Island. Jekyll and Hyde. All of these are great books, no doubt, but when you get right down to it, they're all missing something. We have to face facts, here, GeekOlogy! We can't just shrink from vital criticism just because these classics all have established positions in the literary canon. Let's admit to ourselves and announce it to the world: All of these games need more bonus levels, cutscenes, and secret characters. In short, they all need to be video games.
That's the basic theory behind U.K. transmedia company Tern Digital's upcoming adaptation of The Thirty Nine Steps, a classic spy novel written in 1915 by John Buchan. Tern Digital is currently working on the game, which is being designed for PC, PS3, and iPad. More interestingly, though, the company's also set its sights on other literary gems (including all those I listed above!) for possible conversion into video game experiences. We figure Tern's got a secret conversion chamber buried deep beneath the streets of London, where, by some modern alchemy, they transform kidnapped books into towering interactive automata. Scary stuff.
I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of classic-book video games, but I am a little bit hesitant. I feel like books and video games are two great tastes that don't necessarily taste great together--the interactivity of games seems to contradict the sort of omnipresent, piercing spectatorship of a good novel. There's also that whole video-games-vs.-books feud, as arranged by our President... it's unstable territory, is all I'm saying. Then again, Dante's Inferno was decidedly not terrible, so there's that. Maybe Tern's onto something here. Either way, I have to thank them for two reasons:
1) It's always nice to see someone doing something new, and
2) They've given me a reason to finally include this video in a post.
WATCH IT UNTIL YOU LOVE IT. (It shouldn't take long).
Follow Josh Harrison on Twitter: @geekologized.
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