David Remnick: The list of movies and TV shows adapted from video games is really long and it's checkered. For every Tomb Raider, we have dozens of forgettable shows and would-be blockbusters that just weren't. Now, there's The Last of Us, the HBO show based on a series of games set in a post-apocalyptic world. The Last of Us has been years in the making, and it's turned out to be a huge success both critically and commercially.

Movie Excerpt: I know what's out there. We were going with an entire squadron for that very reason, but now I don't have a truck. I don't have a Squadron. FEDRA's five minutes away. What I do have is you, and I know what you're both capable of. For better or worse.

David Remnick: I talked to Alex Barasch, who's an editor at The New Yorker, to understand why adapting video games has been so difficult over the years, and what makes it work when it does work. Alex wrote about The Last of Us in December. Alex, I think you know me well enough to know after all this time spent working together that what I know about video games, you could fit in a this thimble. [chuckles] My kids will never forgive me. They're grown now, but I outlawed them at home.

They remind me of this all the time, and maybe I made a mistake, but you love them. More to the point, you are telling us that video games-- it's a long process, but have been influencing all other arts, particularly, obviously, television and movies. What I'd love for you to do for us today is give us three instances where video games have been adapted to great effect and real effect on popular culture. Let's go to it.

Alex Barasch: I think we do have to begin with Super Mario Brothers-

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Alex Barasch: -which I would not call a great adaptation, but it is an instructive one in its impact and its reception. Nobody in Hollywood had tried the live-action feature-length video game adaptation as a firm. Frankly, the game did not give them a lot to work with in the way of plot.

[music]

Movie Excerpt: They're brothers, they're plumbers. They're on the trail of a kidnapped princess and a mystical meteorite that gives anyone who possesses it the power to rule the Universe.

Alex Barasch: When they came to adapt it, there was a degree of self-consciousness, a desire to say, "This is something more than the game. The tagline in fact was, "This Ain't No Game." They were aiming for a Ghostbustersy subversive comedy mode, slightly darker, slightly zanier and they missed.

David Remnick: Unless I'm wrong, Super Mario Brothers was a console game. It comes out in 1993 as a film, and lo and behold, in 2023, somebody's taking another crack at it.

Alex Barasch: Oh, yes. We are trying again with Chris Pratt in the title role.

Movie Excerpt: It's me, Mario.

[laughter]

Alex Barasch: I think this speaks to Hollywood's quest. They've not given up. It was a Box Office bomb at the time, but nobody has given up on cracking this formula.

David Remnick: Now we come next to something that dominated my household when my kids were really young, Pokemon.

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Alex Barasch: This is the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart, I will say, in terms of the adaptations past. It had this really interesting unusual mutualistic relationship between the games and the series. The series, I should say, had 1,200 episodes, 25 seasons, it's still going strong. Every time a new game came out, they would take the protagonist of the show who is this perennial 10-year-old called Ash Ketchum, and plop him into the new region. He meets all the same monsters as you meet in the game, he's meeting the same characters. He's fighting the fights that you as a player would undertake.

That feedback loop has continued for decades now. It was actually recently announced that Ash would be stepping down as the protagonist after some 25 years. There was a real outpouring of nostalgia and excitement about that.

David Remnick: Is Ash retiring to Boca Raton?

Alex Barasch: We can only hope, after the service that he's put in.

Movie Excerpt: You did buddy, [unintelligible 00:04:30].

David Remnick: Now, not long ago you came into an editorial meeting, I don't know, a few months ago and said that HBO is going to make a huge hit show out of a game called The Last of Us. Am I right?

Alex Barasch: Yes.

David Remnick: I greeted this idea with a raised eyebrow, but said, "Alex, you go ahead and do it."

TV Excerpt: That's the video game turned small screen sensation had HBO's second biggest debut of the last 13 years behind only House of the Dragon.

Alex Barasch: Yes, it's pretty amazing. The premise of the show and of the game is quite simple. A fungus-based pandemic has decimated society. There's a smuggler called Joel who is played in the show by Pedro Pascal, who lost his daughter at the beginning of the outbreak some 20 years prior. He is thrown together with this young girl called Ellie, who it's understood may be immune to the pathogen and thus could save what remains of society. They have this road trip across America. He is taking her to a lab where they hope that they will be able to engineer a cure.

Ellie: Joel, I can handle myself.

Joel: It's called luck and it is going to run out.

Ellie: You hear that? Run, there's too many of them.

Alex Barasch: That sounds like every post-apocalyptic story under the sun, but it's really about the ways of living that people have carved out for themselves in this landscape. There are some people who are building these idealistic socialist communes. There are people who have barricaded themselves into their own towns and won't let anyone else in. There are people who've turned to incredible violence. There are all of these different modes of existence. You're seeing all of this unfold through the deepening relationship, this father-daughter dynamic between the two of them.

David Remnick: Alex, Super Mario Brothers, Pokemon, and The Last of Us. Is this all about Hollywood's search for intellectual property that will become the next Marvel or something like a franchise that will just float the boat financially?

Alex Barasch: I think that's certainly a factor. Amazon, Paramount, Netflix, basically every studio and streamer under the sun is trying to do some version of this. There've been a lot of false starts. Assassin's Creed with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard was believed to be the next great hope of video game adaptations back in 2016, I think it was. That just crashed and burned and plans for sequels were promptly scrapped. There has been some attempt over the decades to get something like this off the ground. I think that The Last of Us has the advantage of this inherently cinematic quality and of a team that genuinely believes in what they're doing. It's not this cynical cash grab alone.

David Remnick: Is it possible to predict what other games will become the television and movies of the near future?

Alex Barasch: There are a million that are currently in development. Amazon just announced a God of War series. Netflix are trying about a dozen different things right now and seeing what sticks. I think the thing to look for, and I hope that they know this now, is strongly defined characters and a strong narrative backbone. Something that a lot of these adaptations of historically lacked, because when you're playing a game, you want to be able to project onto the character.

You get to fill in the gaps or even customize the way that they look and the way they act. When that comes to television and they're just an empty cipher, it's not very interesting to watch because you have no reason to care about them. I think if people are careful in their selection of source material, then they will have much more success in that arena.

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David Remnick: Alex, thanks so much. Great to talk to you as always.

Alex Barasch: Yes, thank you.

David Remnick: Alex Barasch is an editor at The New Yorker, and you can find his reporting piece about The Last of Us at www.newyorker.com.

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