Video games and movies have had a fairly sordid history. In the 8-bit and 16-bit era, any movie license was thrown onto a platform shooter or driving game, while Hollywood did horrible things with the Super Mario and Street Fighter games.
On the other hand, there was the odd gem. Aliens games have usually been worth the price of admission and Platoon delivered a suitably grim war-is-hell experience long before the likes of Battlefield 1. Joining the mix is Vietnam classic Apocalypse Now, which is up for funding on Kickstarter.
Rather alarmingly, there are only a few pieces of artwork to hint at how the game will play, but it has the blessing of movie Director Francis Ford Coppola and a decent band of games industry veterans, with Fallout, Neverwinter Nights and Wasteland under their belts.
However, would you like to put some cash up front for a game that won’t be launching until 2020? Currently it is listed as PC only, but there could be an Xbox Scorpio or PlayStation 5 (who knows?) version by then. If you can’t wait, classic PS3 shooter, Spec Ops: The Line is also loosely based on the source material for Apocalypse Now, Joseph Conrad’s novella the gripping Heart of Darkness.
The Apocalypse Now game is described as “an immersive, psychedelic RPG with survival and horror overtones.” But how the mind-melting horror of war can be shown and expressed is a very big question indeed. Will it be a VR game (a $3 million stretch goal) that really sucks the player in?
The project has reached $50,000 off $900k required to achieve its base goal within the first day or so, but that’s still a long way to go. Even if it gets good press coverage, there will be many gamers who wonder about the need for this game to exist. Plus, many young gamers won’t even care about the film, and older gamers who are fans of the movie might be getting a bit bored of the endless horror adventures doing the rounds.
We reckon this is definitely a wait-and-see title, given the failure of some high-profile Kickstarter games to deliver.
YouTube: Apocalypse Now – Official Teaser Trailer of the Game Prototype
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnGTWI9ebKw
Photo credit: Erebus
