Masterpieces, pixelated.
Books and video games. Once thought mortal enemies now the strangest of bedfellows. Decried in the 1980s as literacy kryptonite (“That Pac Man Invader Kong will rot your brain!”), it’s now common for libraries to check video games and books out alongside one another and for literature to find new life rendered in pixels and boss fights.
Of course some contemporary best-sellers seem practically written to pirouette easily into games (Katniss Everdeen did not fight in The Hunger Meditations), but how about novels written decades before Pong? How about novels with the cultural baggage and crappy memories of being forced on you in 10th-grade English?
They’ve got game too. Here are our favorite video game adaptations of works of classic literature. We may still be waiting to play I Know Why The Caged Bird Kills Zombies or Waiting For Godot: The First Person Shooter. But in the meantime, we’ve got gems by Fitzgerald, Hugo, Bradbury, and Austen.
Ready, player one?
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy (1984)
Via bbc.co.uk
Before humankind discovered fire, a run of popular video games were text only, no graphics. The Mozart of creating these games was Infocom, a company in Cambridge, Mass., made up of O.G. nerds from MIT. Small wonder then, when the money started rolling, that they licensed a nerd talmudic text like Hitchhiker’s to make “Don’t Panic” playable.
Enemies: A wicked hangover, impending bulldozers, intergalactic bureaucrats known as Vogons.
Weaponry: Famous for having puzzles so complicated they required a dozen unrelated objects to solve, Infocom eventually sold T-shirts emblazoned with “I Got The Babblefish!” because no one could figure solve the damn Babblefish puzzle (the answer involves a towel, a dressing gown, and a pile of junk mail).
Can I Play It? The BBC put a free, illustrated version online to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary.
Via gamesdbase.com
Fahrenheit 451 (1984)
Mostly text and a few graphics, and set five years after the novel concludes, protagonist Guy Montag is now an agent for the Literary Underground, whose sentries speak to one another in quotes from great books. His mission: break into the New York Public Library where illegal books have been transferred to micro cassette (Hey, it was 1984!) and upload them to the Undergrounds' Information Network.
Ray Bradbury collaborated with the game’s designers on the script. Carisse McClellan is back as Montag’s partner in crime. There’s also a super intelligent computer named (what else?) RAY.
Enemies: Fireman, 451 Patrols, Electric Hounds.
Weaponry: A lighter called “The Flame of Knowledge.”
Can I Play It? You can download it here, then find a Commodore 64 or make your computer impersonate one.
Via en.wikipedia.org
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