What gets us about the films that are made from our favourite videogames isn't that they're almost inevitably bad, but how bad they inevitably are. There's no good reason they should be.
Every other movie Hollywood produces is based on a book. The equally maligned comic book conversions have at least seen some notable highs with the likes of Superman, Spider-man and, of course, The Dark Knight. Plays, TV shows, and other movies have been huge box office success.
Yet games are trapped in the basement, with the mere mention of their titles putting the audience in mind of Pacman, Doom, and greasy nerds fondling themselves to naked Lara Croft fan art. It's not fair. It's not right.
The trouble is, with the kind of movies we usually have fighting our corner, it's really not surprising. Part of the problem is that the people who greenlight movies haven't historically been gamers themselves.
The same company later produced Pac-Man, Rubik The Amazing Cube, Mega Man and Dragon's Lair, carving out a real niche for itself that we in the UK were mostly fortunate enough to miss.
Turning Frogger into a journalist suddenly seems like such a small leap, doesn't it? This was followed by the truly ghastly Street Fighter II movie, which featured roughly five million characters, two braincells, and exactly one good line ("For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday") and the two Mortal Kombat movies – the first of which was decent, given the limitations of the source, and especially compared to the two hours of agonising genital pain that would be preferable to its sequel.
We're skipping a few here, including the first two Pokemon movies, Fatal Fury, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros, "The Great Quest To Rescue Princess Peach". However, rest assured, you're not missing much if you haven't seen them.
As far as the PC was concerned, the transition from games to movies typically went the other way during the 1990s. The birth of interactive movies gave companies the chance to be film producers without going to Hollywood, and while many titles were rumoured to be considering making the jump to movie stardom – including Doom (long before the film we finally got), Monkey Island, and Deus Ex – for the most part it just didn't happen.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) typically gets the credit for being the first blockbuster based on a PC game, and rightly so. It wasn't actually the first – Wing Commander came out in 1999 – but it was easily the first big success, and one of the only conversions up to this point that bothered treating its source material with some respect.
Yes, it's far from perfect, and as soon as Angelina Jolie first dons her padded bra to fight a killer robot, it's clear that it's trying far, far too hard to be 'extreme'… but it's not a bad movie. It's fun, competently made, with a decent budget, and generally good additions, such as adding an extra emotional level involving Lara's relationship with her dead father.
It's also notable that when Toby Gard and Crystal Dynamics rebooted the franchise with Legend, they made many similar decisions – losing the new Mission Control character Bryce, but adding Zip and Alistair as tech/historical replacements, and putting much more narrative emphasis on Lara's parents, and why she feels so compelled to run around arctic tundra in that infamous green T-shirt and short-shorts.
Despite the Croft movie setting the pace for the rest of the industry, and being very successful in the process (it pulled in over $270 million), its lessons were almost instantly forgotten. In the 16 years since it came out, only Silent Hill (2006) stands out as a genuine attempt to make the most of its source material. It's not a great movie, but at least it feels right.