Late 1990s subscription-based online videogame film adaptations

This article explores an important moment in late 1990s US film and videogame industrial convergence. It does so through a Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) of the contemporaneous industrial paratexts surrounding three film-to-subscription-based online videogame adaptations, Aliens Online (1998), Godzilla Online (1998), and Independence Day Online (2000). It asks why these adaptations failed critically and commercially despite the critical praise and evident consumer demand at the time for videogame adaptations of major films like GoldenEye 007 (1997), and subscription-based online games like Ultima Online (1997). Moreover, it asks what these failures tell us about US videogame and cinematic convergence in the late 1990s. In seeking answers to these questions, this article intervenes into Thomas Leitch’s discussions of ‘adaptation strategies’, as well as Jason Mittell’s ideas around ‘unbalanced’ transmedia. It uses these interventions to demonstrate why it is vital to consider the industrial contexts necessitating each adaptation. The RTA reveals that these include the impact of new videogame distribution models, the threat posed by competitors, and the massive profit potential of subscription-based online gaming. This article ultimately demonstrates that in productions of transmedia products like these games, multiple stakeholders can operate in hierarchical corporate structures with differing levels of power to impact their production, which I refer to as their ‘authorial agency’. It is therefore vital also to consider the ‘primary’ strategy driving each adaptation. This article’s central argument is that to fully understand the failure of these adaptations, we should recognise how ‘promotion’ was the primary adaptation strategy that most impacted each game’s production and therefore undermined their quality. This has substantial implications for how we think about our contemporary media ecology in which the US videogame industry is now more profitable and potentially exerts greater authorial agency than its conglomerate partner, US cinema.