How Videogames Changed the Course of Film History

Welcome back to the Playhouse Post, your regular update on everything happening at the Southampton Playhouse from its Artistic Director. Write me here with any feedback on the theater, our program, or the weekly newsletter.

Snow White continues on our IMAX screen this week and we still have some showtimes for Black Bag, which features a special introduction from screenwriter David Koepp, who also wrote Jurassic World Rebirth, which arrives at the Playhouse this summer.

We’ve also added a charming new release with The Penguin Lessons, which stars Steve Coogan as an English teacher in an Argentinean private school against the backdrop of the country’s political upheaval in 1976. Based on Tom Michell’s 2016 memoir, the movie finds Coogan finding unexpected companionship in the form of a penguin he meets on the beach. Despite that quirky setup, The Penguin Lessons is a poignant (and at times bitingly funny) exploration of finding meaning and motivation in hard times, with Coogan’s soulful performance at its center.

Meanwhile, we’re anticipating next week’s release of A Minecraft Movie with our latest repertory series, Pictures of Pixels: Videogames at the Movies. As the name suggests, this series surveys the modern relationship between videogames and movies. If you aren’t already eager to check out A Minecraft Movie – which, by the way, is a total blast – this selection may help things along. From the absorbing documentary The King of Kong to the playful action-comedy aesthetics of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, this program delivers a range of fun big-screen experiences for gamers and non-gamers alike. The series even invades our family-friendly matinee program with the original 1995 Jumanji on Saturday and Sunday.

Plus, we’re showcasing A Minecraft Movie director Jared Hess’ first feature, the hilarious coming-of-age comedy Napoleon Dynamite, which is more relevant to his latest work than it might seem.

For more on the evolving relationship between videogames and movies, read on…

When Pong became the first successful video game in 1972, nobody expected a movie franchise to emerge from a bunch of pixels bouncing across the screen. Technology, however, moves fast enough to catalyze massive shifts in society, as well as the stories it tells.

It only took a decade for Tron to imagine a videogame developer trapped in a CGI world and forced to participate in games of his own design. While direct videogame adaptations kicked in with 1993’s Super Mario Bros., the real lasting impact of videogames on movies is much broader than any direct game-to-screen translation.

Tron came out two years before the release of the first Macintosh Computer, as the general public grew more and more accustomed to the idea of digital resources invading their everyday lives. This yielded a spate of riffs on the classic Alice in Wonderland formula, as wayward protagonists slipped into strange, ominous environments and had to use their wits to escape. In most cases, they became victims of the games that they played – and forced to adhere to gaming logic to escape. From WarGames to The Last Starfighter, the ‘80s and ‘90s are loaded with examples of gamers thrust into scenarios that force them to apply their frivolous skills to more serious endeavors.

Many of these efforts played with early CGI trickery and embraced the inherent silliness of their concepts. But a funny thing happened on the way to the arcade-movie formula: The movies got deeper, stranger, and imbued with the genuine emotion of gamers who took games as seriously as any other art form.

In retrospect, 1995’s Jumanji taps into the evolving subculture of gaming as well as the relationship that many gamers developed with the medium from a young age. Yes, there’s a lot of goofy, cartoonish fun packed into the saga of a bearded Robin Williams getting stuck in a jungle board game as a child, then unleashing its mayhem on suburbia when he escapes 30 years later.

At the same time, there’s a profound melancholy to the story of an adult man still consumed by the fantasies of his youth, and learning how to reconcile them with his grownup reality. Other 1995 releases, including Jonny Mnemonic and The Net, reflected the paranoia of a terminally online future, but Jumanji tapped into the personal stakes of getting lost in a virtual world – four years before The Matrix took that concept to the next level.

Since then, the narrative has shifted. Games no longer have exclusively ominous connotations, and the movies about them can be bright, fun, even inspirational. The medium exerts a powerful influence over the entertainment industry. Over three billion people worldwide identify as gamers. A generation that grew up at the arcade led to new ones that grew up with Nintendos and Playstations, the sophisticated 3D environments engendered by the launch of Unreal Engine, and vast, open-world games ranging from The Sims to World of Warcraft. Many games speak in the language of movies while building on them at the same time.

In the late ‘90s, George Lucas’ Lucasfilm game division LucasArts ushered in an era of cinematic point-and-click adventure games like The Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango, which tipped its hat to Casablanca. Later, so-called “sandbox” franchises like Half-Life and Fallout set the standard for vast gaming experiences loaded with complex storytelling pathways and a degree of immersion that stood on its own as a unique artistic achievement.

With the onslaught of smartphones, the early days of time-based games found fresh life on the small screen, proving the ongoing appeal of that form with megahits like Candy Crush and Angry Birds. It was around then that the hit 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters captured the continuity of a counterculture forged in the arcades.

King of Kong follows the egomaniacal Billy Mitchell, the world-record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong. After soft-spoken Seattle-based dad Steve Wiebe seems poised to unseat Mitchell’s status, the mulleted competitor goes into survival mode, as the movie builds to a showdown at a New Hampshire tournament with unexpected results. (Years after the documentary came out, Mitchell was accused of cheating, though he sued to maintain his record.)

King of Kong is such a fascinating immersion into the ecosystem of arcade gamers that when it first came out, director Seth Gordon was often asked if it was a mockumentary. Mitchell, who speaks of himself in the third person and sends hired goons to intimidate his competition, hails from the classic movie-villain playbook. King of Kong is loaded with eccentric characters from the world it depicts, including referee-turned-musician Walter Day (the subject of a recent King of Kong sequel, Arcades & Love Songs: The Ballad of Walter Day). After all these years, King of Kong works as a fast-paced comedy of obsession, and a near-perfect snapshot of the arcade generation entering middle age.

By the end of the aughts, a newer generation of gamers were navigating young adulthood. Enter Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. In 2010, director Edgar Wright’s highly stylized look at a self-obsessed Toronto rock musician (Michael Cera) transported the formula of a typical romantic comedy into a new vernacular. Whereas games previously took their cues from movies, here was a movie that relied on the language of games to enhance its complex emotional stakes.

Ever since his breakout Shaun of the Dead, Wright’s movies have relied on a zany energy to make their deeper themes more palatable. In Scott Pilgrim, he uses the framework of an action-comedy to craft an advanced look at toxic masculinity. Though it has since diversified, the gaming arena was once entirely dominated by men (see: King of Kong). Scott Pilgrim shows the result of such insularity. The main character doesn’t fully realize how much he has imposed his narrow views on the women around him until he battles through his own superficial relationship to romance.

That serious endeavor unfolds, in typical Wright format, under entertaining circumstances. Adapting Bryan Lee O’Malley’s similarly eccentric graphic novel, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World finds its anti-hero battling the seven “evil ex-boyfriends” while his new lover Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) watches from the sidelines. Virtually every scene unfolds as though Scott were locked inside an arcade of his own imagination, with foes erupting into coins and extra lives figuring prominently in the plot. It’s a delightful exercise in subjective storytelling that turns on the synergy between games and movies unique to its moment.

Fifteen years later, games and movies continue to enjoy a rich dynamic. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie became a global hit in part by playing off nostalgia for the original games. That same year, The Last of Us found success on HBO by building on the zombie survival plot of the game series.

Meanwhile, much as independent films provided an alternative to studio projects, indie games found their community. Countless indie game developers, many of whom found their own audiences through self-distribution on the Steam platform, redefined the boundaries of the gaming experience. Many of these achievements owe a clear debt to the movies. The most celebrated videogame designer today, Hideo Kojima, has expressed a desire to direct movies as an extension of his background in games.

A Minecraft Movie reflects all of this history. As with Jumanji, it finds a small group of people transported into a game world, and fighting to get out. They’re aided by uber-gamer Jack Black (who, notably, has several videogame credits, including the heavy metal action romp Brutal Legend). One member of the group, a brawny narcissist played by Jason Momoa, runs an old arcade store and wouldn’t look out of place in King of Kong. Despite the absurd circumstances, the movie takes its characters seriously, in part thanks to director Jared Hess.

A little over 20 years ago, Hess made his directorial debut with iconic cringe-comedy Napoleon Dynamite. Jon Heder’s legendary performance as an awkward Idaho teen is a wondrous paean to small-town life. Napoleon is an odd character subject to rampant bullying and trapped in his own head, until he befriends classmate Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and helps him gain the confidence to run for class president. The magic of Hess’ movie stems from generating such empathy for Napoleon and transforming him into more than just a punchline.

Napoleon’s ability to come out of his shell mirrors the progress of the videogame community as a whole. Once treated as a side dish to mainstream culture, it now occupies centerstage, and more than a few big-screen achievements have benefited from its rise.

“Pictures of Pixels: Videogames at the Movies” begins Friday, March 28. Showtimes are available here.