Why Comic Books Don’t Make Good Video Games

So before I start this article, I want to stress that I have in fact played the Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City games. These games are superb and make for excellent video game investments, but they are what I would consider the exception that proves the rule.

Comic books and video games are two totally different mediums of entertainment, but for some reason, developers seem to think that they can simply port the character into a console and have the same, pleasant fanfare that they get from the comics. Video games based on comic book characters have had a history of falling short of the mark, and even making the characters seem hackneyed and silly. The problem with that all revolves around the issue of storytelling.

Both mediums rely heavily on the visual elements of the storytelling, that goes without saying. The trick then isn’t about debating which one simply looks better but which one sets the stage for the best kind of adventure. Comic books have the luxury of drawing out a story over time. They can even pick up with much of the story untold and simply allude to something that happened a year or so ago. Back in the early nineties, comic books even included footnotes from the editors telling you what issue to look in to get the allusion. Video games, however, have the problem of having to make sense from beginning to end with only the material presented in the game to make it enjoyable.

Often the conflict and tension between characters in comics draws on the history of each individual skirmish that they have fought in years past. On the page, narrative captioning can enrich the images and flesh out the emotion and involvement that each character feels. The video games however often blanket over most of the history between characters and make it so that the villains are no longer characters themselves with deep-running hatred for the protagonist: they are just the next boss to be beaten.

Marvel seems to feel the brunt of this dilemma with games like Ultimate Alliance, which suffered from poor camera work and the overall hollowness associated with trying to fit every possible character and villain into the game, and Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions, which felt odd due to the game’s attempts to distinguish between four iterations of a character that played essentially the same. Wolverine’s struggles in video games are worse off due to the fact that nearly every game he gets a solo role in is tied into a film release and therefore rushed through both development and QA testing.

The truth of the matter is that comics need time and to not only prepare for but execute. The joy of reading comics is that you have time to anticipate what’s going to happen next in the story. With a month between issues, you can chat with friends who have read the same issue, speculate on where the story is going, and even revisit the issue to scan for things you missed. When you cram that kind of storytelling into a video game, the time to process the content is just too short for any reasonable kind of appreciation.

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