Eat, Sleep, Play co-founder David Jaffe has listed Konami’s venerable Metal Gear Solid franchise as one of his favourite series of all time, though couldn’t resist poking criticism at it’s storyline, branding the narrative as ‘ham fisted.’
“Metal Gear’s one of my favourite series of all time, but if you really just strip the gameplay and the graphics out of Metal Gear and you just look at it as a story, it’s a really ham-fisted, kind of cheesy story,” said Jaffe, during an interview with LAGTV.
He went on to observe that videogames industry tends to be heavily influenced by Hollywood films, adding, “It works great for Metal Gear, it makes Metal Gear a AAA game, but a lot of what ends up happening is we’re so influenced by Hollywood in our industry that we end up making games that are so influenced by movies that when you acquire the rights to a video game and you say, ‘What’s the meat on the bones of this thing to turn into a film?’ there really isn’t a lot, because all we’ve done is make a game… our gameplay is really fresh and innovative, but look at Gears of War 2, one of my favourite games of the year, it’s such a rip-off of Aliens, and those kinds of Michael Bay films, that it’s not funny, from a thematic standpoint.”
Despite this, Jaffe admitted there are a few exceptions – games that possess a strong narrative may in turn lead to a successful movie adaptation, though went on to state it’s unfair to assume a good film will come from games, as “we don’t have the stories to begin with.”
In terms of a film adaptation of God of War, Jaffe said he would personally like to see the project directed by Paul Verhoeven, who has previously worked on the likes of Total Recall and Robocop.