The showrunner of Halo believes that video game fans hate all adaptations by default

In Hollywood, it is trendy to adapt video games, but it seems that few people know how to do it well. Many people adapt books; they have found a goldmine in video games, but it seems that the success rate is still much higher among the former. Or at least, that is the impression given. And now, Steven Kane, creator of the Halo series, has two reasons for this: video game fans hate adaptations, and moreover, adapting a video game is much more difficult.

A man aware of the challenges of his job

In an interview for Deadline, the creator of the Halo series admitted that adapting video games has an extra difficulty compared to other media. “Fans are going to hate anything you do at first. You have to accept that it’s part of the process,” he stated. Adding that, “also, the company that owns the game doesn’t want to destroy the franchise, so there’s a lot of pressure”.

Regarding what it has meant to work with Halo, he pointed out that “everyone has their own idea of what Halo is, so now you carry what the IP means and you don’t want to mess it up.” Thus demonstrating a total awareness of the difficulty of his work. And also why players often have a very defensive attitude towards these kinds of adaptations: each person has a very particular concept of what the IP is and they don’t necessarily have faith that it will be adapted well.

But as we have seen in recent years with series like The Last of Us, Fallout, or, to a lesser extent, Halo, it seems that the audiovisual medium is knowing how to adapt video games with much more fidelity than before. Assuming with more respect, affection, and delicacy towards the medium, everything indicates that video game adaptations are now treated with more respect and care than before. And also, that fans will learn to accept them more easily.

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