Traditionally, video games find their way to Hollywood by being the inspiration for a truly dire live-action movie. Some make money (Resident Evil), some are watchable (Dead or Alive, the first Mortal Kombat), but most are disasters. This is the golden age of television, however, and with the Halo live-action series finally in production and a Resident Evil show coming to Netflix at some point, we're on the cusp of a new wave of video game adaptations, this time made for streaming TV. Some games are better picks than others, and that's what this list is about: the best games to support a TV-style adaptation.

Obviously, there are a lot of games that would be prohibitively expensive to adapt if it was possible at all. It's fun to speculate about a Final Fantasy VII live-action series set in Midgar, for example, but the hairspray budget for Cloud's actor would bankrupt most studios by itself. There aren't any shortage of games with a modern, near-future, or low-fantasy setting, however, and many of them have deep enough lore that it's a wonder they don't have a series on Netflix already. Here are some picks for games that could support a full series, ranked in a list from moderate to extreme levels of potential and hype.

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Naturally, this list assumes that all adaptations will be reasonably faithful to the original material. Obvious adjustments would have to be made, for narrative flow if nothing else, but none of these theoretical adaptations would be an in-name-only rolling disaster like, say, Dragonball Evolution. Nobody here wants to do Grand Theft Auto V, but they're all teenage drag-racers on 23rd-century settled Mars or karate velociraptors or whatever. This is a safe space for following the original text.

Honorable Mention: Watch_Dogs 2

Marcus on rooftop

Marcus Halloway and his grey-hat hacker buddies in DedSec could make for a thoroughly watchable series with the right writers and cast. Imagine Leverage if every main character was mostly Hardison, and pit them against a variety of up-to-the-moment computer crooks, online harassers, and identity thieves.

However, it's difficult to ignore that this is really just a goofier version of Mr. Robot. As fun as the idea might be, it's been covered already, and to widespread critical and fan acclaim. It's also probably best to avoid even the possibility of having to cast a live-action Aiden Pearce, as he is a remorseless murder hobo who Ubisoft persists in treating like he's Vigilante Jesus. Best not to open that door.

#6: Lollipop Chainsaw

James Gunn and Suda 51's New Weird zombie beat-'em-up may not have sold that well, but it's still got fans to this day, and it's the perfect vehicle for the kind of splatterpunk slapstick that also characterized the late, lamented Ash vs. Evil Dead. If there isn't space in the modern television ecosystem for a show in which an upbeat, peppy blonde cheerleader slices zombies to ribbons with her rainbow-patterned chainsaw, then it is the ecosystem that is wrong.

Seriously, though, Lollipop Chainsaw is a lot more than the sum of its parts. It may sound like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a different monster, but its tone is wholly different, aiming for slapstick splatterpunk and subtle satire over Buffy's self-aware Joss Whedon dialogue gags. Juliet's relentlessly cheerful demeanor, Nick's constant running Greek-chorus commentary ("It is fun! It makes me forget that most of my friends are dead!"), and the insanity of the other monster hunters in the Starling family are all just set dressing in the game, but in a TV show, have a lot of possibilities. In the age of the dour, despairing zombie drama, the Walking Deads and Z Nations and Black Summers, there should be more room for the goofy, satirical side of the zombie apocalypse. Daybreak may have gotten canceled, but a Lollipop Chainsaw could leap directly into that void.

#5: Fatal Fury

super smash bros terry bogard

This has already been done recently, sort of; the recent King of Fighters: Destiny animated series on YouTube mixes the first Fatal Fury with the first King of Fighters game, with a few additional details added for spice. However, by itself, Fatal Fury is the beginning of a surprisingly involved, wide-ranging international martial-arts comedy/drama, with a likeable protagonist.

The first game is a simple revenge story: Terry Bogard's father Jeff dies at the hands of the young criminal Geese Howard. Terry and his little brother Andy survive the attack, leave town, and train independently in the martial arts. Years later, as adults, they return to their hometown to get revenge on Howard, and discover that he's now the leader of organized crime in the city. Fortunately, Howard's also both hosting and competing in a local martial-arts tournament, and both Bogards enter. Along the way, they meet a variety of eccentric characters – a live-action Duck King, handled properly, could be the character find of whatever year this is – and eventually force a showdown with Howard.

This would be a hard sell to any production company. The 2010 live-action King of Fighters movie was a waking nightmare that not even Maggie Q could save, and martial-arts-focused shows have typically been relegated to weekend morning slots in North American markets. It's not impossible, though, and Terry Bogard's profile has never been higher thanks to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The King of Fighters universe has a ton of great characters to draw on, Southtown is a solid setting for a grimy martial-arts crime drama, and frankly, SNK's entire universe has been begging for this kind of treatment for decades.

The production would need to change a few crucial details, of course. Geese Howard has an objectively stupid name, Mai Shiranui's outfit poses its own content issues, Andy Bogard is actually kind of a dork, and most crucially, there's the "Cartwright Curse" Terry's been saddled with in adaptations since the 1992 Fatal Fury animated movie. (Terry's been in four animated features at this point, and his love interest dies in three of them.)

A good fix for that is to introduce Terry's love interest "Blue" Mary Ryan early on. She'd be great in her own right in live-action; she's a bounty hunter, blues singer, and biker who's always been depicted as Terry's equal. Bring her in for the first season to add another woman to the cast, provide someone Terry can have exposition-laden conversations with, and furnish endless B-plots through bringing Terry in to help with her latest bounty.

#4: Dishonored

This might have been a difficult concept a few years ago, but in a post-Game of Thrones world, there's much more room for a low-fantasy, pseudo-Victorian action-drama. The Dishonored universe also conveniently has a nice big window of unexplored time in which to set a series: the fifteen-year gap between the first and second games.

Here's the pitch: By day, Corvo Attano is his daughter Emily Kaldwin's faithful bodyguard as they navigate the risks of ruling a still-very-much-unstable Dunwall. By night, Corvo teaches Emily the arts of stealth and assassination. The two of them being weird steampunk ninjas is a nearly-unbeatable edge when dealing with the intrigues of Emily's court, the various factions struggling for control in Dunwall, the supernatural plagues, and all the other potential threats to the city. A smart writing team could build up an entire court of allies, rivals, and issues in Dunwall, and are free to do as they like without disrupting series canon, since most of Dishonored 2 is set well outside the city.

There's also a potentially disturbing arc to be written about Dunwall's reliance on whale oil, the combustible wonder fuel that makes all the various technologies of the city possible. It's mentioned in passing in the games that the whales that produce the oil are getting harder to find, and that there's something otherworldly about them in the first place. There are a lot of uncomfortable parallels to be drawn between Dunwall's imminent whale-oil crisis and the real world's struggles with the upcoming threat of climate disruption, and a clever writing team could get a lot out of that.

#3: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

The pre-timeskip Garreg Mach military academy is one of the richest settings for an ensemble drama that any video game has produced recently. Fire Emblem also has a big advantage over a lot of Japanese-produced fantasy games in that it's relatively low-magic, which means it's easy to depict in live action. Sure, there are still combat spellcasters and giant monsters, but most of the series is devoted to small-scale infantry combat.

In this adaptation, Byleth ends up as the viewpoint character as s/he navigates the societal clashes, weird friendships, rivalries, and culture shocks at Garreg Mach. Play up the interactions between the noble-born students and their lower-ranked peers, as well as the survivors' guilt and inherent stress of their training missions. There's a lot of drama in Three Houses that the game only touches upon, where several characters are uncomfortable with violence even before war breaks out, and it's really fertile ground for a TV show. It's a teenage boarding-school drama as written by Joe Abercrombie.

To throw a real swerve into things, make it look like it's a straightforward adaptation of the canonical game right up until the end of the first season, then turn it around all at once in the finale. Instead of [spoiler] being a would-be conqueror in the show, it's someone else entirely. Maybe it's one of the other two house captains, working off an ancient grudge; maybe one of the lower-class students is trafficking with dark powers or building up towards a revolution; hell, maybe it's one of those Ashen Wolf basement nerds from the campaign DLC. It's a whodunit, where the "it" in question is planning an international war that will destabilize the continent.

#2: Silent Hill 2

The big mistake that most adaptations of Silent Hill have made is to focus on Dahlia Gillespie's cult and the events that surround it. It's even arguably the single biggest misstep of every Silent Hill game made after Silent Hill 3. The cult may be spooky, but it ignores the sheer potential established by 2001's Silent Hill 2, which turns the titular town into a nearly perfect setting and antagonist for an anthology show like American Horror Story. Naturally, it would also need an Akira Yamaoka soundtrack to be perfect.

Picture this: Somewhere in North America, there's a peaceful resort town called Silent Hill. It's a perfect place to get away for the summer, a pastoral lakeside community where not much ever really happens. Both the town and the surrounding area's history is surprisingly dark, if one thinks to look it up, but the modern-day town is a portrait of small-town Americana.

There's more than one Silent Hill, though. Someone with the right kind of darkness inside them may end up in one of the other layers of the town, where dark powers play with them like rats in a maze. Here, monsters haunt abandoned streets, the only other people they can find are the equally haunted, and if they can survive for long enough, Silent Hill can offer them either redemption, or several different new kinds of damnation.

Each season, a new protagonist is drawn into Silent Hill somehow, to find it abandoned. Whatever secret they're hiding is reflected in the town, and in the monsters that lurk around every dark corner. Over the course of the season, viewers find out more about the protagonist, what they're hiding, and what they did that made the town take an interest in them, until finally, they reach the kind of ending they actually deserve.

It's important here that a showrunner on this theoretical Silent Hill anthology show take the right kind of lessons from the earlier games' level and monster design. In the first three games, the monsters you face and the shape of the Otherworld are all directly shaped by the characters' fears and desires. Harry is exploring Alessa's Silent Hill, and she's a burn victim who's been trapped in a boiler room for years, so her Otherworld is all fire damage, old blood, and distant machinery; James Sunderland killed his wife, so his Silent Hill is full of female monsters and psychosexual violence. If a Silent Hill show's monsters and setting are not specifically relevant to the protagonist and their personal tortures - if they just throw in some undead nurses and Pyramid Head, then call it good, the way Dead by Daylight did - then it's dramatically missed the mark.

#1: Control

Control Jesse

This does feel a little unnecessary, as much of Control already is its own live-action adaptation, and the way it unspools its story as you explore the Bureau is deliberately reminiscent of surreal television dramas like Twin Peaks. It's actually a wonder that, at time of writing, Control isn't already being developed for TV. That doesn't take away from the sheer potential of the setting or characters, however.

An ideal format would be to start from a rough adaptation of the game, but slowly establish several key differences and lead up to a wholly new ending. Jesse might still be appointed the new Director of the Federal Bureau of Control from jump street, but new characters and different events can spin things in a new direction, with her hunt for her brother left on the table as a driving force behind future seasons.

The primary issue for an adaptation is that more characters would have to be introduced much faster. A video game narrative can just about get away with conveying information to the player through documents, audio logs, and the protagonist constantly muttering to herself, but that doesn't really fly in any other medium. Jesse could meet Emily much earlier, for example, or take surviving FBC agents with her into the field so she has someone to swap expository dialogue with.

However that gets done, it doesn't change the basics. Just on a conceptual level, the Federal Bureau of Control is as rich a setting for supernatural stories as similar organizations in shows like Fringe or Warehouse 13, but substituting Lynchian surreality for post-Buffy self-awareness and humor. Throw in some occasional Sam Lake weirdness - go ahead, pull in elements from Quantum Break, see who notices - and Control has substantial potential to go anywhere that a showrunner wants to take it.

In the meantime, the Halo TV show is still in production as of earlier this year, though filming was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is reportedly still on schedule to be released in 2021.

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