Star Trek Into Darkness director J.J. Abrams has spoken very candidly about Star Trek: The Video Game, saying that he believes the game’s poor quality had a detrimental impact upon his movie.
Speaking to GamerHub.TV, Abrams said:
“The last game, which was obviously a big disappointment to me, was something that we were actually involved in from the very beginning and then we sort of realized it was not going in a place where we were going to get what we wanted, so we dropped out and they continued to do it despite… y’know.
“To me the video game could have been something that actually really benefited the series and was an exciting, fun game with great gameplay and instead it was not and was something that I think, for me emotionally it hurt, ‘cos we were working our asses off making the movie and then this game came out and it got, this isn’t even my opinion, it got universally panned and I think that it was something without question that didn’t help the movie and arguably hurt it.
“I think that, the thing that we all know is that anyone who loves video games and loves movies, very, very rarely does a movie based on a game, or a game based on a movie, really work. It usually ends up being something that everyone that goes to play feels like this was a marketing decision made by a room full of people that wanted to capitalize on a title. That’s no way to make a game and no way to make a movie.”
Abrams is currently working alongside Valve to discuss the possibility of creating films based upon the Half-Life and Portal series. Abrams said of his and the developers’ collaboration: “The dream is to say despite its existence, despite it pre-existing as a game, despite it existing as a movie, what makes this great? And starting from scratch, from a place of ‘let’s make this from the ground up great regardless of what’s come before.’ And that to me whether it’s a video game or a book or a movie or a song, anything that is based on something else needs to exist on its own terms. And a lot of times these seem to exist as ancillary products in which case it will suck.”
Watch the interview below.
