In a recent interview, Yair Landau, Vice Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and President of Sony Pictures Digital, discussed how movies affected video games and vice versa.
"Basically, Saving Private Ryan gave birth to a genre of gameplay", said Landau. "You could say there were shooter games before, but really the whole World War II game experience is more than just a shooter experience. It's a role-playing experience in a specific context that enhances the shooter experience. In my mind, that's the first time that you've seen a great Hollywood experience translated into a mass game experience."
Landau believes that, up till now, no game-inspired movie managed to live up to its game's quality. But he thinks that the movie 300 is the proof that this is feasible.
"I actually think that the phenomenon of 300 is really, in fact, a manifestation of the video game experience in kind of the collective conscience. The audience who came to see 300 was weaned on video games and what they saw in the marketing materials for 300 was a similar experience. They didn't show up because they were interested in the Spartans, or because they read Herodotus, or because they thought the Battle of Thermopylae was a great, untold story."
"They showed up because they saw a movie experience that was the most similar to the game experiences that they've grown up playing. The movie works because it's violent and it's actually very video game-ish. Even though it's based on a graphic novel, the execution of that graphic novel was more to video games and so you could say 300 is the first video game movie translation even though it's not really based on a video game."
