Mento's Movie Magic: Video Game Homages To "Escape From New York"
By Mento 10 Comments
Welcome all, to this second entry for a series where I look at games that have been clearly influenced by a masterpiece of the silver screen. Now, given it's Halloween, and I hear John Carpenter's kind of a dude that's all about the spooky shenanigans, it might strike some of you as strange that I'm covering one of his few that has nothing to do with horror: 1981's Escape From New York. Well.. it's... screw it, I wanted to do this one.
To start with, I should probably break down this movie to its core components before starting with the game comparisons so people unfamiliar with this Kurt Russell joint can know what to expect. Besides a kick in the pants to go watch it already:
- Mysterious badass is dropped into a dilapidated city for a specific purpose.
- Dilapidated city might be roaming with dangerous prisoners and other ne'er-do-wells. Certainly the case with the movie.
- Mysterious badass will also die if he doesn't hurry. So no dawdling. As if mysterious badass was even lame enough to dawdle. Hint: He is not.
- Ernest Borgnine.
So taking these factors, please join me with this thing that I wrote about a movie and some video games. If you would.
The Legend of Snake Plissken - Metal Gear Solid (Series)
Perhaps the best well-known factoid among Kojima-ites is his love of 80s American movies, with the second being that the dude is completely crazy in the head. Each of his highly distinctive intellectual properties are based, in some minor or major part, on growing up with the brash, imaginative and visually distinctive sci-fi and action movies of the period: Snatcher was heavily influenced by Blade Runner and Terminator (whereas SD Snatcher was influenced by the Peanuts parody of Blade Runner, "It's Time To Die, Charlie Brown", which I just made up), Policenauts by Lethal Weapon and his flagship series of Metal Gear has, of course, a growly taciturn Special Ops protagonist named Snake. Solid Snake has probably long since surpassed Plissken as the be-eyepatched mercenary of note in the minds of many gamers, but the similarities between the two couldn't be clearer. He even adopts the name "Iroquois Pliskin" as an alias in the second game. Spoilers?
Similarly to Plissken, Snake is often placed in dangerous scenarios all on his lonesome and must complete whatever task he has been assigned, preferably within a time limit. Whether or not Isaac Hayes is more menacing than a 20 foot tall nuclear-powered mech is a debate for another time, as is whether or not Snake Plissken could've saved himself a beating or two if he'd just pretended he was a cardboard box more often. Such are the differences between films and games.
New York, New York, It's a Hell of a Town - Batman: Arkham City
I suspect a tiny lightbulb just popped over your heads after wondering what reason would I have to cover a 30 year old movie and the video games that have been influenced by it, and the relatively new release of Batman: Arkham City is it. Pretty much the entire plot of the movie has been dropped on the Caped Crusader, as he spends one awful night crossing a walled-off ruined city housing thousands of convicts to procure a life-saving antidote to the poison he just drank (wrong movie) fed to him by the Joker. All the movie's components carefully detailed above are evident here, besides maybe Ernest Borgnine - but then The Penguin is a more than adequate substitute. Watching Escape From New York now, I can't help to note the resemblance in scenes where Snake glides into New York from above, meets resourceful lowlifes that have barricaded themselves inside buildings once worthy of note, is dumped into gladiatorial arenas and that one perplexing scene towards the end where he finds a trophy shaped like a green question mark.
Of course, Arkham City has a lot more going on for it than the basic plot structure and familiarly dystopian setting it shares with Escape From New York: There are sub-plots aplenty, most of which are also homages of movies: Everyone's favorite palindromic serial killer Zsasz has been offing people who answer public phones, Riddler's ramshackle deathtrap hostage rooms are reminiscent of those of another sociopathic intellectual, and there are the grim adventures of a sniper too improbaly awesome to be caught, until he is because I don't know if you know this but Batman's the World's Greatest Detective.
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be - Dystopian Games (Fallout, Deus Ex)
Getting a dystopia right in any medium is a difficult task, mostly because it has to feel like the genuine result of something we may one day run afoul of if we don't sort out our more destructive and selfish tendencies. While the world of Fallout is a relatively straightforward tale of gigantic nuclear missiles turning the world into a giant toilet, the ongoing dystopia of the Deus Ex franchise is a more subtle one where domestic terrorist cells are rising up in an attempt to quell the increasingly corrupt and powerful ruling classes, with the rift expanding further thanks to prohibitively expensive augmentation technology and an equally costly epidemic.
In both these cases and that of Escape From New York, these settings serve as heavy-handed portents meant to horrify and entertain in turn with just how bad everything's gotten - whether those things be abundant crime, nuclear proliferation or the growing chasm (and resentment) between the "haves" and "have nots".
BONUS COMICS
Batman: Arkham City
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