Remember how Amazon is making a TV show based on God of War (2018)? I thought it was canceled at some point since there hasn’t been much news about it since the original showrunners left the project last year, but news broke this week that the show is, in fact, still in production and Amazon has already greenlit two seasons.
Alongside the news of a second season, showrunner Ron Moore gave some unfortunate insight into his gamer cred on Katee Sackhoff’s podcast, The Sackhoff Show. He said that he tried to play the God of War games but couldn’t get very far because he’s “not a gamer.”
Adaptations Are Meant To Adapt
This has caused a lot of outcry from God of War fans, with many already writing the show off completely. But, like, here’s the thing: I don’t think it matters if Moore has actually sat down and played the games or not. This is the man who’s writing an adaptation of a game for television, not the guy designing the combat for whatever follow-up Sony Santa Monica is working on to God of War: Ragnarok. His inability to play the game shouldn’t have much impact on his ability to write a script.
I really don’t care if an adaptation is all that accurate to its source material as long as it presents an interesting take on it. When the God of War show was announced in 2022, Amazon Studios’ Head of Television Vernon Sanders said that the show will be “incredibly true to the source material,” which is fine to an extent, but if you need an adaptation to be exactly the same as the game it’s based on, why not just go play the game? God of War and God of War: Ragnarok are both incredibly well-acted and well-written already, so if you just want to revisit the story beat for beat, shot for shot, line for line, you can do that.
In fact, we’ve already seen the good that happens when a TV adaptation of a game actually adapts its source material with episodes 1 and 3 of The Last of Us on HBO. The first episode takes the game’s relatively brief introduction that follows Joel’s daughter Sarah as the cordyceps outbreak begins and fleshes out her story.
We follow Sarah all day as signs of the outbreak begin to start showing at school and at home until things come to a head at night when the world quickly starts coming to an end. Here, it’s very faithful to the games, but it’s the moments where it isn’t that I remember most fondly.
The third episode, “Long, Long Time”, adapts a sequence from the game by telling the untold story of Bill and Frank’s romantic relationship, something that was only ever implied in the game itself. It’s an excellent episode of television that stands out as one of The Last of Us’ best because it hardly uses anything from the game.
To this day, it is the most critically acclaimed episode of HBO’s adaptation as it took the nugget of a narrative idea and dared to expand upon it.
Both of these episodes are good because they use the source material as a jumping-off point to explore a story in a way that best fits the medium they’ve been adapted to. They’re The Last of Us at its most interesting, and I honestly feel the HBO adaptation gets pretty boring and uninteresting when it’s only interested in retreading familiar ground.
Ron Moore and his production team should learn the same lesson and adapt God of War with changes that best fit the small screen. It feels like so many people tout the legitimacy of games as a medium, but the second that an adaptation comes around, they forget that video games are completely different from film and TV and just want things to be exactly the same.
Ron Moore Isn’t Just ‘Some Guy’
It’s possible that God of War will be bad. When looking at the long history of video game adaptations, I’d say the odds aren’t in its favor. That said, Moore is an extremely accomplished producer and screenwriter, leading projects like the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Outlander, a very well-received TV adaptation that ran for 91 episodes. Moore may not be a gamer of his own admittance, but Outlander proves he knows what he’s doing with an adaptation.
Just because he hasn’t had his hands on the controller as Kratos stomps around Midgar with his kid, doesn’t mean that Moore hasn’t done research on the games’ story, read scripts, or even just watched one of those “GAME: FULL MOVIE” videos on YouTube.
God of War is already a deeply cinematic experience –it tries its best to emulate the “one-shot” feel of films like Birdman or Rope – so I don’t think there’s much lost if a person doesn’t actually sit down to play it, especially since the actual gameplay mechanics are relatively straightforward and largely not integral to the story.
Before you jump down my throat, I do recognize there certainly are gameplay moments that matter for the story of God of War like the scene where Kratos goes home to get the Blades of Chaos and cuts his way through a bunch of frozen draugrs with them, but, by and large, the story of that game is told through dialogue and cutscenes.
It’s possible the God of War show won’t deliver, but we all need to calm down about gamer cred when it comes to the people working on adaptations. A love for source material is good, but I’d rather watch a show that does something insightful and new instead of simply digging up the past.
Next
It’s Good For Gaming That We Aren’t Getting A God Of War Live-Service Game
Sony’s cancelled live-service God of War game might do better dead than alive.