Valve boss slams movies based on videogames

Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has slammed Hollywood's attempts to bring videogames to the big screen, stating that there will be no film adaptation of Half-Life unless a decent script is produced.

In an exclusive interview with Eurogamer, Newell said he makes a point of going to see videogame movies, although not through personal choice: "I have to put on my professional 'I'm doing this for the company' hat, not the 'I'm a movie go-er whose soul is going to be crushed by another unbelievably crappy game adaptation' one."

"I just think that there's an attitude right now that they're trying to exploit the built-in audience of gamers right now and they don't really care whether the movies are any good."

In a likely reference to notorious movie director Uwe Boll, Newell went on to observe that there is a tax loophole in Germany which means investors "Don't really care how profitable the movies are either, so you have this collision of people who are not long-term stakeholders who just think 'what are the next five movies I can crank out before the German government closes this tax loophole?' And 95 per cent of the gaming movies are being made specifically for those reasons."

Newell confirmed that several Half-Life movie scripts have been submitted for his approval, but said: "They all sucked. They're just bad movies - movies that shouldn't get made."

"I'm a huge fan of movies, I love going to movies and we have absolutely no reason to do it. It's not like they've offered us these giant buckets of cash and said "let us go and ruin your game" [laughs]. They offer you little tiny amounts of cash, so it's like they've not even tried to bribe us to go and make a bad movie... Unless it's a great movie, unless it's as exciting a movie as the game was a game then it will never get made."

Valve has tried to get around the problem by handpicking potential directors and screenwriters, but according to Newell, the end result has been "really uninspired scripts."

"It's just not going to happen until we think that there's a director and a cast and a script and can say this is a movie we'd like to go and see, and not just some vanity piece. We've seen what happens to those sorts of movies and the world would be a better place if nine tenths of those projects had never happened."