Movies and games have never been happy companions. Somehow the two mediums just don’t get on and experiments in cross-breeding have rarely panned out. As an afficionado of the truly awful, I own some fine examples of unsuccessful attempts.

Movies made from games rarely work, with only the tiniest slivers of original game story surviving. Doom turned its solo horror into a multi-marine slugfest with gameplay only represented in the closing minutes with an all-too-brief first-person bout of shooting that could have been ripped straight from any game-in-action video. Tomb Raider had lots of high-octane action sequences but not much in the way of raiding. And let us not forget the master of this arena, Uwe Boll, whose many classics include such delights as Alone in the Dark. To his credit, Mr Boll fully embraces the “dark” but he never once seems to get to grips with the “Alone” part, bringing commando teams in at every opportunity. At least Edward Carnby didn’t discard his trusty revolver for one of the high-tech machine guns the film was filled with, even if he isn’t quite the Victorian Gentleman adventurer I remember from the first game.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the film-makers seldom seem to have interest in the source material, beyond its potential ready-made audience. When those involved in making a film have some personal investment in the original, the film benefits as a result. Whilst it might not be about to win any Oscars in the near future, the Ben Jordan film Le Chateau Macabre is a good example of this. This story of ghosts and mysterious suicides at a French hotel could easily find a place as a game in the popular freeware series. Hardly surprising, since the title role is taken by the creator of the series, Francisco Gonzalez himself. There is even a cameo by the creator of the AGS games engine, Chris Jones, as regular series character Percival Quentin Jones.

So, is the long-running attempt to bring Myst to the movie screen an example of the former or the latter? Brainchild of the Mysteriacs, Patrick McIntire and Adrian Vanderbosch, the seeds of this idea run back as far as 11 August 1994. On that day Patrick’s mother bought him a new computer game that he found pretty cool. That game was Myst and in 2004, his love of that game led to Project Passage being born. Since then, Patrick and Adrian, both involved in independent film, have put in a lot of work, liaising with Rand Miller, creator of the Myst game, and even creating a concept animatic outlining the intended plot of the film. .

It has been a tough slog for them, as anyone looking at the Myst Movie website can see for themselves, but the project got a big boost recently with the official endorsement on Cyan's own website. This isn’t the same as the movie actually going into production of course, but it’s a big step forward and may be just the boost the project needs to start becoming reality. Maybe this is another thing that will fade away, but the fact that the dream has run this long without dying gives me hope. Call me a mad optimist in a cynical world, but I wish them well and look forward to the day I can see the fruits of their labours.