The Great Gatsby Game (Retrospect)

Earlier this week, the Internet was treated with a surprise 8-bit adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's widely lauded novel, The Great Gatsby. The game was created by Charlie Hoey and Pete Smith over the course of a year, and spans four levels in which players vanquish butlers, promiscuous flappers, gangsters and ghosts with Nick Carraway's trusty boomerang hat. Needless to say, the game is a rather loose interpretation of the book, with questionable depictions of the novel's events. However, that's largely the point -- the game acts as a parody of video game adaptations from the NES and SNES eras, adaptations which rarely accurately portray their source material.

As Nick Carraway, you begin in Gatsby's mansion during one of the aristocrat's "parties for nobody." You fight your way through an army of servants, drunkards and dancers before meeting Gatsby in his garden. Later levels see you hopping across train cars, fighting T. J. Eckleberg's giant disembodied glasses (that no doubt shoot lasers), battling rats and alligators in the (obligatory) sewers, and making your way across a crab-infested pier to "find that mysterious green light." Along the way you collect ubiquitous coins and sacks of gold for otherwise trivial reasons, and martinis and golden hats (the equivalent of Mario's mushrooms) to survive the onslaught of superficial cretins. It's an absurd, surrealist take on Fitzgerald's novel much like previous retro adaptations: The Bible, Tom Sawyer, Wayne's World, and Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde as just a few perturbing entries.

A pivotal turning point for our hero.

Unlike these games, Hoey and Smith aren't looking for a quick cash-in of preexisting material. Arguably, they're creating art for art's sake, and their project should be treated and applauded accordingly. Perhaps it's an elitist view to uphold of such a clearly goofy and intellectually chaste side-scroller, but more on that later.

The game appears to be an anachronism, but is in fact a pretense of an earlier time where cookie-cutter levels and villains were cloned ad nauseam across every genre and franchise. The game mimics, if not blatantly lifts from, early Castlevania games, a practice commonplace in the pre-modern video game industry. Today such plagiarism would be met with guffaws or snide dismissals (see: entire Gameloft library), but for 8 and 16-bit games we turn a blind eye, even embracing the symbiotic design culture as charming and understood. This re-appropriation of preexisting blueprints is mildly referenced in a satirical magazine ad created by the game authors, poking fun at the inane marketing of 20 years ago. The entire project is treated with an understanding of the generational divide that exists between the "retro" and perpetual "next-generation."

Of course, the game serves strictly as such: a parody of these generational differences. Where it flounders as a post-modern take on a genre archetype (i.e., misleading tie-in) is within its inability to engage with the source material outside of shallow interpretations. Like the dubious adaptations it parodies, it merely plunders images, themes, and ideas from the source material and reduces them to symbols and sprites to passively interact with during your adventure. Hoey and Smith emulate this exceedingly well, but to a fault. It lacks an extension of the source material, to lead into a further understanding or relationship with its characters, themes or events via, say, current cultural conditions. Instead, it's emulation of the pedestrian comes across as an uninspired toy; a mere easter egg-laden romp. It foregos the plethora of possibilities for explication that Fitzgerald offers in his American classic (re-invention a painfully missed opportunity), for something less daring. It lacks an exaggeration that magnifies, say, the inane nature of its existence. The recent Atari 2600 mock-up of Waiting for Godot does just that -- it's reducible to its essential parts; not necessarily a faithful, pontificating examination of Samuel Beckett's play, but an exaggerated and absurd litmus test for player patience.

Admittedly, waiting is not for everybody.

However, adaptation of literary classics through interactive media is exciting to me, and potentially worthy of introduction to the art world. Much like Bioshock muses on the concept of player-game relationships ("Would you kindly?") or One Chance as an exercise in player restraint and authentic choice, interactive media is ripe for relational experimentation. Is it so wrong to examine video games under the same scrutiny as art? We interpret other forms of entertainment such as films, music, and theater in much the same way. We are departing the era that treated games as products for little kids and are nearing the cusp of a renaissance of experimentation and "games for game's sake." Regardless, the internet has been ablaze with a slew of literary adaptation requests, which range from Ulysses to Moby Dick, and my personal favorite, Don Quixote. Hoey and Smith appear to understand the potential of their own project and have put their game's source code online for free, hopefully to inspire other artists and creators to capitalize upon their groundwork.