The success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie is spurring the industry to get in the game with video game adaptations. This week, we’re publishing stories from our October/November magazine issue that dive into the lucrative-if-done-right art of turning video games into films and series. In today’s feature, prodcos share their creative and business insights about building game-to-screen pipelines. 

When it comes to tackling a game-based IP, kids producers have their work cut out to ensure a successful translation—whether it be a legacy game with decades of history, or a burgeoning property that has yet to expand beyond the console.

The craft of adapting video games for other media involves bringing depth to character arcs, folding in callbacks for longtime fans, making storylines accessible to fi rst-timers, and determining the right kind of visuals. Execs agree that the key is to strike a delicate balance between old and new, and they have some ideas on how to achieve that.

A search for the next generation’s Pokémon led Paris-based Somewhere Animation to co-produce its upcoming Temtem series (26 x 22 minutes), aimed at kids ages six and up. Based on the same-name game from Spanish developer Crema, it explores a colorful world where the titular creatures engage in battle.

There’s no better time than now to adapt kids video games, says Somewhere’s founder Arthur Colignon, who credits the success of game adaptations in recent years to today’s youth. “I think the new generation really looks for a 360-degree universe. When they love an IP, they want to continue the ride across all formats.”

Ultimately, the challenge for these adaptations is staying faithful to the source material’s roots without simply mimicking the game. “To make a good adaptation, you have to betray [the source]…but with intelligence,” he says, echoing advice he received from a French author. “If you simply copy and paste, you lose out on everything ‘new’ that the audiovisual format could bring.”

One way to call back to a game without simply mimicking it is through music. Colignon says there are two recognizable songs from Temtem that he hopes to include in the series—and early discussions are underway with the musician who worked on the game.

Paris-based TeamTO is experienced in the video game adaptation space—the studio has animated a slew of popular series for third parties, such as Skylanders Academy and Rabbids Invasion. Detailed early discussions with IP owners and producers are essential for mapping out how a project can “[stay] true to the game design and fans’ expectations, while also making the characters more complex,” says president and CEO Guillaume Hellouin.

While it’s always a gamble to expand a yet-to-be-released game, companies like Toikido are seeing some creative upsides to the approach. The British toymaker chose to debut its original property Piñata Smashlings as a Roblox game in July 2023, while prepping an animated series that’s due out next year. Like Temtem, the IP centers around a world of colorful creatures (known as Smashlings). US metaverse company Supersocial developed the game, and Nelvana is handling the series, but Toikido maintains responsibility for all creative and character writing, says marketing head Andrew Matjaszek. This ensures cohesiveness during the crucial franchise-building phase.

Despite the game and series not releasing simultaneously, their development overlapped, which helped the company plan ahead for attracting fandoms. “We can create cross-promotional strategies, such as teasing the series in the game to build excitement,” he notes.

The overlap also allowed creators to fine-tune how certain game elements would translate into a linear narrative, and vice versa. In the game, players complete quests and collect “gems,” which can be used to speed up their progress or “tame” a Smashling. The team decided to include these gems in the series as well, but tweaked them into a form of currency the characters use to buy things from the Piñata Village, says Matjaszek.

But what about creating a new series for a well-established video game IP? This was the challenge for Canada’s WildBrain Studios when it signed on as a co-producer for Netflix toon Sonic Prime. The Sonic IP’s 30-year existence in the market means it has already been a part of several cross-platform adaptations—making novelty all the more important in any new iteration.

“[It’s why] we wanted to work closely with SEGA to bring audiences something that felt authentic, but also new in the Sonic canon,” says executive producer Logan McPherson, who is also WildBrain’s SVP of creative and animated production.

Brainstorming led to an idea called the “Shatterverse”—an important part of the series that sees Sonic’s world get shattered into multiple realities, where he meets alternate versions of his friends and even himself. With that trope in place, McPherson says the writing for the series also had to align with modern Sonic’s existing mythology.

“We couldn’t mess with the game timelines, the Green Hill location or any well-established Sonic lore,” he notes. “This was where the Shatterverse really came in handy, since it was our playground to invent new characters and storylines and really drive the series arc, while also having some fun with the game legacy.”

The Shatterverse also served to give the iconic hedgehog a new mission (restoring his original world) that appealed to nostalgic fans, while creating an emotional arc (learning who he and his friends are) that relayed everything new fans would need to know.

This narrative resonated with audiences and landed both seasons of the series among Netflix’s top 10 most-watched English-language shows during the title’s release week. And in July, season two racked up almost eight million viewing hours on the platform, with a single ep quickly generating nearly five million views on the Netflix After School YouTube channel (four million subscribers).

Reflecting on the growing success of game-to-screen adaptations, execs can’t help but observe that the lines between the two have increasingly blurred. While video games have advanced to look more visually cinematic than ever before, streamers like Netflix are leading the “gamification” of TV with interactive shows. “Animators these days grew up with visual codes from the gaming world, so they are very at ease in this crossover area of the industry,” notes TeamTO’s Hellouin.

And speaking of animation, Somewhere’s Colignon highlights the advantage of adapting games using real-time rendering technology. This can result in a more efficient workflow, because the assets created for the game with real-time tools can also be used for an animated TV show or film adaptation.

In fact, such assets could carry over into a variety of other formats, such as social media content or theme park backdrops—which perfectly serves Colignon’s 360-degree franchise model. He says the plan is to collaborate closely with Crema whenever they work together on a sequel, in order to plan ahead for shared assets.

But real-time is not the only option, notes TeamTO’s Hellouin. For RAID: Call of the Arbiter, released in May, “we used Pixar’s RenderMan because the sophistication and quality of lighting in [the RAID: Shadow Legends game] could not have been achieved with a real-time render,” he says. Similarly, Sonic Prime leveraged a “feature-style animation pipeline with Katana/Arnold as our lighting and rendering package to really push the storytelling visually,” says McPherson.

With so many options available, the art of adaptation is no doubt overwhelming. But there’s one simple way to ease the process: having actual gamers working behind the scenes. Hands-on experience is prioritized in the recruitment process at TeamTO, according to Hellouin. “Most artists working on the [adaptation] are already familiar with the game, which is why we selected them.”

Another way to become as familiar with a game as a fan is a handy little tool known as the internet. Colignon says producers can log on to vocal online communities like Reddit to stay in the loop about fan expectations for a series or movie. “We’re on Discord to connect with the fanbase, and we also frequently talk to the head of Temtem France, a leading fan-site for the IP,” he adds. “This way, you’re really connected with your future audience.”

This story originally appeared in Kidscreen‘s October/November 2023 magazine issue. 

Yesterday, producers weighed in on whether the video game adaptation model is finally starting to turn out hits. And tune in tomorrow to learn how video game franchises are performing in the toy aisle.