Travicity
02-08-2011, 09:36 PM
Oh, the public domain - where characters go once their creator has been dead for too long. Many of these characters have seen exploitation in movies, comics, and games, but here's 11 who could be the stars.
11
Queequeg
The entire story of Herman Melville's Moby Dick is in the public domain, but the fatalistic quest of Captain Ahab to kill the White Whale is a little limited to base a game around. So why not do a prequel with the ship's master harpoonsman, the exotically tattooed Queequeg? Hailing from a fictional South Pacific island, Queequeg is a self-admitted cannibal who abandoned his life to serve aboard whaling vessels.
I see this as a third-person action-adventure with lots of insane harpoon-related violence, hacking away at old-school racists in between awesome sailing segments. Modern game protagonists are silent and violent, and this dude fits the bill.
10
The Black Terror
The early days of superhero comics saw a huge number of characters created and destroyed within the space of a few years, as publishers tried to cash in and went out of business. One of those publishers was Nedor Comics, who rolled out a whole line of superhcharacters in the early 1940s. Of those, the best was the Black Terror - a chemist who game himself a fat set of superpowers with "formic ethers."
The character has been revived in a number of comics, but he's ripe for a game - set it in the noir atmosphere of the late 40s with the Terror dealing with morally ambiguous cases and you've got a worthy challenger to L.A. Noire with a quirky twist.
9
Octobriana
While most of the characters on this list found their way into the public domain as a result of time passing, some were birthed directly into the ideastream by their creators. In 1971, Polish author Peter Sadecky told the story of a group of underground Russian cartoonists who created a character named Octobriana, the living spirit of the October Revolution.
Unfortunately, Sadecky's story was a hoax - he was actually the creator of the character. But, in an interesting quirk, he renounced all rights to her, meaning the buxom Russian can now appear in any story, anywhere. Third-person stylish shooting action game, like Bayonetta meets Gears Of War, with a Commie twist and Rasputin as the last boss (of course).
8
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is a classic tale of survival and triumph - when a castaway washes up on a tropical island off the coast of Venezuela, he spends twenty-eight years waiting to be rescued. At first accompanied by a dog and two cats, he comes into conflict with raiding groups of cannibals, the deprivations of nature and more before escaping his island hellhole.
I'm thinking an open-world sandbox game where "missions" are things Crusoe needs to survive, like storms and raids. You spend in-game time crafting, hunting, fishing and exploring, and eventually when you get your manservant Friday you have some adaptive, learning AI as you teach him English. Would be awesome.
7
John Carter Of Mars
Oh, Mars. Back before we knew it was an inhospitable red ball of dust (with some water), our ancestors thought it was an awesome wonderland of dangerous aliens and unlimited adventure. Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, brought his swashbuckling style to the Red Planet with the John Carter Of Mars series. An immortal Earthling who is transported to Mars (which the locals call Barsoom), Carter had multiple adventures over the course of his life, eventually coming to rule the planet.
The environment of Burroughs's Mars is an awesome one, and this old-school space opera with hot chicks, huge monsters and more would be a perfect brawling action game.
6
Fantomah
The comics of Fletcher Hanks have enjoyed a bit of a resurgence lately - these insane, moralistic fables feature heroes with nearly unlimited powers exacting horrible vengeance on spies, crooks, and other lowlives. Fantomah, who may be the first super-powered woman in comic book history, is the defender of a lush African jungle. When danger strikes, she turns her normally beautiful face into a skull and uses her insane magic to screw up suckers.
Although her powerset is a little ill-defined, this could make for a super-sweet action game, where Fantomah runs, jumps, flies and crushes her way through the rainforest to defeat evil menaces and humiliate them utterly.
5
Herbert West
H. P. Lovecraft is cool again, with Guillermo Del Toro working to bring At The Mountains Of Madness to the big screen, and one of his most enduring characters is ripe for a videogame incarnation. Dr. Herbert West is the star of Re-Animator, and he brings a new take to the zombie scenario: a zombie creator. Of course, he gets dismembered by his creations at the end, but we can gloss over that.
The game is an obvious category for a low-level RTS - West dashes around the battlefield with syringes of his re-animation serum, animating corpses to fight by his side against some obviously Lovecraftian extradimensional entity.
4
Allan Quatermain
I was working hard to avoid characters in Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but Allan Quatermain is too cool to miss. The star of a series of novels by H. Rider Haggard, Quatermain is the quintessential British explorer - sarcastic, educated and a serious ass-kicker with an elephant gun. He also rules because he's an undersized old man who has no real skills except for his amazing marksmanship.
So a Quatermain game would be a great fit for a FPS, with the legendary safari master sniping enemies from a distance and using stealth to avoid conflict. Once you're in your sixties, regenerating health doesn't really kick in anymore.
3
Jerry Cornelius
Michael Moorcock has never come out and said "Hey, Jerry Cornelius is free," but he's basically given tacit approval to anybody who wants to to use the fictional secret agent, so go nuts. He's in many ways the proto-hipster, bisexual before it was cool and going through an ever-shifting crisis of identities in Moorcock's four Cornelius novels.
For a video game, this would be a perfect occasion to do Alpha Protocol right - all of the cool faction and conversation aspects of that game, just with the rest of the game at the same level of quality. You know it would rule.
2
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Sure, we've seen plenty of games where the protagonist can transform into a brutish beast - I don't even want to talk about that Sonic The Hedgehog mess - but why not go back to the original tale of Man's struggle with his darker half? Robert Louis Stevenson's novel is fertile ground for interactive entertainment.
I was no fan of Heavy Rain, but imagine this story told with that kind of narrative immersion? Switching back and forth between Hyde and Jekyll, each personality with its own goals, and tack on a KOTOR-esque morality system that led to different endings and you'd have a classic.
1
Pollyanna
Wel, games aren't entirely about killing people, right? Imagine translating Eleanor H. Porter's 1913 novel Pollyanna, about a young orphan girl who has a positive spin on every situation, into vidcon format?
Make it a variation of Katamaria Damacy, with the unstoppable Polly capering through Beldingsville, Vermont, lifting the spirits of as many residents as she can within a time limit. Spin it out even farther, as Polly travels the world cheering up people of every race, creed and color. This could be a bizarre cult hit - or at least get written about in the back pages of EGM.
11
Queequeg
The entire story of Herman Melville's Moby Dick is in the public domain, but the fatalistic quest of Captain Ahab to kill the White Whale is a little limited to base a game around. So why not do a prequel with the ship's master harpoonsman, the exotically tattooed Queequeg? Hailing from a fictional South Pacific island, Queequeg is a self-admitted cannibal who abandoned his life to serve aboard whaling vessels.
I see this as a third-person action-adventure with lots of insane harpoon-related violence, hacking away at old-school racists in between awesome sailing segments. Modern game protagonists are silent and violent, and this dude fits the bill.
10
The Black Terror
The early days of superhero comics saw a huge number of characters created and destroyed within the space of a few years, as publishers tried to cash in and went out of business. One of those publishers was Nedor Comics, who rolled out a whole line of superhcharacters in the early 1940s. Of those, the best was the Black Terror - a chemist who game himself a fat set of superpowers with "formic ethers."
The character has been revived in a number of comics, but he's ripe for a game - set it in the noir atmosphere of the late 40s with the Terror dealing with morally ambiguous cases and you've got a worthy challenger to L.A. Noire with a quirky twist.
9
Octobriana
While most of the characters on this list found their way into the public domain as a result of time passing, some were birthed directly into the ideastream by their creators. In 1971, Polish author Peter Sadecky told the story of a group of underground Russian cartoonists who created a character named Octobriana, the living spirit of the October Revolution.
Unfortunately, Sadecky's story was a hoax - he was actually the creator of the character. But, in an interesting quirk, he renounced all rights to her, meaning the buxom Russian can now appear in any story, anywhere. Third-person stylish shooting action game, like Bayonetta meets Gears Of War, with a Commie twist and Rasputin as the last boss (of course).
8
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is a classic tale of survival and triumph - when a castaway washes up on a tropical island off the coast of Venezuela, he spends twenty-eight years waiting to be rescued. At first accompanied by a dog and two cats, he comes into conflict with raiding groups of cannibals, the deprivations of nature and more before escaping his island hellhole.
I'm thinking an open-world sandbox game where "missions" are things Crusoe needs to survive, like storms and raids. You spend in-game time crafting, hunting, fishing and exploring, and eventually when you get your manservant Friday you have some adaptive, learning AI as you teach him English. Would be awesome.
7
John Carter Of Mars
Oh, Mars. Back before we knew it was an inhospitable red ball of dust (with some water), our ancestors thought it was an awesome wonderland of dangerous aliens and unlimited adventure. Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, brought his swashbuckling style to the Red Planet with the John Carter Of Mars series. An immortal Earthling who is transported to Mars (which the locals call Barsoom), Carter had multiple adventures over the course of his life, eventually coming to rule the planet.
The environment of Burroughs's Mars is an awesome one, and this old-school space opera with hot chicks, huge monsters and more would be a perfect brawling action game.
6
Fantomah
The comics of Fletcher Hanks have enjoyed a bit of a resurgence lately - these insane, moralistic fables feature heroes with nearly unlimited powers exacting horrible vengeance on spies, crooks, and other lowlives. Fantomah, who may be the first super-powered woman in comic book history, is the defender of a lush African jungle. When danger strikes, she turns her normally beautiful face into a skull and uses her insane magic to screw up suckers.
Although her powerset is a little ill-defined, this could make for a super-sweet action game, where Fantomah runs, jumps, flies and crushes her way through the rainforest to defeat evil menaces and humiliate them utterly.
5
Herbert West
H. P. Lovecraft is cool again, with Guillermo Del Toro working to bring At The Mountains Of Madness to the big screen, and one of his most enduring characters is ripe for a videogame incarnation. Dr. Herbert West is the star of Re-Animator, and he brings a new take to the zombie scenario: a zombie creator. Of course, he gets dismembered by his creations at the end, but we can gloss over that.
The game is an obvious category for a low-level RTS - West dashes around the battlefield with syringes of his re-animation serum, animating corpses to fight by his side against some obviously Lovecraftian extradimensional entity.
4
Allan Quatermain
I was working hard to avoid characters in Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but Allan Quatermain is too cool to miss. The star of a series of novels by H. Rider Haggard, Quatermain is the quintessential British explorer - sarcastic, educated and a serious ass-kicker with an elephant gun. He also rules because he's an undersized old man who has no real skills except for his amazing marksmanship.
So a Quatermain game would be a great fit for a FPS, with the legendary safari master sniping enemies from a distance and using stealth to avoid conflict. Once you're in your sixties, regenerating health doesn't really kick in anymore.
3
Jerry Cornelius
Michael Moorcock has never come out and said "Hey, Jerry Cornelius is free," but he's basically given tacit approval to anybody who wants to to use the fictional secret agent, so go nuts. He's in many ways the proto-hipster, bisexual before it was cool and going through an ever-shifting crisis of identities in Moorcock's four Cornelius novels.
For a video game, this would be a perfect occasion to do Alpha Protocol right - all of the cool faction and conversation aspects of that game, just with the rest of the game at the same level of quality. You know it would rule.
2
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Sure, we've seen plenty of games where the protagonist can transform into a brutish beast - I don't even want to talk about that Sonic The Hedgehog mess - but why not go back to the original tale of Man's struggle with his darker half? Robert Louis Stevenson's novel is fertile ground for interactive entertainment.
I was no fan of Heavy Rain, but imagine this story told with that kind of narrative immersion? Switching back and forth between Hyde and Jekyll, each personality with its own goals, and tack on a KOTOR-esque morality system that led to different endings and you'd have a classic.
1
Pollyanna
Wel, games aren't entirely about killing people, right? Imagine translating Eleanor H. Porter's 1913 novel Pollyanna, about a young orphan girl who has a positive spin on every situation, into vidcon format?
Make it a variation of Katamaria Damacy, with the unstoppable Polly capering through Beldingsville, Vermont, lifting the spirits of as many residents as she can within a time limit. Spin it out even farther, as Polly travels the world cheering up people of every race, creed and color. This could be a bizarre cult hit - or at least get written about in the back pages of EGM.