Is the box office surprise hit Iron Lung the future of “video game movies”? | games

SSomething strange struck me early on while watching Iron Lung, which has so far grossed $32 million at the box office, despite being a low-budget sci-fi thriller adapted from an indie video game that few people outside the horror gaming community have ever heard of. Set in a post-apocalyptic galaxy, he must buy his freedom by piloting a rusty submarine through an ocean of human blood on a distant planet. Ostensibly, he is searching for relics that might be vital to scientific research, but what he finds is far more horrific. So far, so strange.

The film was also written, directed, and financed by one person — YouTube gamer Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach — who also stars. But that’s not the weird part either. The weird part is that watching Iron Lung feels like you’re watching Fischbach play Iron Lung. Perhaps it’s the fact that he spends most of the movie sitting at the submarine’s controls, trying to figure out how to use them properly – as the player would. Perhaps, as the film progresses, he has to solve a series of environmental puzzles linked to various codes, computer readouts and small injections of narrative – just like in a video game. Long stretches of the film involve Fischbach trying to decide what to do next, while the camera zooms in on his confused face. This is incredibly similar to watching his YouTube videos about playing Iron Lung, an experience he often found confusing. This was the most comprehensive experience I’ve had at the cinema since The Truman Show – but I’m not sure that’s what Fischbach intended.

Of course, there have been plenty of movies in which a character must escape a closed environment by solving a series of puzzles. It’s an entire subgenre of fun thrillers, from the Saw series to Buried to Fall. But the highly procedural nature of Iron Lung, the long meditation sequences, the tools the character uses, and the way the puzzles fit together to open up new possibilities? This is video play. Even the way the backstory is revealed, through short, oblique flashbacks, is exactly how the game uses cutscenes to flesh out the universe. This isn’t a movie about a game, it’s a movie about experiencing a game, a kind of narrated YouTube play. I was almost expecting the comments section to appear instead of the closing credits.

Iron Lung isn’t the only video being converted to linear media on YouTube. The hugely successful Dungeons and Dragons YouTube channel, Critical Role, is now an animated TV series. Elsewhere, Adventure Time and Rick and Morty got their start on the web before they were transferred to television (and then became games), and the theater has been experimenting with immersive interactive productions for a decade or two. There are now a growing number of TV shows turning into video podcasts (the new Harry Hill series, for example), and video podcasts turning into TV. We now live in an era of hybrid entertainment experiences, and as viewers, we will have to renegotiate our relationships with traditional media as a result.

Remember the controversy over how the audience would shout catchphrases and throw popcorn during a Minecraft movie? What they were doing was re-enacting the quasi-social experience of playing and/or watching Minecraft on a computer screen – but in a cinema. The auditorium has become the physical equivalent of a Twitch/YouTube chat window, where spectators engage in meme-like jokes. While watching Iron Lung, the teens behind me were pointing out tropes and Easter eggs that referenced Fischbach’s YouTube videos as well as the original game, like a kind of existential hall of mirrors.

Iron Lung can be enjoyed as a slasher, claustrophobic B-movie. Comparisons have been drawn to John Carpenter’s chaotic Dark Star, though I see a closer counterpart in the sci-fi thriller Hardware, in which a self-assembled killer robot terrorizes a woman in her apartment. But beneath the familiar trappings of built-in thrills, Iron Lung’s origins as a game are also written into the experience, there for those in the know and those willing to pick apart the self-reflexive threads.

Whatever you make of Iron Lung, I’m sure we’ll see more YouTubers migrating into the world of film. I just hope this in no way leads to a Rocky movie directed by Jake Paul.

What are you playing?

This is a game for those who want a role-playing adventure that won’t take 120 hours to complete or bombard you with dark Tolkien lore. I just started playing The hermit and the pigbut I’m already fascinated by it — an unlikely but comforting intersection between Thank God You’re Here! And Nicolas Cage’s Pig, set in a beautifully drawn, multi-colored world.

The Hermit is a lonely man wandering the forest with his truffle-smelling pet, until the two are drawn into a drama involving an evil corporation. There are puzzles to solve and sub-quests to tackle, all of which endearingly critique RPG conventions, such as turn-based combat and the level-up system. The narrative focuses on Hermit’s social awkwardness in a sweet and respectful way, and the visual style will remind you of your favorite offbeat cartoons and webcomics.

Available on: PC, Mac
Estimated playing time: Eight hours

What are you reading?

• Just one month after its launch, Riot Games laid off up to 80 employees 2XKOa fighting game based in the League of Legends universe. “The overall momentum just hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long-term,” said executive producer Tom Cannon. The game received positive reviews for its fast-paced combat and vivid visual style, but the fighting game scene was crowded, and even a potential user base of 100 million League of Legends fans wasn’t enough to secure widespread interest.

• In December, FIFA It has announced that a new mainline football game will be coming in 2026, through a publishing deal with Netflix. The developer is named after the relatively unknown company Delphi Interactive, and GamesIndustry.Biz conducted an interesting interview with its founders about how new models are needed to succeed in an ever-evolving market. Personally, I think the important part is making a good soccer game like EA Sports FC, but I’m not a CEO.

• And on the subject of Electronic Arts, the company has kept it Sims The brand has been going for over 20 years, and the newest additions, Royalty & Legacy, show why. It allows you to rule your royal lineage over multiple generations, adding a touch of epic grandeur to the usual gameplay recipe of building a beautiful house and then trying to prevent the residents from accidentally burning it down. Writing for Eurogamer, Matt Wells explains why Sims fans can’t wait to become king. Or a queen.

• And regular Pushing Buttons users, listen to our games editor, Keza, talk about her new book, Super Nintendowhich explores the game-changing company, on The New York Times’s Book Review podcast.

What to click on

Question block

This week’s question from a reader james rseeks to bring the discussion of retro video games back to life:

“A few years ago everyone was asking, ‘What is Citizen Kane in video games?’ But no one seems to talk about that anymore. Do we really have Citizen Kane in video games? Did I miss that?? If so, what was it?“

This long-standing debate seems to have reached a peak of interest in the late 2000s and early 2000s, when innovative and highly cinematic titles such as BioShock, Red dead redemption and Ex-deity They were expanding the narrative and emotional scope of games with dazzling new technologies. At the time, every online gaming site had its own question titled “What is Citizen Kane in video games?” condition. For example, IGN declared Nintendo’s sci-fi adventure Metroid Prime a good fit for the project because, like the Orson Welles film, it used a wide variety of tropes and artistic tricks to achieve its ambitious goals. Even then, most people disagreed, but IGN did well for trying.

I think this debate has ended because it has sunk into self-parody, it represents the reflexive anxiety of a growing medium that still lives in the cultural shadow of cinema. Ten years later, we’ve become more comfortable realizing that not everything that happens in video games has to be similar to movie history. There are officially daring games like Citizen Kane (Stanley Project, Disco Elysium, Giant’s shadowThere are games that tell stories with countless narrative threads (The last of us, Life is strange, Mass effect). But the whole package? Maybe not. In the end, I think the answer to your question is that it doesn’t matter. Games do things differently than movies and comparing them this way doesn’t really accomplish anything. Having said that, the real answer is Shenmo.

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