Here's my top-four! This comes straight of my blog, typed some time ago. It was a slow day and I wanted to give detailed thoughts.
4. Day of the Tentacle - LucasArts (Point and Click Adventure Game)
A classic. A sequel to an earlier game called Maniac Mansion (a game filled with so many deliberate red herrings that it's nigh-impossible to finish). The mad but not neccisarily evil Doctor Fred has a pair of disembodied tentacles for pets and when one of them sprouts opposible thumbs thanks to some of the doctor's home-made toxic waste it decides to take over the world. So it is up to Bernard (a playable character from the first game) and his two friends, Laverne and Hoagie, to solve the problem by travelling back in time to the day before and turn off the toxic waste. Unfortunately the Chron-o-John malfunctions, leaving Bernard in the present, Laverne in the future ruled by tentacles, and Hoagie at the signing of the Declaration of Independence (eventually, thanks to the puzzle solving, having a vacuum cleaner in your basement become part of the US Constitution). Another very silly game that has great potential for a movie as long as Roy Schneider stays away from it.
3. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - LucasArts (Point and Click Adventure Game)
Indiana Jones goes off to save the world from Nazis yet again, who are looking for the famous city of Atlantis to utilize its technology for the upcomming war. The game plots end up investigating why Atlantis, a great civilization, has fallen, and that it's truth is more disturbing than anything he could have thought. To tell the truth, whenever I try to write a story, I find shades of this game creeping in at times. The writers at LucasArts actually made a pretty good game with a pretty good story with more depth than some of the Indiana Jones movies (yes, you heard me, Temple of Doom!). Very early, when attempts were made to make a fourth Indy movie was it rumoured that this would story would be used. But alas no, very early it was revealed that the fourth Indiana Jones will not have anything to do with Atlantis. *sigh*
2. Alone in the Dark - Infogrames (1992) Third Person Adventure Game
The Uwe Boll movie does not count, mostly because it sucks. And because it utilized the story of the fourth game, which has nothing to do with the original trilogy. Back in its day, despite crappy 3D graphics, Alone in the Dark was a very scary game. Firstly it utilized a plot driven by Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos and ideas. Set in the 1920s, Edward Carnby, a detective, is hired by an antique-dealer to see if the house of Derceto in Louisianna really has an antique piano with a secret drawer in it. When he finds the secret drawer he finds a note from the house's previous owner stating the reasons for his suicide. Now Carnby must make it out of the house, filled with zombies, night-guants and the occasional demon. Each step the character gave creaked on the floorboards, the sounds the creatures made were eerie, the house figuratively reeked with atmosphere and when I was in the caverns beneath the house being chased by a giant worm-like creature called the Cthonian (making weird grunting noises) my skin couldn't help but crawl. The game had almost no cut-scenes, and the story had to be pieced together by the player himself from notebooks, diaries, manuscripts. The gameplay is very similar to the original Resident Evil games. Thing is, Alone in the Dark was there first. Resident Evil may have ended up being the better known and more popular of the two, it is nothing but a rip-off of Alone in the Dark. The second game in the "trilogy" had undead pirates (always a favourite) and the third game undead cowboys. Both were more action driven and had more complex plots and were a lot of fun, but ultimately were about as scary as cheddar.
1. Grim Fandango - LucasArts (1998) - Adventure Game
One of my favourite adventure games of all time and hailed many times as one of the best adventure games ever made. It's the Godfather of PC Adventure games, which emphasized character and originality above plot and, off course, action. It has has an epic plot that more or less spans four years, it has many characters and arguably one of the most original worlds (both in concept and design) found in a PC game, ever! As a movie project it would be perfect for a Tim Burton / Henry Selick collaboration... or maybe just Henry Selick. The world Grim Fandango populates is the Land of the Dead, a world (based on Azteco / Mayan mythology) where the dead have to go on a four year journey before they may enter the Paradise, the Land of Eternal Rest, unless they commit an unspecified sin in life which gets you stuck in something like community service. In this position is poor Manuel Calavera, who has to sell travel packages to the recently dead. When faced with being fired from his job, making his journey to the Land of Eternal Rest impossible, he steals a client from Domino, a more successful salesman. The client is Mache Colomar who is practically a saint and with whom Manny is smitten immediately. But Manny makes a mistake, leaving her alone in the Petrified Forrest and him wracked with guilt over messing up. He joins the Lost Soul's Alliance, a group of Souls who plan on exposing the corruption in the Department of Death, the morbidly named agency that is more or less the government. Manny, with his elemental spirit side-kick, Glottis (a large orange thing) travel the land of the dead in search of Meche, but also, in the process, discover just how diabolical the plot is.
Unlike most games, Grim Fandango is actually thematically rich; some of the themes touched upon are responsibility, disillusionment, serving oneself vs serving others, etc. The dialogue in the game is among the best written for a game and the original voice-cast is also among the best for a game, headed by Cuban actor, Tony Plana. The design of the game is based on 1930s Art-Deco coupled with Mayan, Aztec and Modern-day Mexico, and is one of the most gorgeous looking games. Even the characters resemble the paper-maché skelotons made during Mexico's Day of the Dead festivals. The game is also is steeped and stewed in film noir with many references to classic movies, including the Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The Third Man. The final scene is even set in and around a greenhouse (most likely a reference to The Big Sleep). Grim Fandango was just a bunch of good things that game together well (not counting to occasional plot hole). It was also one of the few games that actually envoked emotions from me the same way many good books have; you felt sad that your adventures have ended. Returning to this game always felt more like returning to a good book.
There is three reasons however why this excellent game will never be made into a movie: (1) Despite being constantly high on "the best games ever" lists (in many Game of the Year awards it actually beat out StarCraft and Half-Life), it's actually not very well known at all, which leads to problem (2): the game despite being successful, was not as succesful as past LucasArts games; it came out in 1998, at the dawn of multi-player games and was probably sunk by that. It's "failure" was the nail in the coffin for adventure games in general, a genre which was at its time the best-selling genre on the PC. And thirdly, Hollywood is run by idiots, so I doubt they'll ever be interested in a decade old game that supposedly underperformed. At least some fans are apparently making a Half-Life 2 Grim Fandango Mod to keep the memory alive.
Well, that's my piece of pretentious pseudo-journalism for the day. I'll just end this on my favourite quote from Grim Fandango, which is also one of my favourite quotes of all time. "Run, you pigeons, it's Robert Frost!!"