ABSTRACT
This chapter is both a historical account of film-to-game adaptations produced between and 1994, and a plea in favour of what Guins describes as "critical historical studies of video games", a historical excavation that eschews both grand histories and minute, often vacuum-sealed, vernacular descriptions of specific phenomena. A history of video games deals with good games as well as bad games. The chapter analyses a specific practice within the video game industry: that of licensing and adaptation. It describes the ways in which video games of the 1980s and 1990s worked on pre-existing cultural material in order to adapt it into playable artefacts. The chapter analyses film-to-game adaptations produced and distributed between and 1994, with a specific focus on games produced for home console platforms. A history of adaptations should always consist of at least two histories. The chapter presents two histories that differ in the level of granularity.
