Chapter 25 Videogame Adaptation Kevin M. Flanagan Narrative videogames difer from media like flm, novels, and radio broadcasts in their reliance on interactive input and their foregrounding of play. Tat said, they are among the latest in a long line of media that make and remake stories. While many dif- ferent kinds of texts, from twentieth-century psalters to yesterday’s Internet meme, are arguably always reliant on extant sources for their intelligibility, videogames present a special case in which older regimes of representation are remade into something appar- ently more dynamic. With the exception of some abstract art games, most videogames function under the logic of “remediation,” a tendency within digital media to incor- porate, contain, reform, and re-establish old media forms for a new cultural moment (Bolter and Grusin 339–46). Grand Tef Auto IV (2008), for instance, is not a game experience that was conjured out of the ether. Tough the game is premised on build- ing a criminal empire through such outré actions as carjacking, assassination, and kid- napping, it has surprising claims to realist discourse. Te convincingness of its world is based on the game’s ability to contain, in representative miniature, the contours of a city space (based on New York City), fashions based on popular designs, and fctional cars approximating iconic brands, as well as photographs, cinematic cut scenes, and mock web pages that are rendered through the game’s graphical engine. Moreover, Grand Tef Auto IV, as befts a sequel, distills and responds to a series of design decisions that take previous games in the more than decade-old franchise into account. Even the production of the game thoroughly remediated the triumphs and controversies of pub- lisher and franchise developer Rockstar Games—though, in a bit of transnational irony, the Scotland-based Rockstar North developed most of the games in this thoroughly American series (Kushner 260–65). Tis loop of iterated design and textual mediation was refreshed anew with Grand Tef Auto V (2013), the most recent in the series. Looked at from a textual angle, the history of videogames becomes a history of adap- tation. Since the early days of Tennis for Two (1958) and Spacewar (1962), videogames have looked to other textual forms, and other media histories, for their inspiration. Tis inspiration is not limited to in-game content, but also buttresses the technology and history of the games industry. Spacewar, for example, was created by MIT academics OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Oct 24 2016, NEWGEN oxfordhb-9780199331000_part_4.indd 441 10/24/2016 8:46:41 PM