One of the most iconic movies of all time, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, is to be made into a computer game. Involved in production are some of the top games developer talents behind big titles like Fallout New Vegas, Gears of War and Battlefield: Hardline, as well as Coppola and the production company of the original movie, American Zoetrope.
The game is being crowdfunded via Kickstarter as the developers are keen to avoid the temptation to turn the project into another shooter. They feel if a big production company were to fund the project then they would be directed into making Apocalypse Now more generic than their vision.
The ambition the team have for the game is commendable. They like to describe their idea as a “Survival Horror Experience.” Bold words indeed. The plans they outline in their short Kickstarter video tell us the team want to show real respect to the depravity and suffering of war, something few other games deal with. The team want the players choices to be open and consequential to the story as a whole, leaving decisions up to the individual as you find your own path through the Asian jungle.
In a recent interview with PC Advisor, Rob Auten, lead writer for the game describes their project as “not a conventional war game in any way,” with the action being driven “by relationships and by tension.” Auden also tells us that we will play the lead character from the movie, Captain Benjamin Willard, and there will be sequences from the movie that make up part of the game’s storyline. We also know the game will be played in the first person.
With it being so early in the production of Apocalypse Now, little is known (probably by the team behind it as well) about how far they can take this idea and how much of a well-rounded title they can make it into. With ambitions such as described in the Kickstarter video, of making a game where “you can sit on the boat and drop acid… if you want to,” as well as being able to make the AI respond to the many different decisions you will face along your journey to find Colonel Kurtz, this project may turn out to be a massive non-starter. If the developers ambitions are realized however, then we may be comparing the game with being as ground breaking and talked about as the original motion picture.
The many fans of the Apocalypse Now movie will of course be the most critical, and hardest to please with the prospect of the film being made into a video game. We will have to wait a few years to be able to make up our minds on “the horror,” with the release date set tentatively as 2020 for all major platforms. Be sure to check back to Gamespresso for any future developments.