Late 1990s subscription-based online videogame film adaptations

Abstract

This article explores an important moment in late 1990s US film and videogame industrial convergence. It does so through a Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) of the contemporaneous industrial paratexts surrounding three film-to-subscription-based online videogame adaptations, Aliens Online (1998), Godzilla Online (1998), and Independence Day Online (2000). It asks why these adaptations failed critically and commercially despite the critical praise and evident consumer demand at the time for videogame adaptations of major films like GoldenEye 007 (1997), and subscription-based online games like Ultima Online (1997). Moreover, it asks what these failures tell us about US videogame and cinematic convergence in the late 1990s. In seeking answers to these questions, this article intervenes into Thomas Leitch’s discussions of ‘adaptation strategies’, as well as Jason Mittell’s ideas around ‘unbalanced’ transmedia. It uses these interventions to demonstrate why it is vital to consider the industrial contexts necessitating each adaptation. The RTA reveals that these include the impact of new videogame distribution models, the threat posed by competitors, and the massive profit potential of subscription-based online gaming. This article ultimately demonstrates that in productions of transmedia products like these games, multiple stakeholders can operate in hierarchical corporate structures with differing levels of power to impact their production, which I refer to as their ‘authorial agency’. It is therefore vital also to consider the ‘primary’ strategy driving each adaptation. This article’s central argument is that to fully understand the failure of these adaptations, we should recognise how ‘promotion’ was the primary adaptation strategy that most impacted each game’s production and therefore undermined their quality. This has substantial implications for how we think about our contemporary media ecology in which the US videogame industry is now more profitable and potentially exerts greater authorial agency than its conglomerate partner, US cinema.

Introduction

Scholars have long charted the convergent relationship between videogames and cinema from the gradual conglomeration of US media industries that eventually led to Superman (1979) on the Atari VCS (Aldred, 2012: 93) to the adoption of cinema ratings systems by the videogame industry in the 1990s (Ruggill, 2009: 109). In charting this relationship, it becomes clear from critical and commercial perspectives that adaptations that result from it are susceptible to both successes and failures. Super Mario Bros. (1993) infamously failed in the early 1990s, and Nintendo would not attempt another live-action film adaptation until 2019's Detective Pikachu (2019), which achieved great success. The scholarly explorations discussed within this article reveal a historical relationship that evokes Judd Ethan Ruggill’s position that ‘while the process of convergence often appears smooth, even inexorable, it tends to be “glacial” instead – irregular, with (often simultaneous) surges and retreats’ (2009: 106). The explanations for such ‘surges and retreats’ are invariably complex, but this analysis attempts to provide some clarity by examining the industrial contexts surrounding each production, which according to Casey O’Donnell is ‘an often-neglected area of academic scholarship’ that deserves greater scrutiny (2011: 272).

In the late 1990s, the US film and videogame industries underwent a surge and retreat of industrial convergence whereby they capitalised on their increasingly synergistic relationship to adapt the films Aliens (1986), Godzilla (1998), and Independence Day (1996) into subscription-based online videogames that ultimately failed both critically and commercially. This failure provokes a question: why would such adaptations fail despite the evident consumer demand in the late 1990s for both videogame adaptations of major films, and subscription-based online games? Moreover, what do these failures tell us about videogame and cinematic convergence in the late 1990s? I argue this moment of convergence exemplifies Thomas Leitch's idea that adapted texts are not simply one ‘category’ of adaptation. They can instead exhibit multiple adaptation strategies simultaneously that their creators employ in adapting them from their ‘source texts’. The following reflexive thematic analysis of contemporaneous industrial paratexts reveals the multiple strategies that Mythic Entertainment and Kesmai employed in creating Aliens Online (1998), Godzilla Online (1998), and Independence Day Online (2000). These three distinct but related terms, convergence, transmedia, and paratexts will be elaborated upon further in the next section, which will provide the foundation to show how Mythic and Kesmai’s strategies were to create adjustments and analogues of their ‘source texts’ while promoting their new distribution platform, GameStorm.

This analysis will also contribute to scholarly discussions around ‘unbalanced’ transmedia (Mittell, 2015: 294) by showing how 20th Century Fox and TriStar used their greater ‘authorial agency’ (Hewitt, 2023: 39) to force unworkably short development cycles on Godzilla Online and Independence Day Online. In doing so, it will show how the critical and commercial failure of these games can be attributed to the imbalance in that relationship. This imbalance enabled Fox and TriStar to prioritise the cross-promotional benefit of releasing the games quickly to coincide with the theatrical and home video releases of their films, rather than prioritising a sufficient development cycle to foster a quality player experience. It will also contextualise the failure of Aliens Online in relation to the short development cycle that Mythic placed upon themselves in order for the game to function as promotion for their new distribution platform, GameStorm. This analysis contributes to Leitch’s grammar of hypertextual relations by arguing that ‘promotion’ is an underacknowledged adaptation strategy that creators often employ in transmedia productions such as these. Ultimately, this article argues that in circumstances like this, in which multiple stakeholders with divergent adaptation strategies and media production strengths in a hierarchical structure exert differing levels of ‘authorial agency’, it is vital to consider the industrial contexts necessitating their productions, and by extension, the ‘primary’ adaptation strategies within the industrial hierarchy that most impacted their productions. This central argument reveals how Godzilla Online primarily functioned as promotion for the theatrical release of Godzilla. Independence Day Online primarily functioned as promotion for its Special Edition DVD release, and Aliens Online primarily functioned as promotion for Mythic and Kesmai’s new distribution platform, GameStorm. Before beginning, however, it would be useful to situate this discussion in relation to its three key terms, convergence, transmedia, and paratexts.

Convergence, transmedia, and paratexts

It is important to acknowledge that ‘convergence’ might mean a variety of things in a variety of contexts. Indeed, Robert Alan Brookey argues that:

Because convergence has been used to describe a multitude of practices, the term has become ambiguous. And because convergence, as it has been applied to the videogames, reflects the interests of both technology and media companies, the ambiguity of the term has been compounded (Brookey, 2010: 285).

Henry Jenkins (2006: 2) tried to resolve some of this ambiguity by offering the following tripartite definition for the term, in that it is said to describe.

(1) The flow of content across multiple media platforms.

(2) The cooperation between multiple media industries.

(3) The migratory behaviour of media audiences.

Jenkins’ work has been highly influential in the field and has been used to explore everything from online sports betting (Lopez-Gonzalez and Griffiths, 2018) to contemporary Chinese journalism (Li, 2018) to word-of-mouth (Hewitt, 2023). It will likewise factor into this discussion, however, my specific focus in this article is the kind of industrial convergence explored by Tim Dwyer in that it refers to scenarios in which production practices are fundamentally tied to moments of ‘industry consolidation and sectoral crossownership [sic]’ (2010: 10). This is not quite the same as ‘economic convergence’ (Jenkins, 2001: 93), which can otherwise be understood as horizontal integration, since many of the examples discussed do not rely entirely on horizontal integration, merely industrial cooperation. Nor is it the same kind of ‘industrial convergence’ hypothesised by economists in the 1960s to describe the gradual convergence of productivity levels across different industrial sectors (Whelan and Whelan, 1984: 104). The best definition for how I am using the term ‘industrial convergence’ is derived from Lee and Olson’s work in Convergenomics wherein they talk about ‘previously distinct industries’ capitalising on their synergistic relationships to produce new products (2010: 91). In our case, it means film studios capitalising on their increasingly synergistic relationships with videogame studios to adapt films into videogames. But crucially, I am arguing the synergy that enabled the production of these three games represents an ‘unbalanced’ form of transmedia. To clarify, Jason Mittell’s model of ‘unbalanced transmedia’ is used to differentiate from what he calls Jenkins’ model of ‘balanced transmedia’ in which stories ‘unfold across multiple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive’ and in Mittell’s conceptualisation equal ‘contributions to our understanding of the world’ (Jenkins, 2006: 293). Jenkins’ often-cited example of a transmedia story is The Matrix franchise, which he describes as ‘entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium’ (95). He means that to fully experience the narrative, one must consume The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), The Matrix Resurrections (2021), The Animatrix (2003), Enter the Matrix (2003), The Matrix Online (2005), The Matrix: Path of Neo (2005), and the various Matrix comics. In this way, no single medium or text is intended to serve a primary role over others. It is therefore ‘balanced transmedia’ (Mittell: 294). Mittell argues, however, media productions more often demonstrate imbalance in that there is often ‘a clearly identifiable core text and a number of peripheral transmedia extensions’ that serve as ‘paratexts’ (294).

In simple terms, Mittell is referring to the kind of alternate reality games, blogs, comics, posters, reviews, social media discussions, toys, trade press reports, trailers, videogames, and more that result from films like Aliens, Godzilla, and Independence Day. In Show Sold Separately (2010), Jonathan Gray calls for an ‘off-screen studies’ to reevaluate these ‘paratexts’. His work is important to this discussion of industrial convergence because it highlights why we might otherwise overlook the impact of corporate synergy and cross-promotion on the meaning we draw from Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online. Gray argues this propensity to overlook stems from the fact that terms like ‘Hype, promotion, promos, and synergy’ are often used as corporate buzzwords, and so we may find it difficult to imagine their importance in creating meaning for the audience (5). Additionally, he cautions us not to dismiss the likes of ‘Barbenheimer’ memes or Lilo & Stitch (2025) Happy Meal toys as mere ‘peripherals’ as they can impact the meaning an audience member receives from the films, and vice versa (6). For evidence of this, one need look no further than Godzilla (1998). The hype for the film was built around not showing a full-size image of their creature design. This worked well until Tiger Electronics published an image of their new Godzilla toy in a magazine, thereby enabling everyone to see the creature before they saw the film (Abrams, 2014). This paratextual relationship is why I have been putting scare quotes around ‘source texts’ because, as Gray argues, using ‘the word “text” in such a manner suggests that the film or program is the entire text, and/or that it completes the text’ (6). Gray instead suggests that films are just instalments of larger texts that are never quite finished, and which can comprise multiple media forms (7). In other words, when Alien was released in 1979 it did not spawn ‘peripheral’ products like James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), Dark Horse’s Aliens comics, or Aliens Online. Instead, Alien (1979) is a constituent part of a larger text that comprises ‘the entire storyworld’ (7), which continues to grow, as we see through Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth (2025).

Gray’s position here suggests that videogame adaptations like Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online are not mere add-ons, spin-offs, or also-rans from their source texts because they extend ‘the horizons of the narrative universe’ (46) of Aliens, Godzilla, and Independence Day. Linda Hutcheon offers the term, ‘heterocosm’ (2006: 14) to describe such an extension of a text’s narrative world. For example, Shin Godzilla (2016) fans can further explore the narrative world of the film by visiting the Godzilla Interception Operation Awaji attraction at Nijigen no Mori theme park in Awaji, Japan. This transmedia experience enables visitors to zipline into Godzilla’s mouth, and in doing so, physically navigate the Godzilla ‘storyworld’, which has otherwise been presented to them on film. As Hutcheon points out, ‘What gets adapted here is a heterocosm, literally an “other world” or cosmos, complete, of course, with the stuff of a story – settings, characters, events, and situations’ (14). This concept is important for us because Hutcheon points out how videogames, like theme park attractions, are ideally suited to allow players to explore the heterocosm of non-interactive filmic texts (51). However, we should note that some videogame adaptations of filmic texts, like Pipeworks Software’s fighting game, Godzilla: Unleashed (2007), are not always faithful adaptations that attempt to conserve as much ‘essence’ of their source text as possible, which we will see is relevant to all three adaptations under discussion here. Lastly, it demonstrates the need to situate this discussion in relation to the established literature on film-to-videogame adaptations.

Film-to-videogame adaptations

In order to contribute to scholarly discussions of industrial convergence, unbalanced transmedia, and paratexts, we require a theoretical means to explain how 20th Century Fox and TriStar prioritised the promotion of their films as adaptation strategies, how Mythic Entertainment and Kesmai prioritised the promotion of their new distribution platform, GameStorm, and how these priorities led to a limited development cycle that undermined Mythic and Kesmai’s ability to produce quality videogame adaptations. This section therefore begins by intervening into prominent discourses around adaptation taxonomies before detailing the multiple adaptation strategies that are most relevant to Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online.

Brian McFarlane argues that to critically evaluate an adaptation, one must first identify its ‘kind of adaptation’ (1996, 11). In other words, one must first understand 20^th Century Fox and TriStar’s motivations before one considers their adaptations ‘successful’. Putting aside for the moment the question of how one measures ‘success’, McFarlane uses Geoffrey Wagner’s 1975 work The Novel and the Cinema to begin a discussion on a possible critical taxonomy of adaptations. The first of Wagner’s tripartite taxonomy, ‘transposition’, describes a text that is directly transposed from one medium to another with maximum possible fidelity (222), for example, Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005). The second is ‘commentary’ in which ‘an original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect’ (223), as in the exclusion of Tom Bombadil from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The third type is ‘analogy’ in which a text is dramatically modified in some way (223). Consider Akira Kurosawa transposing the narrative of King Lear into 16th-century Japan in Ran (1985) as an example. Comparable tripartite taxonomies have been offered Dudley Andrew (1980: 10), and Michael Klein and Parker (1981: 9-10), but like Wagner’s, they have faced criticism that they would be too restrictive to understand the myriad complexities of adapting films like Aliens, Godzilla, and Independence Day into videogames.

Deborah Cartmell (1999) argues these restrictions are especially limited to adaptations in which ‘the figure of the author (Shakespeare, Austen, Hawthorne)’ or in the case of Godzilla and Independence Day, Dean Devlin, ‘is prominent in the film’s [or game’s] publicity and reception’ (24). Cartmell argues we should instead ‘read adaptations for their generation of a plurality of meanings. Thus, the intertextuality of the adaptation is our primary concern’ (Cartmell: 28). Gérard Genette would seemingly agree as in Palimpsests (1997) he incorporates intertextuality into his ‘transtextual’ taxonomy of adaptations, which aims to describe all possible relationships that can exist between any two texts. Acknowledging the intertextuality of the adaptation process in this way seems appropriate for our needs, as none of the three games under discussion fall neatly into any one of Wagner’s tripartite taxonomy. However, Thomas Leitch cautions that such a ‘loose’ taxonomy ‘does not adequately demarcate the frontiers of adaptation’ (94). Or, in simpler terms, he poses the question, at what point does one consider a text to be simply alluding to another text, rather than adapting it into another form?

To help answer this, Leitch provides a ‘grammar of hypertextual relations’ (95) that describes the various adaptation strategies that videogame creators like LucasArts, Mythic, and Kesmai can employ in adapting a source text. Leitch describes it as a ‘a logical progression from faithful adaptation to allusion’ (123), but I would argue it can be better understood as a spectrum with the most direct hypertextual relationships at the top, and as we move down, we increasingly ‘shade off to the intertextual’ (95) until arriving at mere allusion.

(1) Celebration – Texts that are attempting to preserve as much ‘essence’ of the original text as possible.

(2) Adjustment – Texts that are altering a source text to better fit the specificity of the medium into which it is adapted.

(3) Neoclassic Imitation – Texts that are adapting a source text to modern day.

(4) Revision – Texts that are reinterpreting texts as a means of commentary or critique.

(5) Colonisation – Texts that are adapting a source text into a new cultural context, for example, setting a text in a new country.

(6) (Meta)Commentary or Deconstruction – Texts that are providing commentary on the adaptation process.

(7) Analogue – Texts that are making use of thematic, stylistic, or narrative elements present within other texts without directly ‘adapting’ them.

(8) Parody and Pastiche – Texts that are making fun of other texts.

(9) Secondary, Tertiary, or Quaternary Imitations – Texts that continue from an earlier adaptation, like a sequel to a videogame adapted from a film, for example, Goldeneye: Rogue Agent (2004).

(10) Allusion – Texts that are making indirect or perhaps even unintentional reference to other texts.

This spectrum of adaptation strategies is useful for our analysis because it undermines the idea of a rigid taxonomy for adaptations. Instead, ‘even apparently straightforward adaptations typically make use of many different intertextual strategies’ (126). In other words, if we examine Ran through Leitch’s idea of adaptation strategies, we can see it is not solely an ‘analogy’ in Wagner’s terms, it is instead simultaneously an adjustment, colonisation, revision, and allusion. I will therefore adopt Leitch’s idea of multiple adaptation strategies in this analysis of Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online. The only criticism I will offer of Leitch’s grammar is that in presenting these ten adaptation strategies, he does not offer much room for one to identify others. This is perhaps unfair given Leitch’s ultimate point that there ‘is no normative model for adaptation’ (126), and so his argument would not be strengthened by taking the time to identify other adaptation strategies that might exist. Nevertheless, a gap exists in the established discourse, as I would argue promotion is an adaptation strategy that remains underexplored. In the final theoretical grounding section, I wish to point out how it is vital sometimes to consider the ‘primary’ adaptation strategy that a text exhibits, as well as considering how that fundamentally relates to what I call, ‘authorial agency’.

Primary adaptation strategies and authorial agency

By ‘primary’, I mean the one that most impacted its production. This is a useful expansion of our critical vocabulary because it helps support the idea that fidelity to a source text is not always, and perhaps seldom, the goal of media production companies in making an adaptation. McFarlane supports this by pointing out how critics still too often regard fidelity to the source text as the sole critical category by which the success of an adaptation should be judged. In this antiquated approach, other late 1990s videogame adaptations, like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six (1998) would be regarded as a ‘better’ adaptation than Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (1997) because it remains more faithful to its source text. Yet, as someone who enjoyed this Star Trek game in the late 1990s, the enjoyment of this game came not from its faithful celebration of a specific TV show episode or film, it came from experiencing the heterocosm of Star Trek through the eyes of a new Starfleet cadet. The interactivity of the videogame medium allowed me to experience that in a way I could not through TV or film.

This is precisely why fidelity to a source text is a problematic critical approach for McFarlane. Instead, he emphasises that adaptations should be understood as products of convergence. To ignore how the differing industrial contexts of the videogame and television industries affected the production of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and Star Trek (1966-1969) marginalises what he calls the ‘production determinants’ that have nothing to do with the television show but may be ‘powerfully influential’ upon the videogame (9). These powerfully influential industrial contexts that can impact a production, sometimes far more than a creative desire to remain faithful to a source text, are precisely the ones that Casey O’Donnell argues are too often overlooked. These would include ‘genre conventions, auteurist predilections, studio style, “industry” matters such as use of certain stars, let alone extra-cinematic influences such as the prevailing ideological climate’ (McFarlane: 201). Linda Hutcheon likewise adds that ‘economic issues’, such as financing and distribution rights should also ‘be considered in any general theorizing of adaptation’ (30), alongside paratextual elements, although Hutcheon does not use that term, like hype, press coverage, and critical reactions (143). I would argue, therefore, that attempting to understand the ‘primary’ adaptation strategy present within a finished text is a useful way of inferring the ‘goal’ of an adaptation. From a critical standpoint, one can therefore measure its ‘success’ more accurately. If its primary adaptation strategy, its goal, was to remain faithful to its original text then Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six is an excellent adaptation. If its primary adaptation strategy was to expand the heterocosm of Star Trek to better fit the specificity of the videogame medium, then Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is likewise an excellent adaptation.

Returning then to Brian McFarlane original point that to critically evaluate an adaptation, one must first identify its ‘kind of adaptation’ (11), we have seen how this is a problematic approach. I would argue it is often better to instead ask, what is the primary adaptation strategy present, among many? Asking this question acknowledges that multiple adaptation strategies can be present within the same text while also acknowledging how differing production determinants that result from the industrial convergence of two previously distinct industries producing, in this case, three subscription-based online videogames, can affect the meaning the audience take from these texts. This is important for this discussion because it highlights why we might otherwise overlook the impact of corporate synergy and cross-promotion on the production of these three games. After asking such a question, one would naturally enquire as to how one answers it. If the primary adaptation strategy is the one that most impacted the text’s production then by identifying those with the greatest ‘power’, however one understands that, to impact the production, we can theoretically infer the primary adaptation strategy. In simple and perhaps reductive terms, my point is that when you have a well-financed production company like 20^th Century Fox involved in the production of a videogame adaptation alongside a markedly less well-financed company like Mythic Entertainment, it would be useful to consider 20th Century Fox’s primary goal in adapting their film into a videogame. I have already put forward a way to conceptualise this greater or lesser power to affect media productions, I call it ‘authorial agency’ (Hewitt: 39).

I derive this terminology from Salmon Rushdie’s BFI Film Classics book on The Wizard of Oz (1939) in which he argues the film is an ‘authorless text’ because of the multiple directors involved in its production (1992: 16). However, if we consider the hierarchy of authority present in most mainstream film productions then I argue every director, producer, writer, actor, etc. that contributes his or her talents and labour to its production can claim some degree of ‘authority’, a word that is etymologically linked to ‘authorship’, over its production (Hewitt: 37). Crucially for us, most mainstream media production industries are hierarchical, therefore, some people or organisations will exert greater authorial agency than others. A film’s director, for example, will usually exert more authorial agency than its editor. A videogame’s producer will usually exert more than its quality assurance team, but that does not mean the editor or quality assurance team’s agency is non-existent – nor does it mean the director or producer’s agency is supreme.

This analysis of Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online will utilise this idea that videogame productions are subject to a hierarchy in which some entities, like 20th Century Fox, have greater authorial agency that allow them to affect the productions more than others. In doing so, it will expand our critical vocabulary by showing how an underacknowledged adaptation strategy, ‘promotion’, in which adapted texts are created to serve as promotional material for something else, served as the primary strategy for all three games. Godzilla Online primarily functioned as promotion for TriStar Pictures’ theatrical release of Godzilla, Independence Day Online primarily functioned as promotion for 20th Century Fox’s Special Edition DVD release, and Aliens Online primarily functioned as promotion for Mythic and Kesmai’s distribution platform, GameStorm. Ultimately, this will support my central argument that in examining transmedia products, in this case film-to-videogame adaptations, wherein multiple stakeholders with differing levels of authorial agency in hierarchical corporate structures exhibit divergent adaptation strategies and media production strengths, it is vital to consider the industrial contexts necessitating each production, which would include the primary strategy driving each adaptation. Before beginning this analysis, however, it is necessary to outline the methodology I have used.

Methodology

This article seeks to document an important moment in the historical relationship between the US film and videogame industries. This moment in the late 1990s describes a surge and retreat of industrial convergence in which both industries capitalised on their increasingly synergistic relationship to adapt Aliens (1986), Godzilla (1998), and Independence Day (1996) into subscription-based online videogames. These paratexts ultimately failed both critically and commercially, but this article argues these ‘failures’ should be critically analysed through the context of the multiple adaptation strategies that each industry employed in their production, as well as their imbalanced relationships to each other. This analysis follows Casey O’Donnell’s call to offer greater scrutiny to the industrial contexts surrounding media productions. In doing so, it is intended to contribute to Leitch’s grammar of hypertextual relations by showing how ‘promotion’ is an underacknowledged adaptation strategy that was evident in the productions of Godzilla Online, Independence Day Online, and Aliens Online.

To offer greater scrutiny to the industrial contexts surrounding these three paratexts, I require a methodology that acknowledges the central importance of paratexts in the meaning one derives from media productions. It must also enable me to reveal the multiple adaptation strategies that both sides of these imbalanced media productions employed. Lastly, this methodology should be reflexive as the meanings I draw from the various paratexts surrounding Godzilla, Independence Day, and Aliens are inevitably influenced by my prior relationships to each text.

For these reasons, I used Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) to examine contemporaneous paratexts including advertisements, press releases, and promotional interviews, as well as critical reviews and industry commentaries relevant to Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online. This analysis is intended to offer a critical perspective on the multiple adaptation strategies, many of which are not foregrounded in the analysed texts. RTA was therefore an ideal method as it enabled me to ‘offer interpretations of meaning further to those explicitly communicated’ (Byrne, 2022: 1396). The database from which I drew these paratexts was ProQuest Central, which describes itself as ‘the largest single periodical resource available’ covering 1970 to present day. In conjunction with my research assistant, Katie O'Connor, it enabled us to search through 34,286 publications including 4532 trade journals, 2603 newspapers, and 2079 magazines. Several thousand potentially relevant paratexts were found. Search operators were then employed to narrow the results and avoid references to irrelevant data like alien conspiracy theories and the Volkswagen ID.4. Several hundred paratexts were then pinpointed, before a further refinement process for greater relevance was undertaken. Eventually, twenty-eight paratexts from September 1997 to October 2003 were selected as the most relevant to the aims of this research. Owing to the conventions of RTA, citations for are not offered for the sources of data (Byrne: 1407-1408), other than direct quotes, but are available on request. Some paratexts were from major publications like the Los Angeles Times, Las Vegas Review, and The Washington Post. Some were from smaller niche publications like Video Business, but most originate from press releases circulated by newswires like PR in Chicago. According to Braun and Clarke, broadly speaking, I had two options in adopting Thematic Analysis as a methodology. The more positivist codebook-oriented approaches to Thematic Analysis seeks to collect ‘facts’ that are supposedly present in the data, and any subjectivities on behalf of the researcher are considered ‘bias’ that must be eliminated, often using multiple coders (Braun and Clarke, 2020: 3). Thereby, the more reflexive form of thematic analysis better suits my interpretivist epistemology in that ‘Theme development requires considerable analytic and interpretative work on the part of the researcher’ (3), which considers my prior relationships to each game and the source text on which they are based. A close analysis of this material was then undertaken in which various codes were identified, for example ‘marketing strategies’, ‘restrictive licensing deals’, and ‘short development cycles’. From those codes, two key themes were derived that will be discussed in the following sections. They are the industrial contexts necessitating the production of the three adaptations, and promotion as a primary adaptation strategy.

Industrial contexts necessitating the production of Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online

The first theme that emerges from this analysis is that the various stakeholders who exerted some measure of authorial agency over the productions of these adaptations exhibited divergent adaptation strategies while operating in a hierarchical corporate structure. This analysis reveals how these stakeholders were keen to emphasise the benefits of their industrial convergence without fully acknowledging the industrial contexts necessitating them, nor the unbalanced forms of transmedia that resulted. If we take Aliens Online as our first example, then on the surface, it was developed collaboratively by two companies, Mythic Entertainment and Kesmai. Collaboration in business can lead to greater productivity as the skills and resources one is able to draw upon are increased. If we examine this relationship in terms of the industrial contexts of late 1990s online gaming, we can begin to see the complexity of this relationship and what it suggests about industrial convergence at the time.

Mythic achieved previous success with Dragon’s Gate, a text-based multiuser dungeon (MUD) that by 1996 was available through the Internet Service Provider (ISP), America Online (AOL). It is vitally important to understand the industrial context of AOL’s distribution model on online gaming in the 1990s to fully appreciate why Mythic and Kesmai would enter unbalanced relationships with 20th Century Fox and TriStar. Prior to December 1996, AOL was charging users by the hour to access the Internet through their platform. The games they offered were ‘free’ to users insofar as users paid AOL to access the Internet, and in return were able to choose from myriad free-to-access games. And since many users were staying online primarily to play these games, AOL paid royalties to the developers based on the number of user access hours attributed to their respective games. Richard Bartle points out in his seminal Designing Virtual Worlds (2021) that this enabled the videogame production company, Mythic Entertainment, to rake in profits from the approximately one million hours of Dragon’s Gate that users were playing per month (21). AOL was arguably so dominant because of their aggressive marketing campaign, which saw 10% of the average lifetime revenue of each new subscriber spent on securing the next, and their free trial CDs were a staple of mid-1990s culture as according to their former Chief Marketing Officer, Jan Brandt that ‘at one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it. We were logging in new subscribers at the rate of one every 6 seconds’ (Quoted in Blake, 2015). Unfortunately for Mythic, despite their success with Dragon’s Gate, they believed they could make more profit if they dealt directly with the consumer via a monthly subscription model. ‘After all, if they were able to keep all the money that players paid, they could afford to shed 80% of their player base and still make a huge profit’ (Bartle: 22).

One might question why Mythic would take the risk of cutting off ties with the largest distributor in the market. The answer is that that risk offered potentially massive rewards, and the executives at Mythic understood that. Indeed, likely everyone in the US videogame industry in the late 1990s understood the massive success enjoyed by Origin System’s Ultima Online (1997). Ultima is a popular series of multiplatform Role-Playing Games (RPGs) that began with Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (1981). By 1997, there had been nine games released in the main franchise and six spin-off titles. Ultima Online was the first Massively Multiplayer Online RPG in the franchise, and it was a major hit. It sold one hundred thousand copies in its first three months (Kline et al., 2003: 161). However, when ‘it broke 100,000 within a year, jaws dropped. Never mind the substantial income from retail sales: 100,000 people were each paying $9.95 per month having already bought the game – and none of that money was going to retailers!’ (Bartle: 28). Despite this evident interest in MMORPGs, Mythic could not accurately mimic the production of Ultima Online because they did not own an already popular offline game franchise from which to adapt a subscription-based online game. They could instead approximate Ultima Online's production by creating adaptating subscription-based games from popular films, which had proved successful for games like Star Wars: Rebel Assault (1993) and Blade Runner (1997), which sold almost a million copies each (LucasArts, 2001; Pearce, 2002).

This is not to say that successful movie tie-ins were the norm. There had been a slew of film-to-videogame adaptations throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In their oral history of Ocean Software, who produced over forty licenced games, Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean detail the constant need to meet the Christmas rush, the challenge of adapting special effects heavy films onto technically limited hardware, the difficulties securing permission for the use of artwork, and the lack of cooperation or communication between the filmmakers and those trying to make the videogame adaptations. One such example was their adaptation of Michael Lehmann’s Hudson Hawk (1991). Ocean began, like many of their other film adaptations, with the shooting script. Unfortunately, the script then went through several revisions during the film’s production, which meant the videogame ‘adaptation’ bore little to no relation to its ‘source' text (62). Mythic were subject to the same problems as Ocean, but both understood that breakaway hits were possible. Adapting a major film, despite the problems that it presents, could potentially garner the kinds of successes enjoyed by 1990s console adaptations like Aladdin (1993) and GoldenEye 007 (1997), which each sold more than five million copies worldwide (Clarke-Willson, 2006; Kent: 543). Therefore, the first industrial context that necessitated the production of Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online was that Mythic needed to find a way to compete with a massive videogame distributor, AOL, while trying to emulate the success of Ultima Online. This analysis shows they first did so by seeking out popular films from which to adapt subscription-based games, and in the next section, we will see their second way was to partner with another videogame production company that had been developing a rival distribution platform to AOL.

By 1998, Kesmai had achieved some success with their multiplayer online combat flight simulation franchise Air Warrior before beginning work on a distribution platform they called ‘GameStorm’. This subscription-based online gaming platform is described in every press release analysed as ‘the largest collection of online games ever assembled in cyberspace’ and while that claim is questionable, it does hold a degree of merit. GameStorm operated as a partnership between Mythic, Kesmai, and several other online gaming services like SegaSoft’s HEAT.NET, and ENGAGE games online. They aimed to create a massive repository of games, as well as provide users with access to reviews, trailers, and demos through GameSpot. It is evident within the analysed texts that in compiling this repository of games, they were framing their users’ experiences of this new distribution platform through the lens of AOL’s more popular platform. Framing the experience in this way may have helped minimise some risk, as consumers transitioning from AOL had a clear comparison. Unfortunately, Mythic and Kesmai still faced the problem that thousands of games remained available elsewhere online for ‘free’, and so, Mythic and Kesmai needed something else to convince new consumers to pay an additional $9.95 a month on top of their monthly payment to their ISPs. This analysis reveals that the ‘something more’ was to utilise the cross-promotional value of major Hollywood films like Godzilla, which they believed was a powerful draw that could bring online gaming to a wider audience. It must be understood, however, that utilising this cross-promotional value relied on their increasingly intertwined and complex corporate structures.

Kesmai was a subsidiary of News Corp, who also owned 20th Century Fox and their videogame production company Fox Interactive. It was this relationship that enabled Kesmai to secure the licence for Aliens (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The various stakeholders involved in the production of Aliens Online.

One might argue this relationship is not any great revelation. Indeed, Gray’s work shows how utilising synergy is a well-understood corporate strategy. However, this analysis follows Casey O’Donnell’s call to offer greater scrutiny to the industrial contexts surrounding the production of a paratext. Through this we can demonstrate the final industrial context necessitating the production of the three games under analysis was the synergy enabled by their increasingly intertwined corporate structures. We will also see in the next section how the hierarchical nature of videogame productions in the late 1990s meant that promotion became the primary adaptation strategy of all three games, which ultimately undermined their quality.

Promotion as a primary adaptation strategy

The second theme that emerges from this analysis is that despite the divergent adaptation strategies exhibited by the various stakeholders involved in the three productions, the hierarchical conglomerated structure of the late 1990s US videogame industry meant that those with greater levels of authorial agency could implement promotion as the primary adaptation strategy for all three games. As Leitch suggests, each text displays multiple adaptation strategies, but since they involve multiple stakeholders that each exhibit divergent adaptation strategies and differing levels of power to affect their productions, I argue we need to consider the primary adaptation strategies that most impacted their productions. Through this, we can see how Godzilla Online primarily functioned as promotion for TriStar Pictures’ theatrical release of Godzilla, Independence Day Online primarily functioned as promotion for 20th Century Fox’s Special Edition DVD release, and Aliens Online primarily functioned as promotion for Mythic and Kesmai’s new distribution platform, GameStorm.

We see those primary functions reflected in the analysed paratextual advertisements, press releases, promotional interviews, critical reviews, and industry commentaries surrounding Aliens Online and Godzilla Online. ‘Kesmai provided a wonderful marketing and advertising campaign for [Aliens Online], a key feature lacking in [Mythic’s earlier] titles’ (Firor, 1998: 71). It was so successful, in fact, they replicated their approach for Godzilla Online. These paratexts also reveal that each campaign involved cross-promotional deals in the US with Duracell, Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, Duane Reade, as well as a press tour that encouraged users to subscribe to GameStorm. ‘In fact, I can’t think of a major game magazine in the last 3 months that has not run an Aliens Online advertisement’ (Firor: 71). They also reached a deal with the US modem manufacturer US Robotics to have a 1-month GameStorm subscription bundled with all new modems. They distributed 500,000 demo CD-ROMs to selected US movie theatres, and they built international links with the South African ISP HandMade Connections, and World Online, a company founded to compete in Europe with AOL. Arguably their most impactful collaboration, however, was their relationship with AOL’s chief competitor, Microsoft. This enabled them to put demo copies of Aliens Online and Godzilla Online, which users would access through GameStorm, into three million homes as part of the Game Sampler disc bundled with all new Windows 98 PCs.

In terms of synergistic promotion, these strategies are arguably unremarkable. What is remarkable is how 20^th Century Fox and TriStar used their greater authorial agency to set strict deadlines on the production of these games in order for them to serve as cross-promotion for their films. We see evidence of this unbalanced relationship in their respective release dates (Table 1). Independence Day Online was released as a bonus feature on the Special Edition of the DVD. This game was produced by Mythic in conjunction with Centropolis Interactive, a subsidiary of Dean Devlin’s film production company, Centropolis Entertainment, and 20th Century Fox. According to the paratextual industry commentaries analysed, the latter was receiving criticism at the time for the quality and quantity of the bonus materials on their DVDs. Fox also faced the problem that releasing a film on DVD was no longer deemed a ‘press-worthy’ event. Their two-pronged solution to these problems involved offering a select number of ‘premium’ releases containing additional content, and a Buy Four, Get One Free promotion.

Table 1.

Theatrical/home release dates of films and related videogames.

Title	Format	Release date
Godzilla	Theatrical	May 1998
Godzilla Online	Videogame	May 1998
Independence Day	Theatrical	July 1996
Independence Day	Special edition DVD	June 2000
Independence Day Online	Videogame	June 2000

Their Independence Day (Special Edition DVD) was that premium release, and it included ‘dazzling videogame like on-screen menus’, a director’s-cut, a behind-the-scenes documentary, TV spots, commentary tracks, and a 1-month free subscription to Independence Day Online. From Mythic’s perspective, Fox’s DVD bundle represented a perfect opportunity to appeal to potential subscribers of GameStorm. If they had been given a sufficient development cycle to foster a quality player experience then the game may have fared better, both critically and commercially. I would argue that unfortunately for Mythic, the adapted game primarily functioned as a means of helping Fox to sell a premium $34.98 DVD in a market with an as-yet still relatively low install base of DVD consumers, hence why Mythic was only given a short development cycle as a condition of their licensing agreement. This primary function is also borne out by the decreasing amount of cross-promotion from Fox in the months following the Special Edition DVD’s release. This is precisely the time when an online game like Independence Day Online should be building its player base. The sharp decline in synergistic promotion from Fox suggests they had already achieved their goal in partnering with Mythic and Kesmai on this adaptation.

Promotion was therefore the primary adaptation strategy of Independence Day Online in that it is the strategy that most impacted its production. It is an adaptation in which multiple stakeholders exhibited both divergent strategies and ‘unbalanced’ amounts of power to affect the productions, thereby leading to an unbalanced form of transmedia. According to the analysed texts, Godzilla Online was likewise ‘rushed to market to get it up and running while the movie is playing in theaters’ (Gelmis, 1998). Users could see clear evidence of this rushed development cycle when they initially logged onto GameStorm and saw a warning that Godzilla Online was still in early development and subject to crashes. The greater authorial agency exerted by TriStar and its subsequent impact on the game’s production is also supported by Godzilla historian, David Kalat who argues ‘TriStar’s team spent all that money, made all that bombastic noise, pushed around licensing partners and exhibitors like a playground bully’ (2017: 235). Contemporary videogame writers suggest this type of pressure is commonplace. Stephen Joyce argues that ‘Piggybacking on the marketing for a blockbuster film [remains] an attractive solution for controlling costs, but this also ties videogame producers to the film’s release schedule’ (2018: 102). In their chapter from Video Game Writing on ‘Adaptations’, Marek Walton and Maurice Suckling warn writers that they ‘may encounter stakeholders from media with conflicting backgrounds with different agendas, often with limited understanding or appreciation of how their respective medias work at a creative or business level’ (2012: 204). I therefore want to emphasise that this idea of a film’s producers exerting their greater authorial agency over a videogame adaptation’s production, which is usually achieved through their licensing agreements, is not specific to the late 1990s. In The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001), gaming Historian Steven L. Kent details the complex mix of divergent adaptation strategies and media production strengths present in the early 1980s between Steve Ross of Time Warner, and Ray Kassar of Atari, which led to the now infamous critical and commercial videogame failure, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Nor, as Liam Burke suggests, is it limited to the relationship between film and videogames, as other transmedia properties like ‘comic book tie-ins might provide creators with some leeway to assert their authorial control, there is an acceptance that their work serves a greater corporate function’ (2019: 59).

Lastly, this analysis reveals how promotion functioned as the primary adaptation strategy for Aliens Online. The development cycle for this game was just ten months. Interestingly, however, unlike the other two games, this deadline was not a condition of Mythic’s licencing agreement with the film’s distributor. Instead, this deadline was self-imposed because Kesmai was about to launch GameStorm and needed something to attract potential users. Mythic needed to find a way to compete with their massive competitor, AOL, while trying to emulate the success of Ultima Online, without having the benefit of adapting an already popular game series like Ultima into an online context. Aliens Online was supposed to be their way of achieving these aims. In other words, by tapping into the cross-promotional value of an established IP like Aliens, Mythic and Kesmai were using the game as a means of convincing as many consumers as possible to pay an additional $9.95 a month on top of their monthly payment to their ISPs. One might wonder, therefore, why would Mythic and Kesmai not simply give Aliens Online the development cycle it needed to foster a quality player experience? This is especially quizzical as the US videogame industry had already seen through games like Aladdin and Goldeneye 007 that ‘a ton of work over an extended period of time’ on a film-to-videogame adaptation can result in critical and commercial successes (Clarke-Willson, 2006). The answer is revealed through this reflexive thematic analysis, which shows that in the months leading up to the release of Aliens Online, AOL announced it had acquired CompuServe, which would add approximately another five million subscribers to their current pool of eight million. Clearly, Mythic and Kesmai felt the need to prioritise the promotional power of Aliens as soon as possible, regardless of its negative impact on the game’s quality for consumers through a rushed development cycle. ‘So instead of lengthening the project, we had to cull out some of the great features from the design’ (Firor: 74). This scenario would be akin to Ray Kassar forcing Atari to make E.T. in just six weeks because the game’s primary function was to promote the launch of the upcoming Atari 5200. Moreover, it was widely understood at the time that these kind of subscription-based online games required long-term investment to succeed (Bartle: 28), and yet, I found no evidence of patches or updates following the game’s release.

Conclusion

This article described what I consider to be an important moment in the late 1990s in the relationship between the US film and videogame industries. It showed how they underwent a surge and retreat of industrial convergence whereby they capitalised on their increasingly synergistic relationships to create three subscription-based online videogames that were adapted from major films. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of contemporaneous industrial paratexts, it discussed Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online in relation to the industrial contexts necessitating their productions, as well as their primary functions as forms of promotion. These contexts were shown to be the impact of new videogame distribution models, the threat posed by major competitors like AOL, the massive profit potential suggested by the success of similar subscription-based online games like Ultima Online, and the cross-promotional synergy enabled by an increasingly intertwined corporate ecology.

This analysis contributed to Thomas Leitch’s idea that each game cannot be categorised as one ‘type’ of adaptation, they instead exhibit multiple adaptation strategies simultaneously. It also expanded our critical vocabulary of adaptations by explaining that promotion is an underacknowledged strategy that drives some adaptations. Lastly, it demonstrated why it is useful sometimes to consider the primary adaptation strategy that a text may exhibit, and why this is especially true of transmedia products like Aliens Online, Godzilla Online, and Independence Day Online as they involve multiple stakeholders with divergent adaptation strategies, which through their corporate hierarchy, exert differing levels of authorial agency. These interventions are intended to shed greater light on an underexplored moment in late 1990s videogame and cinematic convergence, but they could prove useful for more contemporary considerations. One might consider how the US videogame industry, which is now more profitable than the US film industry and therefore arguably exerts greater authorial agency within their larger conglomerated structures, might impact a contemporary film-to-videogame adaptation. One might see this, for example, through the production of the film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which was delayed to enable more development time for its 2015 videogame adaptation Mad Max (Thompson, 2008).