Looks like fearsome opponent ... detail from Innocent X by Francis Bacon. Photograph: Frank Baron
Echochrome is a videogame adaptation of the drawings of MC Escher. When it's released for the PlayStation Portable later this year, you'll be taking care of a tireless little marionette as he trudges through a series of paradoxical staircases and impossible corridors. At the end of the last level, the camera will no doubt zoom in on the marionette's hands and you'll realise that he is actually playing you.
Although Echochrome looks like it might be one of the most infuriating games ever devised, it does make you wonder why more video games don't plunder the world of visual arts. In last year's excellent Oblivion, there was one quest in which you had save a painter called Rythe who had tumbled into one of his own canvases, armed with only a bottle of turpentine to protect himself against a gang of oily trolls. Unfortunately, Rythe was a rather sentimental impressionist, barely worth rescuing. What about the greats?
The biggest artistic influence on today's games is probably HR Giger, designer of Ridley Scott's Alien and hero to a million goths. But all those glistening black proboscises do get a bit much sometimes. Why not go back to Bosch? The Spider Mastermind from Doom II could certainly hold her own in The Garden of Earthly Delights, but I'd love a chance to blast away at that giant knife-ear creature as well. Even better would be to fly through Salvador Dalí landscapes, dodging monsters from Francis Bacon paintings. Or if developers really want a challenge, what about a hectic, gory, button-bashing romp inspired by Vermeer?
The influence can go both ways. In 2005 journalist John Gibson created I Am 8 Bit, an annual Los Angeles exhibition of video game-inspired art, most of it inspired by retro titles like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, and The Legend of Zelda. Contributions range from eerie, sexualised outsider art to delirious graffiti-style illustration. Presumably the only thing harder than telling your parents you're going to art school is telling your parents you're now working on a painting in which Princess Peach reclines naked on a bed while Mario peers inscrutably over his moustache, but this stuff does sell.
So which artist would you like to see brought to interactive life in a video game? And if you could create a painting based on a video game character, who would it be? (I know some of you might want to reply, "Actually, I have many better things to do than create a painting based on a video game character." But be honest with yourself.)
