Well, it had to happen sooner or later - frankly, I'm surprised it took so long. Yesterday, Ubisoft officially announced that it has secured the rights to produce a game based around the hit series, Lost. The game will be developed at the company's Montreal studio and is due out next year across consoles, handheld platforms and PC.
Amid the usual mix of over-excited hyperbole and eye-gougingly soulless marketing double speak that litters the press release, there's one telling paragraph:
"Many of us on 'Lost' have been hardcore gamers for years..." said 'Lost' producer Bryan Burk.
Really? I never would have guessed. Out of all the youth-centred drama series emanating from the US over the last five years, Lost is the one most obviously influenced by the principles of videogame design and construction.
Of course, the high concept of the series - disparate characters with various personal demons brought together by explosive tragedy - is pure disaster movie basics. But almost everything else comes from videogames.
The setting has a convenient natural barrier (in this case the sea) not only preventing escape, but also giving the creators a defined space to work with, negating the need to create superfluous landscape. Survival Horor games are often set within small towns and villages to limit explorable areas. Resident Evil Code: Veronica even starts on an island.
The deliberately obtuse central mythology borrows from classic survival horror design - there's an unseen monster, a long-term survivor (Danielle Rousseau reflecting the Steve Burnside role in Code: Veronica or Ada Wong in Resi 2) and a buried hatch, hinting at a new explorable area. These are all staples of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series'. The island's Hanso Foundation - a military scientific corporation central to the plot arc - is effectively Umbrella Corp.
The series also takes a restless smash and grab raid on culture, borrowing themes and ideas from classical literature, philosophy and art. Again, it's a familiar device of the Resi series, from the use of the Moonlight Sonata in the first game to the multitude of movie references in number four.
The purchase of Lost represents a weird new stage in the world of the multimedia crossover - a TV series that is consciously or unconsciously built with the machinery of videogame design, turned back into a videogame.
Popular culture eats and regurgitates itself. Then eats itself again.
Just don't get me started on Prison Break.
