Hot damn, was the new Mad Max movie a blast to watch. Cars! Guns! Giant desert races! That guitar! It's the kind of flick that an Ars staffer can't see without imagining a muscle car's cockpit and saying, "I can't wait for someone to make a video game like that."
Sure enough, a new Mad Max game is on its way. What's more, it's from the developers of the nutso open-world series Just Cause and from the publishing team at Warner Bros. Interactive, which was behind movie-inspired games like the Batman Arkham series and Shadows Of Mordor.
The game comes out in September, and we've laid out our impressions of a recent preview build shown to the press. But for now, I'd like to focus on something not seen in the game: the best female characters from the film.The Mad Max game trailer and the gameplay we've seen include no major female characters, such as Fury Road's Furiosa character (played by Charlize Theron in the film) or Beyond Thunderdome's Aunty Entity. Theron recently called the new film "an incredible feminist movie"; Internet commenters have since argued over whether that description is entirely apt, but Theron is certainly less likely to say the same about the upcoming game, at least in its current state.
Instead, the game trailer revolves around dudes, dudes, and more dudes, all driving cars and getting into fights—with the exception of a single woman who appears to be both an unwilling captive of a bad guy and Max's romantic interest. Given its ties to a film packed with combat-ready women, a careful portrayal of sexualization, and a major consultant best known for penning plays like The Vagina Monologues, the game's approach may raise eyebrows among some players. To understand how this happened, it helps to understand the game's long development cycle.
A long and furious Road
In some ways, the game's initial dude-filled reveal fits the general casting scope of the prior Mad Max films, with the major exception of Tina Turner's leading role in Beyond Thunderdome. Up until Fury Road, Mad Max movies have had largely male leading casts, but even Mad Max 2's Warrior Woman character was a weapon-wielding survivor and defender as opposed to a love interest or a helpless bystander. (That said, Mad Max 2 also used a rape to show that Humungus was a really, really bad guy, which didn't win the film any female-portrayal points.)
And with the latest film's prolonged production schedule in mind, it's no wonder that the game's producers weren't eager to tie its development to Fury Road's plot and characters.
This year's Mad Max game has been a long time coming—and, really, so has the film. Kotaku UK's Julian Benson wrote a report earlier this month that touched on both lengthy development periods. Benson spoke to Brian Fargo, a game designer famous for co-creating the Fallout and Wasteland series, and as Fargo tells it, he and Mad Max film series chief George Miller shared a flight together in the "late '90s," and their chat went so well that the duo hung out, reviewed an initial draft of Mad Max: Fury Road, and made a preliminary deal for Fargo and his team—then at Interplay—to make a "party-based RPG" in the film's universe.
From there, both projects languished. The film was in development for so long that Mel Gibson himself was still attached to the project for some time, but delays and issues meant that Miller didn't book Fury Road's eventual stars and start principal shooting until 2012. By that point, Fargo says, the game rights had already been claimed by EA thanks to a larger cash offer.
Since the film itself bounced from studio to studio, eventually winding up at Warner Bros., the game rights transferred to that company's gaming arm as well. (Fargo told Kotaku that EA never paid Miller's production company the $20 million it had promised for the game's rights, so EA may have never truly had possession of them, let alone started work on a legitimate game.) And the rights were never tied specifically to the new script.
In an interview with Eurogamer, a Warner Bros. representative answered questions about whether Fury Road character Furiosa would appear in this game by saying, "We never even went there with George."
Badass Amazonian warriors
So it's easy to look at the footage of the Mad Max game—and its lack of connection to the Fury Road film, including a protagonist who looks little like actor Tom Hardy and lacking any appearances by other major Fury Road characters—with understanding. If Miller never got his film out the gate, or if he never agreed to a specific game-film link, who knows if the game would've ever seen release? Warner Bros. Interactive shouldn't be blamed for not making a pure Fury Road game.
We're also reluctant to say that the pure Mad Max gameplay—especially its car-driving and face-punching mechanics—will suffer without more, better, or stronger women in the campaign.
But it remains an unfortunate, missed opportunity that the game wasn't able to better incorporate some of the badass women warriors from the film, who might have made for an even more interesting game. We've seen it before; WB Interactive's Batman: Arkham City included a substantial Catwoman campaign as DLC, and the addition made that title a better game overall. And last year's Alien: Isolation starred the daughter of series vanguard Ellen Ripley without reducing her to terrified-wimp status.
Game designers are actively talking about how they portray women—or at least how they allow players to control women characters. For example, after the makers of Assassin's Creed: Unity caught flak for not including playable women in its multiplayer mode, more major franchises, including Minecraft and Temple Run, announced that they were adding female avatars to their games.
Warner Bros. Interactive has not yet answered our questions about how women will be portrayed in the final Mad Max game launching on September 1; we will update this report if we get a response.
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