Kingmakers is a game with a simple premise: What if you could travel back to medieval times with an M4 tank to give the primitive screwheads what-for? It looks like it might be fun, although it doesn’t yet have a release date. What it does have, however—and somewhat bafflingly—is a movie deal.
The planned big-screen adaptation is being handled by Story Kitchen, a name that may ring a bell: It’s one of the companies behind the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, and has also announced plans to make movies out of Dredge and Sifu, a Disco Elysium television series, and animated series based on Vampire Survivors and Tomb Raider. It holds the rights to many other game properties, according to its website, including It Takes Two, Just Cause, My Friend Pedro, and Slime Rancher.
“The action, world-building, and intriguing sci-fi of Kingmakers make it a perfect concoction to build a propulsive new franchise in Hollywood,” Dmitri M. Johnson of Story Kitchen said.
Okay, sure, but that’s a lot of weight to put on a game that looks like a playable version of those YouTube videos that pit one Terminator against a million zombies. The Steam page focuses primarily on Kingmakers’ combat simulation and doesn’t really get into the narrative at all, except to say that you’re going back 500 years “to change the course of a bloody war and maybe, if you’re lucky, stave off the apocalypse.”
On the other hand, you don’t necessarily need George R.R. Martin on the script for this sort of thing to work. Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann was based entirely on the premise, “What if a guy went back in time on a dirtbike?” Army of Darkness rolled with little more than “What if a guy went back in time with a shotgun?” Perhaps the most on-point example is the 1980 cinematic classic The Final Countdown, starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Charles Durning, and Katharine Ross, which asked, “What if a guy went back in time with a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier?”
That’s not to say that Kingmakers is likely to make for a good movie. We don’t even know if it’s going to make for a good game at this point. But at least there’s plenty of pre-existing material to take inspiration from.
Kingmakers—the game, not the movie—is slated to be out sometime later this year.