n 1993, Hollywood took the bright colours, bouncing rhythms and cheerful nonsense of Super Mario Bros. and transformed them into a wet cyberpunk dystopia filled with fungus, humanoid dinosaurs and Dennis Hopper.

It was only the beginning.

For the next three decades, video game adaptations repeatedly reproduced the names, costumes, monsters and locations that players recognised, while struggling to understand the experience that made those games matter. Street Fighter tried to turn a character-select screen into a military action film. Resident Evil replaced vulnerability with superhuman spectacle. Assassin’s Creed recreated the rooftops but kept dragging audiences back into rooms where people explained genetic memory.

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave explores why video games presented Hollywood with an adaptation problem unlike books, comics or television. Games are not only stories or worlds. They are things players do, built around movement, timing, failure, discovery and the relationship between a player’s hands and a responsive world.

From Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider and Doom to Detective Pikachu, Sonic and the animated Super Mario Bros. Movie, the industry slowly began to stop apologising for the source material. Then television pushed the breakthrough further, using Castlevania, Arcane, Twisted Metal, The Last of Us and Fallout to find new ways of replacing the controller without losing the feeling behind it.

Video game movies were never cursed.

Hollywood was simply using the wrong controls...

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Why can an adaptation reproduce the characters, costumes, lore and famous moments, yet still feel completely wrong? The problem may not be fidelity, but whether the people rebuilding the story understand what is holding it together.

Hollywood loves an established world.

The maps already exist. The characters have names. The famous scenes are waiting. The fans are already emotionally invested. On paper, adaptation should be the safest possible form of storytelling.

So why do some adaptations change enormous parts of their source and still feel completely right, while others reproduce the surface almost perfectly and somehow miss the point?

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave begins inside the screening room where HBO tested the original Game of Thrones pilot and discovered it had a very expensive problem. The world was on screen, but the audience could not see the machinery connecting it.

From the pilot’s reconstruction and the brutal dramatic logic of the early seasons, through the moment the television series ran beyond George R.R. Martin’s published books, the episode explores what happens when an adaptation understands its load-bearing parts, and what happens when it loses the road beneath them.

Then, as television launches its post-Thrones fantasy gold rush, Dave looks beyond simple arguments about “faithfulness” to examine The Witcher, The Wheel of Time, The Rings of Power, Foundation, The Boys and The Last of Us.

Because adaptation is not the art of making the same thing again.

It is the art of rebuilding it without bringing the roof down.

Season Three of Geekstorians is The Conquest, exploring what happened when geek culture moved from the margins and became the machinery of mainstream entertainment.

Spoiler warning: This episode contains major spoilers for Game of Thrones, along with discussion of storylines from The Last of Us, Foundation, The Boys and several other television adaptations.

Written and presented by Dave Elliott.

Geekstorians is a Geektown production.

For more TV, film and gaming coverage, visit Geektown.co.uk.

You can also find Geektown Radio, our weekly podcast covering the latest entertainment news, reviews and UK television premieres.

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Streaming was supposed to free television.

No schedules. No missed episodes. No VHS tapes with the ending accidentally recorded over by Coronation Street. Just an endless library of stories waiting whenever you wanted them.

For a while, it felt like liberation.

But once television became something delivered through a pipe, the pipe became more valuable than the programmes moving through it. Netflix went from DVD-by-mail upstart to data-driven studio. Disney built its own digital fortress. Every media company wanted its own kingdom. And somewhere along the way, abundance became fragmentation, discovery became algorithmic fog, and shows could vanish from platforms that once promised permanence.

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave traces the rise of streaming from the red envelopes of early Netflix to the platform wars, Quibi’s spectacular faceplant, the cancellation machine, the return of advertising, password crackdowns, and the strange new bargain between viewers and the companies competing for their attention.

Because more than you could ever watch is not the same thing as abundance.

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