Onward and Upward With the Arts - Game Theory

Can a critically acclaimed video game be turned into a hit HBO series?

- By Alex Barasch

When the British actor Bob Hoskins agreed to star in “Super Mario Bros.,” he had little sense of what he was getting into. The year was 1992, and, although the title on which the film was based had sold tens of millions of copies, a feature-length live-action adaptation of a video game had never been attempted. The movie’s eventual tagline, “This ain’t no game,” reflected a self-conscious distance from its source material: a convoluted parallel-universe plot recast the heroes as Italian American handymen from Brooklyn and the princess they set out to save as an N.Y.U. archeology student. Hoskins himself hadn’t even heard of the Nintendo fran- chise—but when his kids learned that he would be playing Mario they excitedly showed him the game. “This is you!” one said, gesturing to a pixelated mustachioed plumber. “I saw this thing jumping up and down,” Hoskins later recalled, in doubtful tones. “I thought, I used to play King Lear.”