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A Kurosawa Epic Turned Video Game
By ROBERT LEVINE

Published: March 14, 2004

EACH year, to the breathless excitement of some and the pained exasperation of others, video games develop more of the narrative drive of films, and movies get more of the frenetic action of video games. This is not only a matter of aesthetics. For decades the game business has looked to Hollywood for inspiration, and nearly every blockbuster worth its boffo box office eventually becomes a property for PlayStation, Nintendo or Xbox.

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For many movies, the video games practically suggest themselves. The pod race scene in "Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace," for example, seems as if it were designed to be a game, and George Lucas's company made it one.

In the case of Akira Kurosawa's three-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, "Seven Samurai," however, a game isn't exactly obvious. Released in 1954, the film has a stately pace and an artful composition that would seem ill suited to a medium associated with twitchy action and lightning-quick shifts in perspective. But Seven Samurai 20XX, a PlayStation 2 game made with the cooperation of the filmmaker's son, Hisao, will be released March 23, which would have been his 94th birthday.

The project grew out of a conversation between the younger Kurosawa, who runs a foundation dedicated to preserving his father's work, and his friend Hajime Satomi, president and chairman of the Sammy Corporation, a Japanese game manufacturer. The company was intrigued by the plot of "Seven Samurai," about a group of warriors who agree to defend a small village from roving marauders. But the film's 16th-century feudal setting limited the graphic possibilities, and Sammy executives feared that Kurosawa's extended buildup to the action would strain 18-to-24-year-old attention spans. "We had to put more action in there," said Brian Glazebrook, the game's producer.

Most of that action consists of hacking up enemies with a sword, and game designers added fighting to the beginning of the story, when players must recruit six more samurai. The company also shifted the setting from medieval Japan to a futuristic landscape filled with a dizzying variety of robotic-looking foes designed by the French comics artist Jean Giraud, who works under the name Moebius.

"We're doing the same thing that the film industry did with `The Magnificent Seven,' " said Steve Fowler, a Sammy product manager, referring to John Sturges's 1960 western remake of Kurosawa's epic. "You could have put it in feudal Japan, but you couldn't have had all those cool explosions."

To Hisao Kurosawa, "the movie and the game are two separate things," he said in an e-mail message, through a translator. And while Seven Samurai 20XX has enemies bearing high-tech weapons and a backdrop that owes less to Kurosawa than to "Blade Runner," the game loosely follows the arc of "Seven Samurai" and takes on some of its essential scenes. Those are "the key moments in the movie he wanted to represent in the game," Mr. Glazebrook said. In animated sequences that frame the action, players see the samurai make a flag to carry into battle, just as they do in the film, and the climactic fight revolves around cutting off and trapping the enemy. The game player takes cues from an older, wiser warrior, just as the main character does in the film.

"Seven Samurai" isn't the only classic movie to be made into a game: "The Great Escape" and the 1969 version of "The Italian Job" have had similar transformations. "I think they were looking for inspiration, story-wise," said Demian Linn, the reviews editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly. So far, he said, some gamers who had played early versions of Seven Samurai 20XX found it not all that different from other "hack-and-slash" games in which players mash buttons to execute offensive and defensive moves. On the other hand, "it has swords," he said. "Everybody loves swords."

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