6 Video Games That Need to Become Novels

While games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption have storylines, they’re too freeform—allowing users too much freedom to play around in the sandbox—to qualify as narratives. Games like Heavy Rain have complicated plots designed to be played as an interactive movie, but their branching storylines allow for so many possible endings and subplots, they’re not so much stories as a multiverse in a box. And while plot-heavy games like Halo, Bioshock and Mass Effect have inspired in-universe tie-in novels, some video games have stories as linear and affecting as any novel. Here are six that we’d love to see jump mediums.
Half Life
While gamers endures endless online pranks involving the existence of the legendary Half Life 3, those of us who love books are dying for a genius turn the rich, complex science fiction story of Gordon Freeman, Half Mesa, and the Combine into the five-book epic series it deserves. One reason the best SF story in video games hasn’t been turned into a novel may be the fact that Gordon Freeman’s silent, first-person point of view could be ruined if we actually met him as a character or—the mind boggles—narrator. Fans might prefer Freeman as a silent crowbar-wielding scientist with ninja-level fighting abilities.
Limbo
This award-winning “little game that could” is deceptively simple: a little boy wakes up in a field and searches for his sister through an ominous forest filled with deadly traps and other children out to kill him. The action eventually shifts to other settings, including a decaying, abandoned city. Throughout, the story is offered only in glimpses, and the ending is left open to interpretation (though most of the interpretations are grim). There’s so much possibility here; the novel would be a deep, moving experience even if it did take away some of the mystery.
Portal
Set in the same universe as Half Life, Portal and its sequel offer up an incredibly interesting story that begins decades in the past with the founding of a scientific research company by an ambitious shower ring salesman, and ends with a psychotic artificial intelligence attempting to murder what may be the last living human on the planet through a series of rigged tests. In the margins is an epic story of insanity, hubris, and the apocalypse. The detailed—and hilarious—world of Aperture Science, GLaDOS, and celebratory cake is begging to be rendered as a wacky work of gonzo SF literature. If they could rig the book with one of those greeting-card chips that would play Still Alive when you turn to the last page, that would be good too.
The Last of Us
Far more than a horror survival game, or yet another zombie story, The Last of Us manages the epic feat of developing well-rounded characters in a video game, not to mention a heartbreaking story that follows the changing protagonists as they fight their way through hordes of fungus-infected former humans, make peace with their pasts, and come to rely on each other. A novelization of this game could single-handedly hit the reset button on the whole zombie genre.
Gone Home
Gone Home is already basically a novel, or movie, pretending to be a game. There’s no skill involved, and no winning, really; you come home to find your house deserted and your family gone, and must wander around seeking clues in order to solve the mystery of what happened to them. The magic is in the moody details, but the payoff is in the margins, which hint at a story that would make for a fantastic book if fleshed out into a full-on mystery.

Silent Hill 2
Yes, there have been Silent Hill novels, but none that have specifically adapted the story from the only installment of the game in which the plot wasn’t completely bonkers. Silent Hill 2 is almost 15 years old, but it remains the high point of the franchise in terms of story, offering up the famous mist-shrouded town not simply as an insane place to randomly encounter monsters, but as the psychological hell of a man who has committed a terrible crime that he has completely blocked from his memory, every monster and horrifying event a manifestation of his guilt and self-loathing. It would make a fantastic novel.
What games do you think would work best as novels?