Somewhere, plans are probably afoot to produce the world’s first videogame based on a book by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. That great writer’s The Brothers Karamazov, a searing study of crime, love and religion, one of the greatest novels of all time, seems just the thing to lend some arthouse respectability to one’s PS2 product line. Imagine the potential for a truly interactive exploration of timeless, deeply human issues through modern cutting-edge entertainment technology. Then forget what you have imagined, because The Brothers Karamazov: Psyches At War (as it will be called once the marketing department decides that some kind of vaguely evocative subtitle is needed) will be a platform game. First help Dmitri to murder his evil father, beat up a fellow soldier and jump around collecting roubles to give to his girlfriend! Then control Alyosha in the gloomy monastery, learning his chops from the old sage Father Zossima and jumping around collecting the pages of an ancient religious text! And thrill to hand-drawn cut scenes narrated by Sean Connery in a supposedly Russian accent! Nice.

Now flash back nearly 21 years to the Christmas of 1982, when a small boy has just received a copy of The Hobbit to run on his ZX Spectrum. It is a text adventure, but what is relatively new and exciting for that genre is that almost every location also has a graphic depiction. Watching each picture draw itself, line by line, over what seems like minutes, becomes strangely hypnotic, especially as the stark, jagged art style is so evocative. The laconic poetry of the location descriptions heightens the atmosphere: “You are in a small and dank dungeon buried far under the mountain.” And you can even talk to the other characters in the game in functional if not sophisticated ways: “TELL GANDALF ‘BREAK DOOR’,” for example.

This boy’s particular copy of The Hobbit - programmed, let us remember, by one man, Philip Mitchell - came in the large-format presentation box along with a copy of Tolkien’s novel, so that the boy was able to read the book alongside his exploration of the game, scanning Tolkien’s prose for clues as how to proceed in the game, or letting the game’s stylised art inform his imagination of scenes in the novel. In a sense the simultaneous experience of book and game was very close to a true “interactive fiction”. Submerged in this revolutionary experience for weeks, the boy must at some point have marvelled at what kind of new imaginative sorcery the technological developments of the coming years might bring.

Two decades later, the boy - who is, of course, me - starts playing another game called The Hobbit, this time Inevitable Entertainment’s big-budget cartoon-styled interpretation for the 128-bit consoles, and what do you know, it turns out to be essentially a platform game. I rack my brains trying to remember where Tolkien devotes pages of prose to detailed descriptions of Bilbo Baggins carefully jumping across series upon series of perilous ledges. In order to appeal to a pre-teen audience, moreover, The Hobbit nows stars a Bilbo who is suspiciously childlike, rather than the middle-aged, very reluctant adventurer he was in the novel.

Now, it may seem unfair to beat an admittedly polished and competent modern videogame with the stick of an old, slightly buggy text adventure that fitted into 48k and that no one in their right minds would actually want to play all the way through today. And I’m not criticising Inevitable for taking liberties with the text of its source material. But somehow it is still disappointing to see 20 years’-worth of possible evolution vanish in smoke. This new Hobbit game has far more in common with other videogames, such as Ocarina of Time (to which it pays careful and repeated homage - or, to put it another way, from which it nicks lots of ideas) than it does with the novel. And it has some nice touches, such as the Wario Ware-style lock-picking minigames, but really, one has seen it all before.

Instead of using and abusing its literary source material to invent a new, weird and wonderful kind of videogame, the developers have taken the book and unceremoniously forced it into a videogame-shaped jar that could equally be tied to another money-spinning intellectual property. That’s the real problem: you feel that this doesn’t *need* to be The Hobbit. If the guardians of Tolkien’s copyright had refused to play ball, exactly the same game could have been produced, only dressed in the kind of impoverished Dungeons and Dragons-inspired mythology seemingly beloved of programmers the world over.

But this is hardly a unique sin among videogame “translations” of works in other media: it is the general rule. The Hobbit becomes a tale of more or less repetitive jumping and slashing; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland becomes a faux-surreal first-person platformer (a genre which should be made illegal by European if not worldwide directive immediately). Stuffing a pre-existing media IP into a videogame-shaped jar is more likely to work, of course, when the source is a film, since film is at least already a visual medium. Peter Jackson had already done the hard and controversial work of adapting The Lord of the Rings for the screen when the Two Towers videogame came along and so effectively insinuated the player into the cinematic action. And I have fond memories of Cobra, a risible Sylvester Stallone vehicle which became a rather good platform-shooter on the Spectrum. But adapting books became a creatively losing proposition as soon as the text adventure had breathed its commercial last (though the form still flourishes among “interactive fiction” hobbyists). The 1982 The Hobbit had the huge advantage over its new sibling that it used the same material as its source: words.

Last time I looked, however, it was a free country, and developers will doubtless continue to make games from books. Surely some day a genius designer will create something unforeseen and truly astonishing by working in this way. But in the meantime, if all you are going to do is to produce another ho-hum multiplatform blockbuster with cut-scenes and a voiceover to really, like, involve the player emotionally in the timeless story of this classic work of literature, then it’s probably best that you stick to those authors who are safely dead. That way, at least there will be no anguished reprisals from those whose babies have been so thoroughly betrayed.

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