If video games didn’t get so good, would John Carpenter still be directing movies?
In recent years, John Carpenter has become an internet hero for his reliably hilarious interviews. During his filmmaking career, Carpenter made some of the greatest horror, science fiction, and action movies Hollywood has ever seen. This means he’ll always have a dedicated fanbase who hang on his every word, despite not making a film in nearly 15 years. Amusingly, though, every time he sits down to talk to a journalist, the last thing he wants to chat about are his movies.
Instead, Carpenter has three passions: talking shit about Hollywood, basketball, and video games. In fact, the man gets so passionate when shooting the breeze about games that it made me seriously ponder something. It might sound silly, but it may also be closer to the truth than anyone wants to believe: if video games didn’t get so good, would Carpenter still be directing movies?
A few inflexion points in Carpenter’s career may have been pivotal in his slow break-up with moviemaking and his ever-increasing love of gaming. In 1992, Carpenter released Memoirs of an Invisible Man, a truly dreadful dramedy starring Chevy Chase and Darryl Hannah. Despite Carpenter’s best efforts, critics savaged the film, and it flopped at the box office. It was also an endurance test to make. In 2023, he told Variety, “It was pleasant. No, it wasn’t pleasant at all. I’m lying to you. It was a horror show. I really wanted to quit the business after that movie.”
1992 wasn’t all a horror show for Carpenter, though. It was also the year that he discovered video games through the medium of a certain lightning-fast blue hedgehog. He told The New Yorker, “I came to video games in 1992 with Sonic the Hedgehog. That’s where I started, and I fell in love with it.” At that time, Carpenter was such a novice that he found Sonic incredibly tough to master, but his son took him under his wing and taught his old man how it all worked.
Fast forward nine years, and Carpenter was once again circling the drain in Hollywood. Ghosts of Mars was another high-profile disaster for the director, who was becoming increasingly exhausted with the process of making films. By that point, he’d been working in Hollywood for nearly 30 years, but it didn’t seem to be getting any easier. Every production was as rife with drama, pitfalls, and aggravation as the one before it. He realised he’d become Sisyphus, forever pushing a boulder up a hill, then watching it roll back down on top of him.
Carpenter told The New Yorker, “I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ It was too rough. For me, it became not worth it. And I didn’t want to say that about movies. Movies are my first love, my life.” So, instead of sticking around to see his love of cinema dragged further through the muck, Carpenter walked away from Hollywood.
Aside from one brief sojourn back into film directing—2010’s The Ward—Carpenter has stayed away from Hollywood. In recent years, he’s worked more in music because his iconic film scores have opened him up to a new market. He now tours and plays them live, along with original material, with his son and nephew by his side. On a daily basis, though, Carpenter has admitted, “I just want to play video games and watch basketball. That’s all I care about doing. I don’t want to bother anybody.”
These days, Carpenter has progressed massively from simple platformers like Sonic the Hedgehog. As a 76-year-old man, he spends hours playing open-world action-adventure games like Fallout 76, Horizon: Forbidden West, Borderlands, and the Assassin’s Creed series.
The open-world nature of games like Horizon speaks to a storyteller like Carpenter. He told The AV Club, “It’s fun. Your freedom to roam around and do it your way. And that’s what I love about Fallout. There is a template to follow; there are missions, but you can do it differently.”
Fascinatingly, as someone who has now played games for as long as he was an active filmmaker, Carpenter can appreciate how advanced they have become over the years. He mused, “Old games are generally not as well designed as the newer ones. They’re not as smooth. The graphics are not as good and sophisticated.”
I believe the most pertinent thing Carpenter has said about video games came during his New Yorker interview, though. When the journalist asked what he thought about video games becoming more cinematic in the last couple of decades, he replied, “They borrow some of the same things as cinema, but you can’t get away from the players’ interaction with what they’re doing. But video games are young yet. They haven’t really reached their full potential.”
This tells me that Carpenter doesn’t just see video games as a fun distraction from his awful experiences in Hollywood. He thinks the medium has as much potential as cinema in terms of where it can go as technology develops. In fact, it may even have more potential than cinema.
All this is to say: if video games didn’t get so good, would Carpenter still be directing movies? Probably not, because he still seems as frustrated with the realities of Hollywood moviemaking as ever. But if video games hadn’t come into his life to fire the parts of his brain that made movies used to, there’s no telling what he would have sought to occupy his days.
Well, except for watching an inhuman amount of basketball, that is.
