Amazon Announces New Action-Packed Video Game Adaptation

Amazon Prime Video has announced that Wolfenstein, a series of alternate history World War II first-person shooter video games widely loved for its cathartic storytelling, is finally getting a chance to shine on screen. Well, the small screen, that is.

According to Variety, a Wolfenstein series is officially in development at Amazon, and it couldn’t have a more perfect logline: “The story of killing Nazis is evergreen.” While exact plot details are currently being kept under wraps, fans of the games (currently developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks) can clearly expect a bunch of dead bad guys. Patrick Somerville is reportedly attached to serve as creator, writer, executive producer, and showrunner for the exciting project under his chaoticgood.tv production banner, with MachineGames exec Jerk Gustafsson of Wolfenstein also on board as executive producer.

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This isn’t the first time a studio has tried bringing Wolfenstein to cinematic life. A movie adaptation of the first game in the franchise, Castle Wolfenstein, even had a director attached in 2012, but it never got off the ground. At the time, video game adaptations were relatively rare — and the ones that were released, like the consistently negatively reviewed Resident Evil films, mostly arrived under a cloud of negative reviews. Now, with projects such as Amazon’s own Fallout enjoying success (and even securing a third season before the second has premiered), the world of video game adaptations has changed significantly. The time is right for a screen adaptation of this classic tale of Nazis trying to use advanced technology, and even supernatural tactics, to take over the world.

‘Wolfenstein’ is the Perfect Next Video Game to Adapt

In the wake of hit video game series adaptations like Fallout and HBO’s The Last of Us, a Wolfenstein series could really shine. The games primarily follow American soldier William “B.J.” Blazkowicz as he fights behind enemy lines against the Nazi regime, but there’s no telling where the series will take fans of the game franchise that helped popularize first-person shooters.

The first title in the series, Castle Wolfenstein, was released in 1981, with a similar, top-down sequel called Beyond Castle Wolfenstein arriving in 1984. In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D shifted the franchise to first-person shooters, helping launch another relatively new game medium. With 14 titles in the series so far, Amazon has plenty of content to pick and choose from for the studio’s streaming adaptation.

Hopefully, Amazon will take an approach similar to the one it’s used for Fallout — namely, one of letting the story build instead of trying to cram all the games’ content into one or two seasons. While there’s obviously plenty of room for error, the franchise’s central premise is almost too perfect to mess up. In the meantime, fans will have to wait and see if Amazon brings home a win for Wolfenstein.

Source: Variety