Exclusive: Minor Booyah: One Good Thing about the G.I. Joe Game & Movie

One of the things I’ve been pretty concerned about as I write my book, “The Game Changers,” is how popular culture has influenced videogames over time.

Along those lines, the movie industry and the game industry have not only been strange bedfellows over the years. They’ve been angry, mocking bedfellows. How bad? Probably like the last days of Kate and Jon. (”Please don’t squoosh the cereal in your anger!”) Probably like the long bouts of arguments in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (”If you start in about this other business, Martha, I warrrrrnnn you!”)

But now, you can see that the blockbuster movie is influenced more and more by games (despite crappy movie games, which will always be with us — remember Coraline). Look at the action in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” for instance. Looks like someone watched (or maybe even played) Burnout for inspiration.

In the new “G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra” movie that drops this week, the movie people liked the game people’s music, mucho mucho. Unfortunately, they were not rapturous enough to add it to the movie’s soundtrack.

Says Matt Marsala, senior game producer for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, “We had the composers put together some early concepts fairly early on, and sent them over to Hasbro for their feedback and approval. Turns out that they loved the direction we were going in, and were excited to get some of the samples in front of Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Stephen Sommers to see if they were interested in using the same composers for the film. From what I heard, they really liked the score as well, but ultimately they went with Alan Silvestri for the score of the film. After seeing the film and listening to the music from the game, I can only assume that they had taken some inspiration from what we did in the game, since both game and film have similar epic qualities to them.”

Yeah, the movie is getting bad buzz even before it drops. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m saying that Hollywood is starting, in the smallest of ways, to look at videogame makers as peers, not just as oddities in an industry full of curiously successful brands to be exploited with lowest-common-denominator scripts.

It almost happened with “G.I. Joe.” If Gore Verbinski gets to make “BioShock” (looks doubtful right now) and Sam Raimi gets to make “World of Warcraft” (looks promising right now), maybe sometime soon Hollywood and the games industry will be making hot, steamy monkey love — together. - Harold Goldberg.