There was a time where the idea of a TV or movie adaptation for your favourite game would fill you with dread—but with shows like Castlevania, Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners, Netflix: The Witcher, HBO’s The Last of Us, and Arcane bucking that trend? I think a Deep Rock Galactic show could be pretty damn good.
As do some unnamed production studios, according to the CEO of developer Ghost Ship Games Søren Lundgaard in an interview with NME last week. “We were talking about it, and we’ve also been approached. It’s definitely viable, but we can’t do everything at once … We would want to be involved as well. If we could just say ‘eh, you do it’, and not be involved, then it would happen, but that wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”
It’s an interesting pitch, to be sure. While Deep Rock Galactic isn’t what you’d call story-rich, its moment-to-moment vibes and atmosphere are immaculate. Spin-offs like Castlevania and Edgerunners have told unique stories which either ignore or add canon to their respective games, and a tale of some ale-swigging lads mining the reaches of deep space sounds like a great time.
Still, it’s only fair that Ghost Ship Games gets a say and, as Lundgaard mentions—the studio’s currently busy with other projects including Deep Rock: Survivor, which PC Gamer’s own Robin Valentine tells us is “the best auto-shooter since Vampire Survivors.” If it hits even a measure of Deep Rock Galactic’s success, the studio will have its hands full for a while.
I also worry that a poorly-handled TV adaptation could scupper what’s otherwise one of the more wholesome communities in gaming. Do we really want to saddle the simple pleasures of rock and stone with online discourse? Still, even if Lundgaard was considering signing off on such a project, it’d be a long while before we’d be treated to the delights of modern beard SFX. Until then, there’s always the mines.
