Terraforming Mars is a board game that is being set up for a feature film adaptation from Cobalt Knight, which optioned the right to the game. The game sees players compete to use resources and innovative technology to make the red planet inhabitable.
They are looking to explore the game’s themes in the story, which include existential tropes like class struggle, colonialism, and ecological collapse.
Cobalt Knight was founded by video game executives Christopher Kaminski (Sonic the Hedgehog) and Christopher Knox (The Real World), and it was founded to develop a slate of TV and film projects based on video games, board games, manga, comic books, novels and short stories.
At first, they were leaning towards developing the project into a series, but it sounds like a feature film is the direction they are now looking to go.
Kaminski said in a statement: “The Terraforming Mars world offers incredible storytelling potential. We are excited to explore the unique human drama that inherently comes along with running a company tasked with literally creating oceans, building prosperous cities, and balancing the ecology of plant and animal life.”
Knox added: “In many ways, the game exhibits strong parallels to the Age of Discovery when European superpowers were sailing around the globe trying to lay claim to everything they touched. This makes it the perfect choice for adaptation, using a distinct and hyperrealistic setting to revisit a familiar narrative conflict.”
Enoch Fryxelius, co-developer of Terraforming Mars and CEO, added, “Jacob and the rest of us brothers have invested many years in Terraforming Mars. It’s much more than just another sci-fi board game – it’s a vision of a possible and positive future for humanity not so far down the road. It’s based on real science ideas and ideas borrowed from science fiction. This could be us in 200 years. We are so excited to see this vision come to life on the screen. We hope this will expand the TM community even further. And we hope that more people will be gripped by the vision of a new home for humanity on Mars.”
Are you familiar with the game and do you think it will make for a good movie?
Source: Deadline