It’s safe to say, in the video game realm, first-person shooters are among the most popular. Whether it be Far Cry, Wolfenstein, Halo, or BioShock, fans new and old have taken to these franchises, basking in high-octane, intense settings that war, as well as saving the world, often create. Other popular series include Quake, Doom, Half-Life, and of course, the Call of Duty property, to the point where folks often call for movies, TV shows, and cartoons to be adapted.
As the digital era and the home console continue to evolve, gamers would undoubtedly love to see even more first-person shooters with fresh narratives and excitingly unique ideas on the market. Interestingly enough, if fans are craving an excellent new IP for the genre that makes use of a thrilling high-concept sci-fi scenario, Prime Video has the perfect tale for a first-person shooter experience in the popular show, The Peripheral. Here’s why it’s perfect for an FPS adaptation.
The Peripheral Rages Against Sinister Societies
In The Peripheral, Chloë Grace Moretz’s Flynne works with her brother, Burton (a former soldier), to uncover a conspiracy and get themselves out of trouble. They’re sent virtual headsets, thinking it’s for a gaming project and to make money. It turns out, these are used to project their minds into artificial avatars of themselves in the future, where their mercenary skills are required to steal intel from a shady tech company called the Research Institute (AKA the RI).
However, their employers, the Klept Oligarchy, aren’t freedom fighters. They’re elites running political and scientific scams. This leads to the siblings using their avatars to fight both sides, not trusting anyone in a story that mixes elements of The Matrix, Quantum Leap, Westworld, and Total Recall. The kicker is that the Klept and the RI are battling for control of branched timelines known as stubs.
The Klept uses these alternate realities to test weapons and drugs, and make money, while also hiding data from the RI. Data is also sent back to the past of the main timeline, which is why Flynne’s family becomes hunted. Tech is sent back to assassins to kill Flynne’s family to keep them from affecting the future, but the RI underestimates how deadly Burton’s crew is as they are all former military. This creates a multidimensional landscape for a game to take place in, with stubs having the potential to be arcane, cyberpunk, or even futuristic/alien in design — something the series teased, but didn’t expand upon.
A Peripheral Game Could Explore Various Worlds and Timelines
A game based on this property could explore the future with Team Flynne or other agents the Klept contacted to help. These agents in their synthetic shells and with handlers in their ears, have powerful weapons, rockets, and blades and rove around dystopian Europe on bikes. This could lead to other missions to steal info from the RI. After all, the RI is desperate to ensure the Klept’s tampering with the past doesn’t trigger a series of apocalypses for the next few decades.
Apart from the future, gamers could even play as Klept agents going into stubs, leading takeovers, and facing off against enemies, security, and governments therein. The narrative could also cast players as RI agents, visiting these realities to take out the Klept while running into conflicts with cops and gangs there, as the show had the likes of the Yakuza opposing outsiders and incursions. What this does is offer gamers the chance to play on either side and across different worlds, basically creating a plethora of side-quests in one big story.
Lastly, players could navigate the main Earth, either as RI assassins gone back in time à la The Terminator to take out Klept operatives or as other humans in the past. They could even take on roles as Klept spies who have to fend off the RI hunting them. What’s worth noting is that both factions have tech linking soldiers as a hive mind, creating more dynamic hunting packs. This would be a massive draw, giving gamers a lot more firepower, more operatives to use rather than depending on respawning, and, according to which era they’re in, advanced tech compared to their opponents. Ultimately, The Peripheral as a game paves the way for a nuanced journey wherein gamers can be heroes or villains, taking part in a corporate temporal scheme that’ll affect the fate of many worlds.
