One of the awkward phases of videogaming’s adolescence was its desire to be movies. There’s nothing wrong with a good FMV game, but for a while there Hollywood and gaming were involved in one of those broken relationships where everyone tries to pretend things will all work out when it very clearly was headed off a cliff. Thankfully the end wasn’t so much a breakup as a mutual understanding that each could learn a lot from the other while remaining good friends, but games were games and tv/movies were tv/movies and each needed to go their own way. Every once in a while, though, a game comes along that makes you wonder if maybe it could have worked out after all, such as 3 Out of 10.
3 Out of 10 is an episodic game modeled on a sitcom about a low-budget gaming studio trying to release its next non-blockbuster. There’s a secret society determined to prevent Shovelworks Studios from creating anything that could be considered actually good, a tentacle-beast in the fridge, a green programmer who knows someday he’ll be unable to resist the call to the dungeons of engineering, interns in pet crates, and plenty of other insanity between the mini-games that connect the plot points of one episode to the next. The game has released two seasons of five episodes apiece, the first season being weekly while season two dropped all at once, and apparently it’s done well enough modeling itself on the structure of a tv show that it’s got a chance of actually becoming one.
Terrible Posture Games (Tower of Guns, Mothergunship, and of course 3 Out of 10) and dj2 (Sonic the Hedgehog movie, a number of upcoming projects) are teaming up to bring 3 Out of 10 to tv. Aaaaand… that’s really the whole thing right there. The official press release goes on to talk about Terrible Posture Games and dj2 a bit, but the only real nugget of information is that there’s a 3 Out of 10 tv show in the works. Animated/CGI or live action, what network might carry it, who’d be in it, and many, many other questions are a long way away from being answered, but even so it’s a perfect license to base a tv show off. The world of 3 Out of 10 has a lot of room for growth, and its core cast is a well-defined and diverse group that bounces off each other in highly entertaining ways. There should be a lot more news to come as the series progresses through tv development, and with any luck at all 3 Out of 10 the TV Series will be able to become the thing that it hopes to be.
