Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein videogame among transmedia franchises: creativity and transcreation merged with interactive non-linear narrative

Abstract

Transmedia storytelling is today a widespread and multifaceted phenomenon, but it was in the 90s that it emerged overwhelmingly: different media shapes, such as videogames or comics, were launched to increase and strengthen the success of a peculiar story, usually belonging to a film or a book. In this context, the case of \emph{Mary Shelley's Frankenstein} (1994) is relevant; the videogame, released on SuperNintendo/SuperFamicom and Sega Genesis, was based on the film with Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro, which represents the most faithful transposition of the literary gothic masterpiece until now. By observing the user playing as the Creature, the paper would analyze the gameplay trying to understand how much the sole videogame experience can offer a proper vision of the story, which refers to the fruition of the starting medium (the film) and eventually to the novel. Moreover, an analysis of the way in which the videogame was localized and how this affected the narration style is performed, even in relation to both the concepts of realism/fiction, and the main issues and challenges proper of our time, characterized by videogame integrations within pre-existing narrative universes. In particular, the study of this "Frankenstein case" will be conducted taking into account the techniques and methods adopted to adapt the dialogues; in fact, as machine translation alone is not enough in game localization, translators had to use creativity and transcreation to make the product enjoyable for the users, other than comparable to the original novel. Also, the texts and dialogues had to be designed to take advantage of the specific features proper of the game, such as interactive and non-linear narrative. \emph{Mary Shelley's Frankenstein} videogame was also the subject of fanmade modifications, through the romhacking phenomenon.