A live-action series adaptation of the video game Hunt: Showdown is now in development. Hunt: Showdown is a first-person shooter that originally launched on Steam in early 2018. It later became available on Microsoft, XBOX One, and PS4. In the game, the player controls a bounty hunter in 1895 who is on a mission to destroy a monster for a huge reward, but needs to survive the treacherous wilderness long enough to get paid.
Hunt: Showdown quickly became popular with fans and even won the Best Online Experience Award at The Game Awards in 2020. The multiplayer adventure sees the hunters navigating traps, smaller creatures, and rival players in their quest for glory. They must also rely on old-fashioned weapons with limited abilities and ammunition, forcing them to fight carefully and strategize.
Today it was announced that the game developer Crytek will be teaming with the nascent streaming platform Binge to adapt Hunt: Showdown into a live-action series. Binge is an up-and-coming streaming service looking to cater to all the entertainment needs of the gamer community, with an eye on launching in 2022. Binge's Allan Ungar and Vince Talenti will be producing along with EPs Avni Yerli, Faruk Yerli, and Pascal Tonecker, who are all major figures at Crytek.
Further information about the series is forthcoming, but it is still too early in development to have any major casting or release date announcements at this time. There are four types of monsters in Hunt: Showdown, so the show could either go in one of two directions. They could either feature each monster in succession throughout the episodes or focus the entire story around a single monster, saving the rest for seasons to come. The game isn't especially character or plot-heavy, so they will have a lot of room to expand the universe in the series.
It's rather unusual for a video game this new to be adapted. Usually television series or movies go for more established properties with broader name recognition. For example, entries like Sonic the Hedgehog, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, HBO's The Last of Us, and Netflix's The Witcher series (which is technically a re-adaptation of the books the games are based on, but wouldn't have been made without the success of the games) premiered at least 5 years but up to several decades after the games first launched. This must mean that Hunt: Showdown has already shown its ability to captivate an audience to the satisfaction of producers, which is great news for fans of the game who want a follow-up.
Source: Binge