50 Cent Is Helping Bring The Payday Video Game Franchise To Life
The Payday games have taken a lot of influence from the big screen, and now it’s coming to the small one.
Cops and robbers stories have entertained audiences across generations, and video games are certainly no different. Much in the same way that lovable criminals like the Toretto gang of TheFast and the Furious will always capture the hearts of moviegoers, gamers also love the wish-fulfillment of playing a “bad guy” — look no further than the success of the Grand Theft Autoseries. Who amongst us hasn’t wondered what it would look like to pull off a flawless bank heist and get away scot-free?
The latter is also the premise of the Payday franchise, a series of some of the most underrated and inventive first-person shooters of the 2010s. The games revolve around a highly-skilled group of criminals known as the Payday gang as they complete missions such as bank robberies, armored car robberies, and drug trafficking runs. The mechanics, introduced in 2011’s Payday: The Heistbefore they were refined in 2013’s Payday 2, give the player the freedom to choose between a stealthy approach or an incredibly loud one involving taking hostages and engaging in firefights with authorities. It’s Michael Mann’s Heatin video game form, and now the franchise is about to go from being inspired by cinema to becoming a television property of its own — with some help from a musician turned TV mogul.
Variety recently revealed that Curtis Jackson (aka rapper, actor, and TV executive 50 Cent) would be joining the upcoming Payday television series as an executive producer. The adaptation was announced back in March of this year, produced in a partnership between Vice Studios and video game development/publishing studio Starbreeze Entertainment. The two companies are being joined by Jackson’s G-Unit Film and Television enterprise, under which he has produced the Starz TV hit Poweras well as all of its resulting spinoffs.
The Power universe is an ever-expanding story of cops and robbers filtered through soap opera sensibilities, filled with complex criminal antiheroes; in other words, it’s precisely the kind of environment the Payday gang would thrive in. Alongside his experience with that kind of crime-thriller spectacle, Jackson is no stranger to video game adaptations, as he’s playing Balrog (or Mike Bison as per Japanese localization) in the upcoming live-action Street Fighterfilm. There’s a cartoonishness and a frenetic stylization to the look of that film that would lend itself well to the high-octane thrill-seeking of Payday’slawlessness.
The Payday games are certainly a well-regarded twist on the first-person shooter formula, but that’s not the reason the series is a clever choice of IP to adapt, nor is it because there’s a particularly groundbreaking or unconventional story. The Payday franchise has paid homage to numerous iconic crime films (Payday 2 in particular released DLCs themed after John Wick, Point Break, Scarface, and Reservoir Dogs) because it’s derivative of many of them. There’s an inherent freedom to the series’ relatively loose premise, and it’ll be a lot easier for the creatives involved to make a satisfying show for newcomers without disappointing fans when all they have to do is riff on the longstanding cinematic lineage of charismatic criminals you love to hate.
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