Aonuma became co-director of “Ocarina,” which revolutionized how game characters move and fight each other in a 3D space. Unlike cinema, video games require audience control of the camera. “Ocarina” created a “camera-locking” system to focus the perspective while you use the controller for character movement. The system, still used by games today, is a large reason “Ocarina” is often compared to the work of Orson Welles, who redefined how cinema was shot.

The “ethos of Zelda” focuses on such new, unexpected concepts of play — even as many other modern games prioritize story, like TV and film do. With “Tears,” at “the beginning of development, there really isn’t a story,” Fujibayashi said. “Once we got to the point where we felt confident in the gameplay experience, that’s when the story starts to emerge.”

All an “Uncharted” movie had to accomplish — all that it possibly could accomplish — was to capture the glint and derring-do that helped the series port the spirit of Indiana Jones into the modern world. And while it’s true that the best moments of Ruben Fleischer’s thoroughly mediocre (if not unpleasant) adaptation manage to achieve that goal for three or four entire seconds at a time, this generic multiplex adventure falls so far short of its source material because it fails in the areas where history says it should have been able to exceed it. The areas where movies have traditionally had the upper hand over video games: Characters. Personality. Humor. Humanity! You know, the things that films get for free, and video games have to create through witchcraft. The same things that someone up the ladder decided to leave behind when they took a solid-gold brand like “Uncharted” and turned it into an IMAX-sized chunk of cubic zirconia, resulting in a movie that isn’t just less playable than the game on which it’s based, but less watchable too.