Could the Castle Wolfenstein movie be the first decent game adaptation?

If there's one thing that unites all video-game movie adaptations, it's that they're all unremittingly ghastly. But if there's another thing, it's probably their desire to strike while the iron is hot. Without fail, from Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter to Michael Fassbender's recently announced Assassin's Creed film, these movies tend to be released at the peak of a game's popularity. And not, say, three decades after the game was first released, as will be the case with Castle Wolfenstein.

Yesterday, Panorama Media announced that Roger Avary – who wrote the script for Pulp Fiction – would write and direct a movie based on the 1981 Apple II shooter. According to the announcement, the film will be "an action-adventure film in the vein of Captain America and Inglourious Basterds". But why Castle Wolfenstein? Why now?

It's such a bizarre choice of game to adapt. Not in terms of storyline – if the world needs anything, it's a film about a Rambo knockoff pelting through a castle and blasting through waves and waves of undead mutant Nazis until he reaches a berserk armour-plated robo-Hitler – but in terms of age. Castle Wolfenstein was first released more than 30 years ago. If you want to be picky, you could argue that it sounds as if Avary will actually adapt Wolfenstein 3D, which didn't come out until long after Castle Wolfenstein, but even that's still more than 20 years old. It's the opposite of striking while the iron is hot. It's tapping at an iron that's almost completely rusted away.

What this means is that, when it's released, Castle Wolfenstein might be the first video-game adaptation not to be targeted at the current generation of gamers. People who loved the Wolfenstein games are people who get misty-eyed about the golden age of gaming, back when games could be knocked up by a couple of blokes in a bedroom and not an entire billion-dollar studio. They're people who used to wait for 25 minutes while their games loaded from a cassette, who know that hitting the T key during International Karate Plus would make everyone drop their trousers, who can't get the hang of modern Call of Duty games because there are just too many buttons to press at once.

It's an interesting approach, and it might just work. Until now, video-game movies have been little more than lazy cash-in afterthoughts that exist solely to maximise a franchise's revenue. But Avary has had decades to think about Wolfenstein. He's got to know its plot and its tone and its humour inside out. Perhaps leaving it so long is actually a blessing in disguise. Without the expectation of market forces pressing down on him, he can take this semi-forgotten gem of a game and craft something loving and nostalgic and golden-hued out of it. Then again, this is a story about shooting robo-Hitler in the face with a chain gun. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.