Is surprise box-office hit Iron Lung the future of'video game films'? The YouTube gaming star's weird and divisive adaptation of his obscure horror film is a game within a film about a game - and hints at new directions for storytelling Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? S omething weird struck me early on while watching the movie Iron Lung, which has so far taken $32m at the box office, despite being a grungy low-budget sci-fi thriller adapted from an independent video game few people outside of the horror gaming community have even heard of. Set after a galactic apocalypse, it follows a convict who must buy his freedom by piloting a rusty submarine through an ocean of human blood on a distant planet. Ostensibly, he's looking for relics that may prove vital for scientific research, but what he finds is much more ghastly.

As interest about the missing Titan submersible grew this week, one horror-themed submarine videogame has seen an increase in sales, according to its developer. Iron Lung game developer, David Szymanski, tweeted a screenshot of a text file showing an increase in the amount of units sold between Monday and Tuesday, with an apparent sharp incline in sales Tuesday. The post was captioned with "This feels so wrong." The source of Szymanski's information was not immediately clear, nor was there any comparison to prior days. "I definitely see the dark humor in this whole Titanic sub thing, it's just... like, I made Iron Lung the most nightmarish thing I could think of, and knowing real people are in that situation right now is pretty horrific, even if it was their own bad decisions … Like all the jokes I've been seeing are hilarious but also good lord nobody should have to die like that,," he tweeted 25 minutes later.