Forget about being a "boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". How about experiencing The Great Gatsby as a digital Nick Carraway, fighting off hordes of Charleston enthusiasts with a weaponised trilby? Well, now you can. A retro shoot 'em-up version of this American literary classic, which you can play at Greatgatsbygame.com, has just gone viral. You can move your pixellated Nick around using the arrow keys and space bar, and press Z to deploy your hat against the massed ranks of the 1920s bourgeoisie.

The reason for the game's success is simple: there's something inherently amusing about the idea of a work as starchy and revered as Gatsby being given the pop-culture treatment. But is the idea of a crossover between literature and video games really such a silly one? After all, films -- which were once regarded with the same bemusement and suspicion as games are now -- regularly plunder the literary canon.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were plenty such adaptations, from a Commodore 64 sequel to Fahrenheit 451 (approved by Ray Bradbury) to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on the Super Nintendo.

As the cutting edge became more technically sophisticated -- and big publishers became more reliant on the action and fantasy genres to shift millions of units -- the idea got left behind. Who'd want to play a text adventure based on The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy when you could shoot aliens, drive racing cars or go on raiding parties with your fellow orcs?

A scan of the Guardian's Top 50 games of the 2000s reveals that none is explicitly based on a book -- although one of my favourites, Bio­shock, skilfully took elements from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Admittedly, outside the winners' paddock chosen by the critics, there looms EA's Dante's Inferno. Their Alighieri had swapped rhyming tercets for rippling triceps and, like some medieval Bruce Willis, was on a mission to hell to save the woman he loved.

Most reviewers agreed that it was fun to play but it had about as much relation to the 14th­century source material as the Pirates of the Caribbean films do to the theme park ride that "inspired" them. It could just as easily have been called HellpocalypseScytheKiller if EA hadn't wanted to exploit the brand recognition of an out-of-copyright cultural artefact. (Its research had found that 83 per cent of people had heard of The Divine Comedy, but only 20 per cent had any idea what it was about.)

Then again, perhaps we should be glad that most game developers aren't following the Hollywood model of adapting anything that doesn't run away fast enough. Very few books respond positively to the necessary compression and simplification of their storylines necessitated by the jump to film. So who would argue that games, whose narrative capacity is currently more limited still, would prove a better medium for literary adaptations?

The Great Gatsby Game might be a tongue-in-cheek tribute that raises a quick smile; but we're a long way from the day when Tolstoy Hero sounds like a good idea.

This piece appears in this week's New Statesman.