Summary
- Historically, movie tie-in games were terrible due to lack of support and vision from financiers.
- As gaming became big business, movie licenses went to better studios, resulting in higher-quality games.
- While there are still bad movie games, overall there’s a positive trend towards better adaptations in both gaming and movies.
I love movies, and I love games. So you’d think I’d love games that are based on movie licenses. The only problem is that, historically, movie tie-in games have been terrible.
Except, these days, almost every game based on a movie franchise I try turns out to be anything from just fine to absolutely amazing. I guess I haven’t been paying too much attention, since it feels sudden, but you can bet I’m paying attention now!
A Movie License Used to Mean a Terrible Game
It was partly a movie tie-in game that crashed the US gaming market back in the 80s. You’ve probably heard of it—E.T. The Extraterrestrial, which to this day has thousands of copies in landfills. Well, that’s probably the poster child for low-quality tie-ins!
For as long as I can remember, throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, games that were tied in with movie releases tended to be pretty awful. It’s no mystery as to why. Movie studios basically saw these games as promotional material for their films. Mere merchandise like action figures or T-shirts.
So, small or inexperienced studios without enough time or money to do a good job were given these projects and, predictably, the results were not great.
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Actually, Not Always!
While the vast majority of games based on movies were unequivocally slop, there were still some pretty great ones too. Everyone loved GoldenEye 007 on the N64. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is a certified classic, and 2004’s Spider-Man 2 game reviewed pretty well, and I know plenty of people who liked it.
So at least there was evidence early on that games based on movies could be good. It’s just that it rarely happened.
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As Gaming Became Big Business, Movie Licenses Went to Better Studios
It was never the fact that these games were based on movies that made them bad. It was the lack of support and vision from those who financed these games. You can’t make a good game when you’re setting it up as a cheap cash-grab! However, over the years, the video game industry has come to rival the movie business. Actually, that’s not quite right, as Media Cat reports the gaming industry now dwarfs both movies and music combined.
This basically means that the owners of the IP and those funding the development of these games take the medium of gaming seriously. The money spent on the game is meant to create something that will stand on its own, it’s not just marketing for a movie or show.
So now we have games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Alien: Isolation, Robocop: Rogue City and a bunch more. We are at the point where my general expectation of an announced movie game is that it will be at least OK, and almost always worth playing for core fans of the films.
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Bad Movie Games Still Happen, but Rarely
Of course, there are still plenty of terrible games based on movie properties. Lord of the Rings: Gollum is possibly one of the worst games of all time, as one hideous example. There will always be bad games based on movies, because there will always be bad games.
The thing is, games are becoming so expensive to make, that I don’t think we’ll ever see these throwaway titles en masse anyway. It’s just not really possible. There are more AA (double-A) games with budgets measured in mere millions now, that tend to attract big movie IPs, but even then these are more likely to be decent just because the art of game development has come so far.
Even Movies and Shows Based on Games Are Getting Better
This is a river that seems to flow both ways as well. Just as games have used popular film and television properties as inspiration, some of the best video game narratives are being made into movies and TV shows. Shows like The Last of Us, Fallout, and movies like Sonic the Hedgehog and The Super Mario Bros. Movie are excellent. Not to mention absolute cash cows in their own right.
So, the way I see it, everyone seems to be winning these days when it comes to games. Either we get great games inspired by awesome movies, or we get slick new shows and movies to watch—it’s all gravy.
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