There are plenty of spin offs and tie ins but not adaptations (save for Lego) for some reason. Obviously this isn’t the case for the reverse.
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The fuck you talking about? There are tons of video games adapted from movies. Like so many it was literally a meme in the 90s. And they were usually fucking terrible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_based_on_films
So many things on this list are directly copying the plot beats of the movies they are based on if not straight up just a playable version of the film.
Point taken, I guess I should’ve specified nowadays and “few”.
And then you have crap like League of Legends that doesn’t even try to follow the plot or visual design of Arcane.
What were they thinking??
Lmao nice
Schindler’s list would be an interesting game.
Have you seen the Monster Hunter movie? That’s why .
There is a Robocop game from 2023 which is quite good and true to the movies.
There’s like a few Harry Potter and LOTR adaptation, and then there’s Street Fighter The Movie The Video Game. It just isn’t worth the dev time these day i guess, because people will just watch the movie.
Not sure how you’re stretching the definitions to not include the Spider-Man games or all the Batman games.
What I had in mind when posting this was how most games, even story focused ones, have rather thin stories supported largely by world building and designed around having to leave room for the gameplay. And seeing how video games keep getting adapted into movies and TV shows, I thought maybe it would be better to do it the other way around.
I haven’t played the spider man games but as far as I can tell the batman games are not adaptations of any movie. They’re original stories based on Batman. Needless to say those are comic book characters rather than original movies
As others have pointed out in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s there were tons of them. It was pretty much guaranteed if a movie came out, pretty much any movie, there’d be a game for it. even tv shows. Hell there was even a game for the movie The Lawnmower Man and the show Home Improvement.
The reason they stopped making them for every theatrical release or tv show is very few, if any, were any good and modern games take a lot longer to make than 16 or 32bit era games. Movies take what? a year or two to make? games now take a lot longer. you had to release the tie in game as soon or very shortly after a movie/show release. Also I don’t think it was very profitable.
Add to the fact the vast majority of them weren’t very good. I can count on one or two hands the good ones. Batman on the NES, Jurassic Park on the Genesis, Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay, Enter the Matrix, Aladdin on the Genesis, LOTR The Two Towers and Return of the King, um really struggling to think of others at this point. Top Gun on the NES was pretty decent as was Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Xbox.
It’s also the same reason you don’t see Toys for movies anymore. I mean hell when I was a kid they had toy lines for Terminator 2 and Aliens which arguably weren’t kid movies. Even Robocop and Rambo had toylines. You just don’t see the merch for movies anymore because I guess it wasn’t profitable in the long run.
As I replied to sb else, I didn’t mean tie ins that come out with or shortly around the movie, I meant adaptations that use a movie as the ‘source material’.
It was the case in the 90’s and early 00’s, there were plenty of video game adaptation of movies. I think it stopped partly because it wasn’t profitable and because video game development takes time, which would make the game come out much later than the movie and if the hype is dead then so is the game.
and E.T. happened
Movie and TV shows take time too, and adaptations have been coming out much later than the game did.
I’d kind of expected the play it safe management to start adapting decades old classic movies n stuff
Movies are a complete mess, though. They are frequently recut into something almost entirely different last minute. Can’t do thst as easily with videogames.
Well before even then - consider the infamous case of the Atari adaptation of the smash hit movie E.T..
Yeah lol like half my game library as a kid was adaptations of movies and shows.
I think the big turning point was The Incredibles 2 video games, which came out in 2005 based on the ending of the first film but the movie itself didn’t come out until 2018 and ended up being a completely different storyline.
I think it’s also that the video game industry is now bigger than the movie industry. The tables have turned: now it’s up to the movie industry to bait video game fans into going to the movies.
The stories are too complicated in today’s games to make any kind of cohesive and even vaguely complete 2-3 hour story out of them. That why such adaptations are not one-off movies, but complete seasons of shows appearing on streaming services.
Most of them were terrible, all the money goes into getting the ip, so they’re both low-budget, and uncreative, paint-by-numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_based_on_films
There are exceptions, like Alien:Isolation, 007(back in like 1999), the mafia games (which are just goodfellas and Godfather with the label scratched off), gta: vc, which is 80% Scarface.
Ty for the suggestions
Alien:Isolation is the only one worth looking at for any reason but understanding history of video games. The others were very much of their eras.
There’s a 007 game in development
Mad Max says VROOOOOOOOM BAM BAM BAM
Mad Max was a surprisingly fun game. Probably the only movie game I’ve played that was worth it. Other than something like the LEGO games.
This is my guess.
A game is different from a film because you can make decisions in a video game. It is observing the consequences of those decisions which makes a video game interesting. But it can also be interesting to see what would have happened if slightly different decisions were made, or if they were made in a slightly different context. That’s why people replay games. A film based on a video game is essentially just a replay of the game that you are watching, where the characters make slightly different decisions.
A film presents a single narrative. When attempting to adapt it into a game, designers must consider where choices can be introduced, and what consequences those choices are allowed to have on the narrative. They are constrained by the source material in this regard, because the player already expects that their choices must progress the plot in a manner similar to what was presented in the film. So it’s much harder to design choices which are meaningful to the player. A film that presents only one narrative inherently constrains the amount of artistic freedom available.
When a game is designed based on a film (or equivalently, a book) that doesn’t have to be faithful to a specific plotline, but merely uses the systems, settings, and thematics of the source material, the much more available artistic freedom allows for more interesting plots to be written and more meaningful gameplay.
I don’t think games need to have interesting choices, and unless you include moment to moment choices that determine if you get a game over, lots of games don’t present the player with any story freedom at all.
I think putting the player in the character’s shoes could make any story more immersive, even if you can’t meaningfully change the narrative.
A hurdle seems to be that big ip comes with the expectation of a big game, which would stretch the story unreasonably. I do agree that a game adaptation has to change things simply because even the shortest games are longer than movies, but I’m afraid too much creative freedom would lead to the same kind of designed-around-gameplay stories that exist in original games
Not every game is a world of branching choices. In fact, most aren’t.
There are plenty though?
Like, List of Middle-earth video games from Wikipedia just for LOTR alone
edit: changed the link so it drops you to the “Official games based on the films” section
John Wick is getting another videogame adaptation too
