Whatever Happened to the Movie Video Game?
Mortal Kombat premiered this past weekend, and in some far-off alternate timeline on Earthrealm, I’m sitting in a basement playing a new video game called Mortal Kombat: The Movie: The Game. It’s not a great game. Actually, it’s not even close to being a good one. The shiny “Based on the 2021 Movie!” tag is a pretty liberal way of describing what feels like an 8-year-old’s imagination of what happens in the film. Sure, there are a few characters from the movie and maybe a voice actor or two. Other than that, Mortal Kombat: The Movie: The Game was clearly made years before the script of the film was even finished. It sucks!
But you see, I just spent a few hours watching a deadly fighting tournament where the fate of the universe is decided by a bloody uppercut onto a pit of spikes. I’m not ready to return to our boring, mediocre reality yet. I want to fight in that tournament myself. Where’s my game?
Okay, Mortal Kombat might not be the best example here, since the movie itself is based on a video game. But that’s not to say this sort of thing hasn’t happened before—you might recall recoiling in terror at the sight of a Street Fighter: The Movie arcade cabinet back in the day. That’s the Street Fighter game that looks like, well, Mortal Kombat. It’s based on the horrid 1994 film adaptation of the fighting series, and features a rotoscoped Jean-Claude Van Damme (who actually did performance capture for the game) straddling the uncanny valley, digitized camouflage pants and all. Sadly, we’ll never get a game like that again.
What I’m saying is this: There used to be a funny little pipeline that ran between Hollywood and the gaming industry, and unless you count a few mobile games, or whatever the hell LEGO has been doing with Star Wars, it seems like that pipeline has been completely closed off. The era is over. Yeah, game studios will draw inspiration from recent movies or well-known film properties—Alien: Isolation, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Middle-earth: Shadow of War are all good examples—but it’s not the same. These movie games just feel like side missions. Give me the real thing. Give me GoldenEye.
Movie games have a long and somewhat contentious history in gaming, dating all the way back to the earliest days of the industry. Scroll down any ROM archive for old consoles like the NES or Atari and you’ll see a murderers' row of adaptations of the greatest films of the era: Batman, The Untouchables, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Tron, Ghostbusters, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Alien... hell, even Texas Chainsaw Massacre had a video game adaptation. Of course, only a teeny tiny sliver of these titles are any fun to play (Batman on the NES still holds up, surprisingly).
Zak Penn, the screenwriter of X2 and The Avengers, made a documentary in 2014 called Atari: Game Over, in which the filmmakers dug up a landfill containing hundreds of thousands of video game adaptations of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari. The game, which was developed, like so many movie adaptations, as a rush-order under enormous studio pressure, turned out to be so terrible that it’s cited as one of the causes of the gaming industry crash of 1983. Arcades all around the country were shut down as sales dropped by billions of dollars. Seven hundred thousand unsold copies of Atari games, including E.T., ended up being buried in a hole out in New Mexico. The poor quality of those games, and the subsequent market crash, is one of the reasons Nintendo puts its “Seal of Quality” (now just the “Official Nintendo Seal”) on titles to this day.
That’s ancient history, though. In my day, seeing a movie and then looking for its game adaptation on the shelves of Blockbuster (or my local rental shop, WOW! Video), was the definition of the perfect weekend. Everybody remembers Goldeneye. (Fun trivia about that game: The head of Nintendo didn’t like the violence so he suggested it end with you shaking hands with all your enemies in the hospital.) But Goldeneye is like the Beatles of movie video games. It’s old news. There are so many others—good and downright atrocious—that I’ve played, and loved.
I can’t begin to predict the hours I sunk into Spider-Man 2. The 2004 game based on the Sam Raimi movie is still highly regarded today for its comfy and almost meditative web-slinging mechanics. And like so many movie games, Activision’s Spider-Man 2 seems to only have a hazy memory of the film’s actual plot, as Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock is joined by almost every Spider-Man villain imaginable, including Vulture, Shocker, Rhino, Black Cat, and even totally obscure enemies like Calypso. Who the fuck is Calypso?
Star Wars has a long and complicated legacy in video games; it’s practically a subgenre all its own. Most of the Star Wars movie games are bad. Sorry, but no one ever enjoyed playing any of the Super Star Wars games for Super Nintendo. Boy, did I obsess over Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for the PS2, though. In addition to a delightfully unhinged, beat-em-up single player mode (that has you alternating between Obi-Wan and Anakin, sabers blazing), Revenge of the Sith included what I still think is an incredible blueprint for a Star Wars lightsaber fighting game. I’d buy a remaster today just for that multiplayer mode!
There’s the totally not-good Superman Returns game based on the mediocre movie from 2006, which I nonetheless obsessed over, flying around Metropolis for hours on end, seeing how fast I could plummet from space down onto the sidewalk. The Sega Genesis-era Disney games—Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Toy Story—are all ungodly difficult and completely unrewarding, and yet if I saw them in a retro store, I’d probably have a hard time walking out without purchasing them.
In most cases, the game is worse than the movie, or, if the film is good, maybe the game gets close to its level of quality. But there are a few games that, somehow, turned out way better than the material from which they were inspired. X-Men Origins: Wolverine blows its movie counterpart out of the water, giving us the God of War-like tornado of violence we all anticipated in that pitiful movie. You could even make the argument that Goldeneye for the N64 is better than the movie. Yes! I said it!
Sometime in the mid-2000s, perhaps around the time of The Matrix, the gaming industry seemed to realize that capturing the concise, 90-minute runtime of a film’s narrative in a game that would have to last somewhere around 10 hours was simply unrealistic. Especially given the unpredictable culture of the movie industry, where movies are developed at a crazy pace, full of constant rewriting, recasting, and reshooting, game studios seemed to shift away from straight adaptations to stories that are rather connected to the big-budget franchises, even peripherally.
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I mentioned The Matrix because that movie franchise was among the first to have a major tie-in video game that was totally separate from the films but still existed in the same world, rewarding players who completed the game’s story by sprinkling in references to it during the movies. Enter the Matrix, which was released by Atari decades after its horrendous E.T. games were dumped into a landfill, is one of the best and most forward-thinking movie-to-game conduits out there. Based on side characters Niobe and Ghost, Enter was able to tell a full story all its own, without overstuffing the campaign with cheap or otherwise completely unearned movie moments to cash in on players’ yearning to just rewatch the movie.
So maybe there’s a reason we don’t see too many movie games anymore. Maybe game studios have a way better track record making loosely connected titles, or just telling original stories themselves. In fact, video games have been telling stories so great lately that the pipeline has completely inverted. Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, Tomb Raider, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted—it’s staggering to consider how many movie adaptations of video games are either out right now, planning sequels, or currently in development. And with huge names like Game of Thrones’s Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey attached to the Last of Us HBO adaptation, it seems like we may be on the verge of prestige video game TV as well.
But where’s my Godzilla vs. Kong game? In 1999, that movie would have been a shoo-in for a video game adaptation! A hastily thrown together Rampage rip-off title for the N64 would have been required. As it should've! After seeing the film, I’m missing the experience of popping in a shiny rental disk, dropping onto a neon-lit Hong Kong map, cracking my hairy knuckles, taking a skyscraper-sized right hook, and knocking Godzilla’s ever-loving lights out. Even if the games were bad, that part of the moviegoing experience was a good one. And no, the LEGO movie games don’t feel the same!
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