Movie Licensed Video Games

by Yug

Since the earliest days of the video games industry there have been games based on movies. Sometimes considered a genre almost unto itself, most serious gamers hardly ever touched a film based game because they were universally accepted to be cheap and nasty cash-ins on a successful movie franchise. If there was a game based on a movie that was actually good, it was usually considered the exception to the rule. A ‘diamond in the rough’ so to speak. For every ‘Goldeneye’, there was at least 20 ‘Supermans’.

In the last few years, this perception seems to have altered. Film studios are taking the video game industry a lot more seriously ever since it began making more money than movies; some even consider it a threat. So what’s changed, and how?

I believe there were 3 major games that shaped our attitudes towards this ‘genre’ of game. They were E.T. on the Atari 2600, James Bond: GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, and Enter the Matrix on the Xbox, Playstation 2 and PC.

Throw your mind back to the early 80s, the time of the Atari 2600. Not that old? Well use your imagination: it was a console that played games limited to 128 colors with a controller that had only one joystick and one button. Now wipe the look of horror off your face.

There are two kinds of movies when you think about it: The ones that would make cool video games (Star Wars); and the ones that wouldn’t (E.T.). As fantastic as E.T. was as a movie (that and I had a crush on Drew Barrymore), it just isn’t the kind of movie that after watching it makes you go “Wow that would make an awesome Video Game”. Atari thought differently, but through a combination of short development time, over production, and just the general fact that there wasn’t much of a ‘game’ you could make anyway, they were proved wrong. In fact, that game is largely considered as one of the reasons the Video Game industry experienced a ‘crash’ in 1983. Popular myth says that copies of the game were destroyed and buried in the desert. Remarkably, the myths are completely true.

Things didn’t get a lot better.

During the ‘Golden Age’ of Video games, back when Sega and Nintendo were battling it out with their 8-bit and 16-bit systems, most games based on movies were widely accepted as being rather average. Most of the time they were mediocre platformers or shooters that tried to replicate the locations, characters and music from the movie, with gameplay and level design coming a distant second on the priority list.

The main point to remember is that although the movie based games themselves were often inferior to the games that pioneered the genres, they had started to reach a graphical and audio point where the player could associate with the movie they had seen. For example, I was a big Michael Jackson fan back in the day, and I got a big kick out of his movie Moonwalker. Consequently, I really enjoyed playing the game of the movie, even though in retrospect the controls were sloppy, the levels bland, and the objective of the game was to ‘save the children’. Go figure.

Not many games tried to expand on the movie licenses which they were based on, with the exception of the Star Wars X-Wing and Tie Fighter games for the PC, which fleshed out numerous space battles that were only ever hinted at in the movies.

Probably the first game that really went a long way to changing the way people viewed movies based on video games was released in 1997 on the Nintendo 64. It was James Bond: GoldenEye. Not only did it pioneer a successful first person shooter genre and control scheme on the console, but it also closely followed the storyline of the movie while constantly building on it at the same time. It also offered fantastic 4-player split screen multiplayer action.

Its critical success followed through to its commercial success, and suddenly you couldn’t actually say there were no good games based on movies anymore.

In the years that followed, there was a mix of the good (Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer), the bad (Superman 64) and the ugly (Street Fighter: The Movie). It seemed that the attitude that made GoldenEye so successful was generally ignored throughout the lifespan of the 32 bit consoles.

Skip ahead a few years to 2003. We were in the thick of the latest generation of consoles, the Xbox, Playstation 2 and Gamecube, with the PC pushing the latest graphics cards for those with a spare couple of thousand dollars to spend. Right in the middle of the hype for the next Matrix movie comes the game based around it: Enter the Matrix.

This was not some throwaway movie tie-in. Here was a game that was not just complementary to the movie it was based on, but it actually followed the adventures of some of the movies lesser known protagonists and zig zaged through the sequences in the movie and then out again. Playing this game enhanced your experience of watching the movie. There was additional unique footage filmed exclusively for the game, featuring the main stars. The plot was written and directed by the directors of the movie, the Wachoski Brothers.

Although the game itself had its share of flaws, one thing is for certain. Because of the importance placed on this game as being a way to extend your experience of the Matrix universe, it was a commercial success. It was not a cheap tie in, but rather a genuine addition to the story.

Partially because of this, not only are a lot of the recent movie based games actually GOOD games, but they treat the license they are based on with due respect, and extend the story of the original movie in ways that you wouldn’t expect. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay created a fantastic game that detailed the events prior to the movie itself, but still featured the actors from the original movie. Similarly the ‘The Thing’ showed the events that happened after the original 1982 sci-fi movie.

Some games go a step further, to just associate themselves with an established license and create their own separate stories but with the same production levels associated with the movies. Such an example is James Bond: Everything or Nothing, which realistically modeled the characters and used the voices of Pierce Brosnan, Judi Dench, John Cleese, Willem Dafoe, Shannon Elizabeth and Heidi Klum to re-create the James Bond magic in a video game form.

So here we are today, with the next generation of consoles already here in the form of the Xbox 360, and with games based on movies being taken seriously and treated with due respect. The fact that one of the latest movie based games, Peter Jacksons King Kong, was not only a critical and commercial success, but also used a simplified and more immersive display as opposed to the more traditional health bars and ammo can only be a good sign that there’s still some innovation left, and some potential for good games.

A big trend is the games based on much older movies as well, due in turn to the game The Warriors that was released last year, a game based on the 1979 film of the same name. Coming up we can look forward to Xbox 360 versions of Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Scarface, and X-Men: The Official Game.

With the video games industry no longer being able to be considered just a bonus in terms of marketing a major motion picture, studios are starting to put larger and larger budgets into producing tie-in games. They want to make a product that complements and enhances the story and image they’ve been working towards and investing in. It’s worth hoping that with the size and maturity of today’s video games market, gamers will finally start getting treated as they deserve: with a high quality game to fill out the experience they’ve known and loved from the movies.