It’s hard to say what’s more of a bummer, folks. Was it the dark days where every single big blockbuster movie got a shitty tie-in video game crunched out by some poor dev team in six months to launch alongside the film? Or is it the present, where new movies rarely get tie-in games at all outside of the occasional throwaway mobile game? Yes, of course there are exceptions, but for every Goldeneye 007, Scott Pilgrim, or Spider-Man 2, there are a dozen E.T.s, Rambos, or Fight Clubs. Meanwhile, we’ve finally got kind of a good thing going in the other direction, with enough quality movie/TV adaptations of games that an outright shitburger like Borderlands feels like a rare exception and not the rule.
I get it, games take longer and more effort to make, especially the kind of quadruple-A thing most film studios would prefer their cash-ins to look like. But here’s the secret sauce, kids: Most of the best movie-to-video-game adaptations aren’t even direct adaptations of a specific movie, but are instead parallel stories, spinoffs, off-brand prequels and sequels, and weird anthology tales existing in the same universe. Star Wars has been proving that theory right for decades now, but even ambitious-yet-average one-offs like Mad Max and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora have the right idea.
And that’s the sweet spot we’d like to look at, especially in the wake of the rather excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The games that took a film’s ball and ran with it. There’s quite a few of them, but here’s 10 that are especially worth your time.