Mortal Kombat premiered last weekend, and in another distant 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. In fact, it’s not even close to being a good choice. The brilliant “Based on the 2021 film!” tag is a pretty liberal way of describing what sounds like an 8-year-old’s imagination of what happens in the movie. 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 for the movie was even finished. It sucks!
But you see, I just spent a few hours watching a mortal combat tournament where the fate of the universe is decided by a bloody uppercut on a pit of spikes. I’m not ready to go back to our boring, mediocre reality just yet. I want to fight in this tournament myself. Where is my game?
Okay, Mortal Kombat might not be the best example here, as 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 remember recoiling in terror at the sight of a Street Fighter: The Movie arcade cabinet back in the day. It is the Street Fighter game resembling Mortal Kombat. It’s based on the gruesome 1994 film adaptation of the fighting series and features a rotoscoped Jean-Claude Van Damme (who actually did the performance capture for the game) astride the odd valley, pants digitized camouflage and all. Unfortunately, we will never have a game like that again.
What I’m saying is this: There used to be a funny little pipeline between Hollywood and the gaming industry, and unless you count a few mobile games, or whatever LEGO did with Star Wars, it seems that pipeline has been completely shut down. The era is over. Yes, game studios will take inspiration from recent movies or well-known films – Alien: Isolation, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Middle-earth: Shadow of War are all good examples – but it’s not the same thing. These movie games are like side missions. Give me the real thing. Give me GoldenEye.
Cinema games have a long and somewhat controversial history in gaming, dating back to the very early days of the industry. Scroll through the ROM archives for older consoles like the NES or Atari and you’ll see a row of adaptations of the greatest movies 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 tiny bit of these titles are fun to play (Batman on the NES still holds up, surprisingly).
Zak Penn, the screenwriter of X2 and The Avengers, made a 2014 documentary called Atari: Game Over, in which the filmmakers unearthed a dump 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 film adaptations, as a rush order under enormous studio pressure, turned out so terrible that it is cited as one of the causes of the industry’s crash. game in 1983. Arcades across the country were closed as sales plummeted by billions of dollars. Seven hundred thousand unsold copies of Atari games, including E.T., ended up buried in a hole in New Mexico. The poor quality of these games, and the subsequent market crash, is one of the reasons Nintendo places its “Seal of Quality” (now just the “Official Nintendo Seal”) on titles to this day.
But that’s an old story. In my day, seeing a movie and then picking up its game adaptation on the shelves of Blockbuster (or my local rental store, WOW! Video), was the definition of the perfect weekend. Everyone remembers Goldeneye. (Fun facts about this game: Nintendo’s boss didn’t like violence, so he suggested you end up shaking hands with all your haters in the hospital.) But Goldeneye is like the Beatles from movie video games . This is old news. There are so many more – good and downright atrocious – that I’ve played and loved.
I can’t begin to predict the times I sank into Spider-Man 2. The 2004 game based on the Sam Raimi movie is still beloved today for its comfortable, almost meditative web-sling mechanics. And like so many movie games, Activision’s Spider-Man 2 seems to have only a hazy memory of the film’s actual plot, as Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock is joined by nearly 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 of its own. Most Star Wars movie games are bad. Sorry, but no one has ever enjoyed playing Super Star Wars games for Super Nintendo. Boy, am I obsessed with Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for the PS2, though. In addition to a delightfully unbalanced, beat-em-up single-player mode (which has you switching between Obi-Wan and Anakin, blazing sabers), Revenge of the Sith included what I still think is an incredible blueprint for a fight at the Star Wars lightsaber. Game. I would buy a remaster today just for this multiplayer mode!
There’s the utterly bad Superman Returns game based on the mediocre 2006 film, which I’m still obsessed with, flying around Metropolis for hours, seeing how fast I could dive from space to the sidewalk. Sega Genesis-era Disney games – Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Toy Story – are all ungodly difficult and utterly ungrateful, and yet if I saw them in a retro store, I would have probably hard to walk without buying them.
In most cases, the game is worse than the movie, or if the movie is good, maybe the game is approaching its level of quality. But there are a few games that somehow turned out to be much better than the hardware they were inspired by. X-Men Origins: Wolverine blows its movie counterpart out of the water, giving us the God of War-like tornado of violence we’ve all anticipated in this pitiful flick. You could even argue 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 games industry seemed to realize that it was simply unrealistic to capture the concise 90 minute runtime of the narrative of a movie in a game that should last about 10 hours. Especially given the unpredictable culture of the film industry, where movies are developed at a crazy pace, full of constant rewriting, reworking and scouting, game studios seemed to be moving away from direct adaptations for rather connected stories to big budget franchises. , same device.
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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 movies but still existed in the same world, rewarding players who completed the game’s story with a sprinkle references during the films. Enter the Matrix, which was released by Atari decades after its gruesome E.T. games were tossed in a landfill, is one of the best and most forward-thinking movie-to-game drives out there. Based on supporting characters Niobe and Ghost, Enter was able to tell a full story, without overloading the campaign with cheap or completely unseen movie moments to cash in on players’ desire to simply rewatch the movie.
So maybe there’s a reason we don’t see too many movie games anymore. Perhaps game studios have a better experience creating loosely connected titles, or simply telling original stories themselves. In fact, video games have been telling such great stories lately that the pipeline has completely reversed. Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, Tomb Raider, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted: it’s amazing how many video game movie adaptations are currently out there, either in planning or in development. And with huge names like Game of Thrones’ Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey attached to HBO’s Last of Us adaptation, it looks like we’re on the eve of prestige video game television as well.
But where is my Godzilla vs. Kong match? In 1999, this movie would have been a shoo-in for a video game adaptation! A hastily dumped Rampage rip-off title for the N64 would have been needed. As it should have! After seeing the movie, I miss the experience of jumping into a shiny rental record, stumbling across a neon-lit map of Hong Kong, cracking my hairy knuckles, taking a scratcher-sized right hook. sky and turn off the ever-loving lights of Godzilla. . Even though the games were bad, that part of the cinematic experience was good. And no, the LEGO movie sets don’t feel the same!
video editor
Dom Nero is an editor at Esquire, where he also writes about film, comedy, and video games.
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