We Didn’t Appreciate the Golden Age of Movie Video Games

The genre only grew year after year from then on. By the 1990s, a tie-in video game was a common part of many movie campaigns, and the majority of major films of the 2000s seemed to replicate that strategy. But by the late 2000s and into the 2010s, the relationship between those two worlds was redefined and re-examined.

In terms of the number of new releases, the movie game genre began to fall off quickly around that time. Whereas once such adaptations were a given, they suddenly started to feel like novelties. Studios began to turn to the cheaper and less risky mobile game scene to profit off of their properties, which effectively killed off the idea of console companions to the biggest films. Of course, we can’t entirely blame the decline of the genre’s quality on the mobile game medium. The lows began long before that.

The Hollywood Walk of Shame

The desire to capitalize on a rising trend, especially in the 80s and 90s, meant that many early video games were often rushed to the market. The situation was much worse when it came to adaptations. Unlike the development of an original IP, there were other factors to consider when adapting a major movie (especially a new or upcoming release) into a game.

Changing scripts and shifting release dates ensured that a video game company would have to keep track of the ever-moving movie industry. What’s more, just because a studio might want to take something from the big screen and transfer it to video games, that didn’t mean it always made sense. Opportunities were abundant, but limited budgets, schedules, and technology resulted in poor execution. 

Some of the worst movie adaptations in gaming history continue to haunt gamers of a certain era. For instance, a highly-anticipated adaptation of Ghostbusters was released in 1984 by Activision for consoles like the NES and Atari 2600. Although its sales were a success, the gameplay itself was boring at best and dreadful most of the time. A core system that required players to catch ghosts to earn money made an inherently exciting concept mundanely “realistic.” Clunky controls and a poor sound design didn’t exactly add anything to a title that could have been so much more.

There is of course also the infamous tale of the previously mentioned E.T. The 1982 video game from Atari, Inc. is still considered to be one of the worst games of all time, and rightfully so. Not only did it boast nonsensical gameplay, but the graphics were so bad that at times it was difficult to tell what was actually going on. That issue shockingly came to define so many early movie-to-game adaptations. Despite being based on the biggest blockbuster films, those titles often felt cheap and too rarely utilized the previously established attributes that should have been their greatest advantages.