The game of the movie of the game

Geoff

James- I would have really loved a Sonic game based on the SatAM series.

That was almost a thing.

oprel

There was a VR game to accompany the launch of the 2018 Tomb Raider movie:
I think it was made by Sticky Studios before they were acquired by Talespin earlier this year. But there aren’t a lot of online records about that.

I also just found a fan game based on the first Pokemon movie:
https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=330482

exodus

Ah nice!! The Rampage and Tomb Raider ones are excellent examples, though it’s hard to see to what degree the Tomb Raider one is advergame vs game people are intended to pay for.

It looks like Alone in the Dark might have been planned to work with Alone in the Dark 5… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_the_Dark_(2005_film)#Original_film_and_game_tie-in_concept

And someone on twitter mentioned there was an iOS advergame with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, but I’m feeling like I don’t want to count advergames.

So right now I’m seeing two definites - street fighter the movie the game, and Rampage!

gsk

Mortal Kombat never directly adapted any of the movies but they did import content from the movies to a greater extent than SF, FF, etc—like, Shang Tsung in the latest game is straight up 1995 movie Shang, voiced and mocapped by the original actor.

Dragon Ball: Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans is a unique case, it went:
—Famicom game (the first to feature an original plot rather than an adaptation of existing stories)
—2-part OVA based on the game
—FMV games for Bandai Playdia using footage from the OVA and new scenes
—remake of the OVA, included within the PS360 game DB Raging Blast 2

The Spy Hunter game for PS2/PSP is interesting in that it’s a tie-in to a Spy Hunter movie starring The Rock that never came out—they went game > movie > game but nobody’s ever seen the movie.

Double Dragon went game > cartoon > game, of course, and there aren’t as many examples of that happening as you might imagine, either. Pac-Man’s done it a few times.

I presume the Angry Birds movie got a tie-in game, someone else can have fun looking that up.

hellomrkearns

Virtua Fighter Animation (aka Virtua Fighter Mini) for Game Gear & Master System is based on the anime.

exodus

I did mention at the top that anime doesn’t count! That’d be it’s entire own thread, and it’d probably never end.

I’m calling it at two right now, but maybe more will arrive……….

hellomrkearns

exodus oops! I had no idea game-anime-games were so prevalent!

do CGI movies count? There was a mobile game tie-in for Resident Evil: Degeneration in 2009. It was on N-Gage, iOS and BlackBerry (what a weird time for mobile!) https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Resident_Evil:_Degeneration_(game)

◉◉maru

Oops sorry, anime as in animated theatrical features don’t count either? I thought you meant no TV series. I am not sure I understand the appeal of the restriction, given that the constraints and creative challenges remain very similar. There are not that many examples either.

exodus

maybe there aren’t as many examples as I think - but there are so many anime games, for so many obscure titles, and I feel like they then get turned back into OVAs or whatever else, but uhhhh maybe I’m totally off!

James-

For what it’s worth, I would absolutely love a Fatal Fury the Motion Picture (the 3rd movie, not the first) beatem up/fighting game hybrid. But how much I like the movie is probably not going to reflect well on myself, so I’ll stop right there.

exodus

I mean I’d play it!

James-

hellomrkearns haha. You had me at N-Gage.

I’m kind of surprised this wasn’t more of a thing with movies/shows:

It seems like it would have been easy to cash in on live action with FMV games like this, and once you had the framework, I would think the same engine could be tweaked to work for tons of video. For what it’s worth, I actually find the game to be a lot of fun. The inputs are consistent to the action on screen and A/B/C are pretty consistently mapped to the same actions.

I wonder if the lack of game->movie->game conversions has more to do with the lack of game to movie conversions in the first place than anything else? It seems like it would make sense to make a game of the movie (since the game is already proven as being a good enough concept to gain enough popularity to make a film in the first place), but maybe we’ve just accepted that video game movies are generally no good and trying to tack on another product to the film is inviting disaster?

Salacious_krunk

Has no one said Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? That has to be the most obvious example, right? They released a game based on a movie based on a game, with the same darn subtitle even, while the memory of the original game was still quite fresh. I never played it. I loved the original Sands of Time and didn’t want it ruined by the passably mediocre Gyllenhaal-boot.

gsk

Salacious_krunk Do you mean Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands? That game was released alongside the movie but has nothing to do with it, it’s a regular-ass Sands of Time series game that ignores both the movie and the cel-shaded reboot.

exodus

looks like the marketing intentions worked on you in reverse, @Salacious_krunk! They got you to not buy the game by fooling you into thinking it was related to the movie, when it wasn’t at all!

JonDHarrison

Does FF VII Remake count as Advent Children: The Game?

All kidding aside, could you imagine a Mario Bros Movie Game? Terrifying.

James-

JonDHarrison I regularly do, and I want to play it so bad.

exodus

me too - I bought the super mario bros the movie blu-ray because it has a 30 minute making of!! there was a very limited US release that I was lucky enough to notice in time.

https://www.slashfilm.com/super-mario-bros-blu-ray/

the article here says it was just a reissue, but I think it was also the only NTSC blu-ray release!?

santashotfirst

This doesn’t fit the prompt fully, but that Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands game came out right alongside the Disney PoP movie. It wasn’t based on the movie but it was just as generic!

The game is really 4 different games depending on what platform you played on. The PS3/360/PC was one, Wii was another, PSP was another, and DS was another. Games don’t do this anymore! I only played the PS3 version and it was like if you took out all the personality from Sands of Time but didn’t also make it buy it’s clothes at Hot Topic like Warrior Within. A true 6/10 game on the mainstream games media scale.

I saw the movie in a small town movie theater and fell asleep. They sure were afraid to hire anyone with real brown skin to be a main character in that movie eh?

Edit: oops totally missed @gsk mentioning this already!

James-

santashotfirst between the high costs of making multiple “the same” games that aren’t actually the same, and the fact that we don’t really have handhelds anymore, I wonder if that trend is truly dead?
We used to see some fascinating titles that were totally different under the same name on different consoles, it’d be a shame to lose that weirdness.

exodus

yeah, it got mentioned above, but I forgot that each version was different! That was when Ubisoft had a million studios. As an aside, this movie is why I got to meet Jake Gyllenhaal, and we had a long conversation where he just asked me questions about what it was like to run a magazine.

It was also the first day the ipad was available, so someone brought one in to take a picture of him with it. And it was during our conversation so there I am: https://www.popsugar.com/tech/Jake-Gyllenhaal-iPad-8005705

the publicist asked me if I would go away so they could take pictures with JUST jake and the ipad and not me and I said NEVER! and then felt embarrassed about it

◉◉maru

exodus That was when Ubisoft had a million studios.

They probably have twice as many studios now as they did back then. One big difference is they had more projects per team and also hired more external studios. I remember the Wii version of this game being praised in comparison with the PS3/360 version but I am not sure if it was more a compliment to the Wii version or a damning of the others.

James- between the high costs of making multiple “the same” games that aren’t actually the same, and the fact that we don’t really have handhelds anymore, I wonder if that trend is truly dead?

I do not know if it is really an issue or a good evolution of things ultimately, but now that the same engines are used across all platforms (ex. the same UE4 code running on PC, home consoles, Switch, mobile) there is no point in designing such different versions. The only outlier is possibly VR and its VR-tailored experiences.