10 Movies You Never Knew Had Video Game Tie-Ins

The factor about films is that they finish. And what’s there to do when you’ve reached the conclusion, the credit roll, and also you’re pressured to re-enter the true world?

Discover the film’s tie-in online game, in fact. Hollywood has been courting the gamer group just about since video games have been invented, and the tie-in online game affords a singular type of company and leisure synergy. Often these video games are primarily based on motion or fantasy movies with an unlimited world and loads of room for kicking, punching, and blowing stuff up. It additionally helps when there’s already a built-in franchise, as with The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or James Bond.

However not at all times. Sometimes you’ll discover a movie with a tie-in sport that’s downright perplexing. What about this film prompt the necessity for a online game within the first place? How may a online game probably be structured round a slapstick comedy, or a hyper-stylized horror film, or a highschool satire?

You wouldn’t essentially assume that the worlds of these kind of films would provide themselves readily for reinterpretation right into a online game mannequin, however, by golly, they did it anyway. (“They” being no matter sport studio was fortunate sufficient to get the temporary after which tear their hair out questioning how on earth they’re going to tug this off.)

As a result of these video games exist, they’re value analyzing, if not essentially enjoying. In actual fact, we’d say most if not all the video games on this record are finest left untouched, whether or not due to outdated graphics or a boring storyline or the truth that their mere existence is downright laughable. Thankfully for these video games, we love celebrating popular culture ephemera. So long as we don’t spend hours attempting to win a boss struggle in opposition to the Scrooge doll from The Polar Categorical.

Massive Hassle in Little China

John Carpenter’s goofy motion journey is type of constructed like a kind of old style arcade preventing video games, so it stands to cause that Massive Hassle in Little China as soon as acquired the Commodore 64 therapy. It’s precisely what you’d anticipate from a side-scrolling beat ‘em up with graphics that border on the minimalist. The participant controls one in every of three characters at a time—Jack Burton, Wang Chi, and Egg Shen—punching and kicking unhealthy guys and accumulating weapons as they slowly make their manner alongside the endlessly scrolling facades of, presumably, a pixelated Chinatown.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

In distinction, the operatic tragedy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t instantly demand to be gamified, and but they made a online game of it however. Launched in 1992, the formally licensed Dracula video games have been made for a bunch of various consoles, with slight variations in every model. In all of them you play as younger lawyer Jonathan Harker, sneaking via Depend Dracula’s citadel and pulling jiu jitsu strikes on varied vermin — bats, rats, spiders, flame-throwing scorpions, often Dracula himself — whereas avoiding Indiana Jones-style booby traps and plotting the vampire’s demise. If Jonathan Harker had had these sick martial arts abilities to start out with, Dracula would have been a really brief film.

Braveheart

There’s actually just one manner you would make a Braveheart online game, and the 1999 battle technique sport they finally made positive tried its finest. It’s an attention-grabbing mixture of kinds: In Planning mode you’ve got a fowl’s-eye view of the map, transferring troops round and surveying battlegrounds, whereas in Realtime 3D mode you’re on the bottom exploring settlements or preventing alongside your troopers. The sport was largely criticized for being too convoluted, and that is smart. Once you’re watching a film like Braveheart, you’re not questioning what would have occurred if the heroes received.

From Nightfall Until Daybreak

What occurs after the occasions of Robert Rodriguez’s vampire action-horror film From Nightfall Until Daybreak have reached their bloody conclusion? Properly, you’d know the reply to that query if you happen to performed the online game. Just a few months after the conclusion of the film, Seth Gecko finds himself in a supermax jail floating off the coast of New Orleans that has been infiltrated by vampires pretending to be inmates. The one method to survive is to shoot his manner out, which is strictly what the sport calls for you do. With out the sinister saloon setting so as to add some taste, this sport is simply one other third-person shooter with middling graphics.

Little Nicky

No, we’re severe, there’s genuinely a Little Nicky online game. The extraordinarily pixelated side-scroller was made for the Sport Boy Colour and got here out a bit of over a month after the Adam Sandler comedy debuted (and subsequently bombed). You play as Nicky, a half-demon half-angel who should journey via 24 ranges impressed by occasions from the film, finishing duties, gathering objects, and infrequently preventing bosses along with your flaming belches and demonic possession abilities. It appears to be like fairly good — the colours are vibrant and the vibe is charmingly retro — it’s simply unlucky that it was primarily based on Little Nicky.

Imply Women

You’ll by no means play the Imply Women online game. (You’ll by no means play most of those video games, in all probability, however Imply Women particularly is unimaginable to seek out.) The sport was made for the Nintendo DS and was scheduled to be launched in Europe in 2009 and in America in 2010, however each releases have been canceled on the final minute for unknown causes. Because of a lately debugged model uploaded to YouTube, we now know what the sport would have been like — a excessive school-set journey sport by way of text-based conversations — however it’s by no means been formally launched. Unusually, star Lindsay Lohan doesn’t even seem on the sport’s cowl.

Napoleon Dynamite

We’ll say this a lot: the Napoleon Dynamite online game has a very charming aesthetic that appears like one thing straight out of one in every of Napoleon’s college notebooks. That’s about all we will say in its favor, although. The sport, which was launched for PlayStation Transportable and Nintendo DS three years after the film opened, is nothing however a group of minigames set within the movie’s stylized small city highschool surroundings. It’s funnier as an idea than it’s as an precise sport, however, actually, what would a “Napoleon Dynamite online game” have even regarded like? A Grand Theft Auto knockoff starring Uncle Rico and Tina?? Truly … we’d play that.

The Polar Categorical

The Polar Categorical definitely appears to be like like a online game, so in principle it ought to work as an precise online game. There was an try, launched the identical 12 months because the movie, to show the story of a younger boy’s acceptance of holiday-flavored childlike marvel into an action-adventure, and it was apparently fairly unhealthy. The sport follows a lot of the foremost story of the movie, however with a number of key variations. Considered one of these is the inclusion of the Scrooge puppet from the terrifying deserted toys scene halfway via the film, besides within the sport the puppet is sentient(?) and desires to cease the kids from reaching the North Pole and assembly Santa(??) by stealing their practice tickets(???). Bah humbug, certainly.

The Room

Whereas unlicensed, The Room Tribute is the closest we’re probably going to get to an official online game tie-in of Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-still-really-bad traditional. Created by Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp, the sport is principally a 16-bit model of the film from Johnny’s perspective, filling in all of the free ends of the movie (similar to the place Peter disappeared to) and including in some new materials. It additionally concludes with an epilogue confirming that Johnny was an alien the entire time, and he and his fellow extraterrestrials reside in a spaceship formed like an enormous spoon.

Scarface

The premise of the Scarface sport is sort of nearly as good because the movie itself: what if, as a substitute of dying horribly in a hail of bullets like he does on the movie’s climax, Tony Montana survives the shootout and goes on a revenge mission to seek out all of his would-be assassins? The end result, 2006’s Scarface: The World Is Yours, is a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and GoldenEye, a goofy tribute to a traditional movie that finally ends up being far more enjoyable than it has any proper to be. It additionally permits the participant to enter Blind Rage mode, throughout which Tony is invincible and his ammo by no means runs out, so you may shout “I’M RELOADED” as many occasions as you need.