The thing about movies is they end. And what is there to do once you’ve reached the conclusion, the credits roll, and you’re forced to re-enter the real world?
Find the movie’s tie-in video game, of course. Hollywood has been courting the gamer community pretty much since games were invented, and the tie-in video game offers a unique form of corporate and entertainment synergy. Usually these games are based on action or fantasy films with a vast world and plenty of room for kicking, punching, and blowing stuff up. It also helps when there’s already a built-in franchise, as with The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or James Bond.
But not always. Occasionally you’ll find a film with a tie-in game that is downright perplexing. What about this movie suggested the need for a video game in the first place? How could a video game possibly be structured around a slapstick comedy, or a hyper-stylized horror movie, or a high school satire?
You wouldn’t necessarily think that the worlds of these types of movies would offer themselves readily for reinterpretation into a video game model, but, by golly, they did it anyway. (“They” being whatever game studio was lucky enough to get the brief and then tear their hair out wondering how the heck they’re going to pull this off.)
Because these games exist, they’re worth examining, if not necessarily playing. In fact, we’d say most if not all of the games on this list are best left untouched, whether because of outdated graphics or a boring storyline or the fact that their mere existence is downright laughable. Fortunately for these games, we love celebrating pop culture ephemera. As long as we don’t spend hours trying to win a boss fight against the Scrooge doll from The Polar Express.
Big Trouble in Little China
John Carpenter’s goofy action adventure is kind of built like one of those old-fashioned arcade fighting games, so it stands to reason that Big Trouble in Little China once got the Commodore 64 treatment. It’s exactly what you would expect from a side-scrolling beat ‘em up with graphics that border on the minimalist. The player controls one of three characters at a time—Jack Burton, Wang Chi, and Egg Shen—punching and kicking bad guys and collecting weapons as they slowly make their way along the endlessly scrolling facades of, presumably, a pixelated Chinatown.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
In contrast, the operatic tragedy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula does not immediately demand to be gamified, and yet they made a video game of it nevertheless. Released in 1992, the officially licensed Dracula games were made for a bunch of different consoles, with slight differences in each version. In all of them you play as young lawyer Jonathan Harker, sneaking through Count Dracula’s castle and pulling jiu jitsu moves on various vermin — bats, rats, spiders, flame-throwing scorpions, occasionally Dracula himself — while avoiding Indiana Jones-style booby traps and plotting the vampire’s demise. If Jonathan Harker had had these sick martial arts skills to start with, Dracula would have been a very short movie.
Braveheart
There’s really only one way you could make a Braveheart video game, and the 1999 battle strategy game they eventually made sure tried its best. It’s an interesting mix of styles: In Planning mode you have a bird’s-eye view of the map, moving troops around and surveying battlegrounds, while in Realtime 3D mode you’re on the ground exploring settlements or fighting alongside your soldiers. The game was mostly criticized for being too convoluted, and that makes sense. When you’re watching a movie like Braveheart, you’re not wondering what would have happened if the heroes won.
From Dusk Till Dawn
What happens after the events of Robert Rodriguez’s vampire action-horror movie From Dusk Till Dawn have reached their bloody conclusion? Well, you’d know the answer to that question if you played the video game. A few months after the conclusion of the movie, Seth Gecko finds himself in a supermax prison floating off the coast of New Orleans that has been infiltrated by vampires pretending to be inmates. The only way to survive is to shoot his way out, which is exactly what the game demands you do. Without the sinister saloon setting to add some flavor, this game is just another third-person shooter with middling graphics.
Little Nicky
No, we’re serious, there is genuinely a Little Nicky video game. The extremely pixelated side-scroller was made for the Game Boy Color and came out a little over a month after the Adam Sandler comedy debuted (and subsequently bombed). You play as Nicky, a half-demon half-angel who must travel through 24 levels inspired by events from the movie, completing tasks, gathering objects, and occasionally fighting bosses with your flaming belches and demonic possession skills. It looks quite good — the colors are vibrant and the vibe is charmingly retro — it’s just unfortunate that it was based on Little Nicky.
Mean Girls
You will never play the Mean Girls video game. (You will never play most of these games, probably, but Mean Girls specifically is impossible to find.) The game was made for the Nintendo DS and was scheduled to be released in Europe in 2009 and in America in 2010, but both releases were canceled at the last minute for unknown reasons. Thanks to a recently debugged version uploaded to YouTube, we now know what the game would have been like — a high school-set adventure game via text-based conversations — but it’s never been officially released. Strangely, star Lindsay Lohan doesn’t even appear on the game’s cover.
Napoleon Dynamite
We’ll say this much: the Napoleon Dynamite video game has a totally charming aesthetic that looks like something straight out of one of Napoleon’s school notebooks. That’s about all we can say in its favor, though. The game, which was released for PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS three years after the movie opened, is nothing but a collection of minigames set in the film’s stylized small town high school environment. It’s funnier as a concept than it is as an actual game, but, really, what would a “Napoleon Dynamite video game” have even looked like? A Grand Theft Auto knockoff starring Uncle Rico and Tina?? Actually … we’d play that.
The Polar Express
The Polar Express certainly looks like a video game, so in theory it should work as an actual video game. There was an attempt, released the same year as the film, to turn the tale of a young boy’s acceptance of holiday-flavored childlike wonder into an action-adventure, and it was apparently pretty bad. The game follows most of the main story of the film, but with a few key differences. One of these is the inclusion of the Scrooge puppet from the terrifying abandoned toys scene midway through the movie, except in the game the puppet is sentient(?) and wants to stop the children from reaching the North Pole and meeting Santa(??) by stealing their train tickets(???). Bah humbug, indeed.
The Room
While unlicensed, The Room Tribute is the closest we’re likely going to get to an official video game tie-in of Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-still-really-bad classic. Created by Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp, the game is basically a 16-bit version of the movie from Johnny’s perspective, filling in all the loose ends of the film (such as where Peter disappeared to) and adding in some new material. It also concludes with an epilogue confirming that Johnny was an alien the whole time, and he and his fellow extraterrestrials live in a spaceship shaped like a giant spoon.
Scarface
The premise of the Scarface game is almost as good as the film itself: what if, instead of dying horribly in a hail of bullets like he does at the film’s climax, Tony Montana survives the shootout and goes on a revenge mission to hunt down all of his would-be assassins? The result, 2006’s Scarface: The World Is Yours, is a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and GoldenEye, a goofy tribute to a classic film that ends up being way more fun than it has any right to be. It also allows the player to go into Blind Rage mode, during which Tony is invincible and his ammo never runs out, so you can shout “I’M RELOADED” as many times as you want.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky