Movie Tie-ins… Who Needs Them?

I can’t believe I’m about to say this but I’m starting to miss movie tie-in games. Were they ever the best video games? Definitely not. But it gave us a chance to experience these worlds in a way that the movies alone never could.

Looking back throughout the history of movie tie-ins there really have been some stinkers. All the way back to the Atari and NES we had games like the infamously terrible ET and Home Alone that failed to live up to the films on which they were based. For each of those we had Batman on NES and, though they weren’t all based on movies, Capcom owned the Disney properties – giving us plenty of titles based on the Disney Cartoons.

Playing through The Lion King and Aladdin are some of my fondest childhood memories. Maybe the games were terrible. The stampede level in The Lion King was impossibly hard for children to beat. But at the time I was so happy that I could play through my favorite movie and actually become Simba. The Super Nintendo was probably the height of the movie tie-in period for me. Other than everything that Disney had out at the time, LucasArts was killing it with their Super Star Wars games based on all three of the films. How fun were those to play? They might be hard to revisit today but boy did I have a blast playing them as a kid.

As video games become more expensive and take longer to make, we started to see these tie-ins become worse and worse. Games like Pirates of the Caribbean last generation just felt like they were rushed out to coincide with a release of one of the films. While that may be true, I still played through it and enjoyed spending a few hours in a world that I loved.

Wolverine was the exception in recent memory. X Men Origins Wolverine was actually far superior to the film it was loosely based on. Ask anyone that played that game and they’ll tell you it’s not only a great tie-in, but a great game on its own merit. After playing through that game I had a lot of hope that we would start to see more movie tie ins at that level.

Unfortunately that was not to be. Not only have movie tie-ins failed to live to that standard, they really don’t exist anymore.

Some other stand outs include Spider-Man 1 and 2, Chronicles of Ridick Escape from Butcher Bay and Goldeneye. Each of these games would be great games even without being movie tie-ins. But they were all handled with such care that we received games that were far better than they actually had to be. These are the tie-ins that I would love to see more of.

2019 may have just given us the biggest movie of all time. Not since James Cameron released Avatar on the world has a movie had this much cultural relevance. Guess what? Avatar had a video game that tied into the movie.

Endgame is here and on pace to beat the box office records set by the aforementioned Cameron film. Yet we cannot live out our super hero fantasy for ourselves. Disney Infinity dabbled with some Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy content when Infinity was at its height, but that was always meant to feel like you were playing with toys. It doesn’t have to be the best game of all time, but I would kill to play through the events of the film as my favorite characters I’ve spent the last decade falling in love with. What an opportunity lost. Sure, Square Enix has an Avengers game in development. However, after years of silence, all we know so far is that it involves melee combat, cover systems, and stealth. So basically a re-skinned Tomb Raider? This is fine, but why is it taking so long.

Movies and video games have always been my favorite two things in the world. When they come together it’s not always the best thing, but I sure have fun playing through the storylines that I’ve witnessed on screen. To me, that’s the greatest form of playing make believe and, in this day and age, we all need a little make believe.