Hello there! Do you remember when movies would always have a tie-in game released at roughly the same time? Well, I have been reminded by this golden or stinky era (depending on your viewpoint) by playing quite a bit of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Let's get to it!
The movie game actually has multiple variations: the rushed retelling of the movie, the mostly unrelated tie-in to pad out the movie's universe (just like some of the books I've discussed in Video Game Books) and the late tie-in (because someone decided to license a movie property years later). As you can see, we are once again operating on a group of 3 distinct categories and I will try to get into the weeds about each of them in order.
This is the most common example of a movie game, and as the section title suggests, those games are usually rushed to market to cash in on the movie's hype cycle. Those games usually go through lots of rewrites and design changes due to the devs having to follow the movie's own developmental changes, and this process is usually arduous due to movie studios not wanting to share the script and set imagery for fear of stuff getting leaked somewhere along the pipeline. Besides the direction of the game not being set in stone, the timetable of the project is another huge problem, since the game usually goes into production way after the movie and making a AAA game can take longer than actual filming.
A great example of all those issues coming together is Treyarch's 007: Quantum of Solace, a first person shooter built upon the bones of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and a pretty neat cover system which pushes the game into being third person, for that extra flair. The game itself is, funnily, mostly a retelling of Casino Royale, which plays out in a sloppy flashback. This all happened because Quantum of Solace (the movie) was actually written and filmed during a writer's strike, and Eon almost always failed to send the latest version of the script, so the actual tie-in content is based on outdated versions of it. This explains the last mission of the game, because in this version Bond actually kills Greene at the hotel in the desert, instead of the movie's version of leaving him stranded in the desert, and the last part of the movie which takes place in Russia is never mentioned. Less extreme examples are the Harry Potter games, which are an absolute spectrum of quality and genres, starting from a 3D paltformer kinda deal and ending with a pair cover-based shooters, in which the different spells you can use are basically weapon archetypes in practice.
Of course, there are exception to the rule, when the movie and game have a more symbiotic relationship (aka movie team and game team actually have great communication and no absurd time constraints are present). The most impressive example of this is, by its official title, Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie. Besides the long title, the game had the direct involvement of Peter Jackson, him being listed as the actual producer, and it was made by the same people as Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil, so there is undeniable talent there. The game is split into two: levels in which you play as Jack Driscoll from a first person perspective, scrounging for weapons and using fire to kill the various critters in your way, giving the game a pretty horror atmosphere, and segments in which you play as King King, which are basically brawling segments with some light platforming.
There is also a small subset of those direct tie-ins that are better than the movie they're based on, and the most likeable example is Rave Software's X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This game is a gory spectacle fighter, kinda like the God of War games (at least in the bloodiness department they are basically the same). The game does retell the story if the movie, of course, but it also adds a lot of original content based upon the much better comics featuring the dude. The combat is the star of the show, providing lots of combos that make you feel like a blender in human form, separating limbs from enemies with each finisher, throwing them into stage hazards and pouncing on them from across the room. It does have problems though, mainly due to the levels being just a bit too long and enemies being heavily recycled in the latter parts of the game, but I'd say this one still is a must play (and the movie a must avoid).
Now I've finally got around to the category of movie games that sparked this whole thing. Those are the games that launch alongside a movie, but they are actually their own thing, sharing only characters and the universe they inhabit. This kind of game usually has more time in the oven and is way less dependent on the parallel development of the movie, lending more creative freedom to the developers.
I did mention Riddick from the beginning, and, to be fair, Escape from Butcher Bay is an absurdly elegantly designed game. The game flows seamlessly between social hubs in which you talk to characters, pick up sidequests and generally just take a slower approach to the game and just explore, to brawling sections in which you parry and pummel enemies into the dirt (or concrete floor in this case), to stealth encounters in which you take on the guards from the shadows, to full on gunfights. They always just flow into eachother. The game is mostly played from a first person perspective, but it switches to third person when you talk to people and when you climb on stuff. The story of the game take place before the first Riddick movie, Pitch Black, but it was launched alongside the second movie, The Chronicles of Riddick, hence the title of the game. Vin Diesel was actively involved in the game's development and he is quite responsible for how it turned out, because the initial design pitched by Starbreeeze was more akin to a prison RPG. Diesel opposed the idea, because his view of Riddick was that of a more silent predator who only talks when necessary. The game also spawned a sequel, Assault on Dark Athena (which includes a remake of the original), totally unrelated to any movie project.
Another absurdly good game in this niche is Mad Max, which launched around the time of Mad Max: Fury Road. The game is a Ubisoft-style open world game, focusing on car combat and scrounging resources to improve your car with various upgrades, weapons and visual customization. There is also a lot of on foot gameplay, focused on exploring bandit camps and fighting them in an Arkham-style combat system with a very brutal coat of paint, between using shivs and melee weapons as finishers, to using a sawn-off shotgun to eviscerate enemies. On the story front, Max helps a bunch of local leaders with their bandit and settlement problems, initially to further his own goal to get a good enough car to travel to what he calls the Plains of Silence in search for inner peace. It is very clear along the way that he also helps these people out of the goodness of his heart, even though he would never admit it. Seeing how George Miller basically structured the franchise as more of a series of Wasteland legends, this game could take place anytime after the first movie, which kinda adds to the mystique of it.
The last example I can think of is kind of an anomaly, because it isn't one game, it is actually four games in a trench coat, and they are movie games based on a technicality. I am once again talking about Prince of Persia (and will probably never shut up about it, also check out my Prince of Persia Collection), to be precise a series of games, all called The Forgotten Sands, all four of them being entirely their own thing. Those games were released around the same time as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (the movie), but this was mostly happenstance, because the movie was supposed to release 1 year earlier, but got delayed by the same writer's strike as Quantum of Solace. I will not go into much detail about the games, since I've already talked pretty in-depth about them in the aforementioned Collection, but they range from decent to pretty good, if we ignore the DS one.
This is the last main category of movie games I have considered, but they are a pretty eclectic bunch. Those are games that are based on movies or franchises way after the original release and they usually tell a new story in the setting, but there are some examples of adaptations.
I will focus on Scarface: The World is Yours, and I'll be straight, this is a GTA clone (they even funnily share the RenderWare engine) with some added flair. The game is a sequel to the movie Scarface, posing an alternative ending in which Tony survived the assault on his mansion. The entire point of the game is conquering districts of Miami, and stealing, transporting and selling drugs to get rich. The added flair I mentioned comes in the shooting of the game, because you have a Balls meter, which fills up based on enemy kills and how you do them (nut shots give extra Balls) and when that fills up, you enter a first person rage mode to more easily smite your enemies, but also in how you deal with selling drugs and storing your money in the bank, because different people give different prices and interest rates and you also have to complete a minigame to get the best results.
Another latecomer to the party is the Godfather series of games, which are also open world crime games, as was the style of games in the 2000s. The main story of each of those is basically following a low level enforcer in their day to day business, running parallel to the movies and sometimes appearing in the background of movie scenes. There is really not much to add about them, but they are a pretty good time, between attacking businesses, antagonizing rival families and general open world shenanigans, just a bit odd as a concept when the movies are those very serious and dramatic crime stories.
After all this talk about movie-based games, I feel like their absence really is noticeable in the current gaming climate, and we are genuinely getting fewer big budget game in general, since the development time has ballooned with the increase in tech specs over the years, consequently shifting the movie game market onto mobile phones in a free to play with microtransactions format. We are also getting fewer outright stinky games due to this, so we can't really contrast the good with the bad, but more like the good with the bland.
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