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The Problem With Licensed Games
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alt title(s): Movie Video Games Suck; The Problem With Licensed Videogames 
"Movies have always been a questionable source for video game adaptations, partly because they have plots and stories, and partly because people in movies don't jump around a lot or pick up power-ups very often."
The problem is, in short, that Licensed Games tend to be mediocre at best. But why?
There are two ways to sell video games: Quality of game, and reputation of name. Most video games that sell fall into at least one of the two categories. Game developers could take some time to develop an original property made with care for the end product and the idea of developing a brand new franchise.
Or, they can just buy up the name of something everyone already knows. A much easier way to make money is to make mediocre games based on licenses — a TV show, or a movie, or a comic book, or a work of literature, or anything really (and we mean anything ). These games don't require nearly as much effort to make, since they're pretty much counting on the people buying them to buy them because of familiarity.
Of course, the ability of licensed games to sell on name alone is a major reason for their poor quality, but it's hardly the only one. Developers are often pressured by movie studio execs to have the game ready for release alongside the movie (which, in the studio execs' eyes, practically equates these games to tie-in action figures, lunchboxes and other low-grade merchandise), which can shorten development time. Stretching the plot of a 100 minute movie into a twenty hour game can lead to a lot of filler material or serious diversions from the movie's plot. Licensed games also attempt to emulate the most popular genres at the time in an effort to maintain appeal — side-scrollers and Fighting Games were popular in the 90s and more recently, Grand Theft Auto clones and shooters are common as well. Sometimes they will be a confusing mesh of gameplay genres as the developers attempt to figure out just what their license could be slapped on to fill up enough game time to push it out the door. And that's assuming the product isn't chock full of game-breaking bugs because of the short Q/A window.
Of course, movies based off video games don't tend to go over well either, ironically for much of the same reasons...Oh, and this trope does carry over into other game genres.
There are exceptions. A pretty good chunk of these were either released years after the source material or were based off of a franchise that had been running for years, thus relieving the time pressure often inherent in licensed games.
This trope is so widespread, it's probably easier to list only the particularly egregious examples and the exceptions. See Spiritual Licensee for a way some games go around this, intentionally or not.
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The Bad and the Ugly
- E.T. for the Atari 2600. It was produced for no other reason than to quickly cash in on the success of the 1982 movie, and was hurried through production in a matter of weeks to be on the shelves for the Christmas shopping season. Its gameplay consists entirely of E.T. falling into pits in order to search for pieces of his space telephone. It sold so badly that Atari eventually had to dispose of the surplus unsold copies in a landfill, and is widely cited as one of the reasons for the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Watching the movie doesn't help in any way understand exactly what you are supposed to do in the game, either. More information
- Of course, reading the manual helps a lot, but who would do that anyway? Atari also published a Hints Sheet later, but the damage was already done.
- Although there were lots of games way worse at the time, the E.T. game being advertised aggressively and the popularity of the movie it was based on led to its reputation as one of the "worst games in history".
- Higher-ups at Atari, desperate to release the game in time for the Christmas season, ordered one programmer to build the entire game in forty days. (The average development time for Atari 2600 games was between five and six months.)
- Programmer Howard Scott Warshaw was requested by Steven Spielberg due to his previous work on the Atari 2600 version of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. He accepted this timetable and was reportedly compensated with $200,000 and an all-expenses-paid Hawaiian vacation. Later, he expressed no regrets about the game:
Howard Scott Warshaw: "But the fact is E.T. was a tough technical challenge that I feel I met reasonably well. I made that game start-to-finish in five weeks. No one has ever come close to matching that kind of output on the VCS. It could definitely be a better game, but it's not too bad for five weeks. That said, I also realize that consumers don't (and shouldn't) care about development time. All they should care about is the playing experience. I feel E.T. is a complete and OK game. Some people like it. It certainly isn't the worst game or even the least polished, but I actually like having the distinction of it being the worst game. Between that and Yar's, I have the greatest range of anyone ever on the machine."
- The infamous Superman game for the N64, based on the animated series, is another licensed game that's a contender for Worst. Game. Ever. It featured clumsy controls, mediocre graphics, and a horrendously dull plot, where Lex Luthor's diabolical scheme was to trap Superman in a virtual world... and literally make him jump (or fly, rather) through hoops.
- This goes back to the NES version of Superman, whose bizarre abstract nature is also legendary. Something Awful, who sometimes purposely reviews bad old video games to add to their "ROM Pit" section (before The Angry Video Game Nerd did it), gave it a score of minus-50 (with five categories being rated on a scale of -1 to -10).
- While we're at it, Superman Returns didn't even come out in time for the movie... and it still sucked.
- The Atari 2600 version is slightly less dire, given the limitations of that console. Here, Supes doesn't fight anything, instead having to dodge Kryptonite (which for some reason floated around randomly and tried to follow Supes around) while nabbing unpowered crooks and fixing a literal Broken Bridge, and the only powers he has are flight and X-ray vision (and strength to lift a bridge, but other than actually lifting pieces of the bridge it had no game value).
- The Commodore 64 version of Superman all that bad, but it doesn't seem like a Superman game. Also strange is the fact that you can die in the shooter levels, but not in the sidescrolling levels (getting hit just sends you flying backwards).
- The Angry Video Game Nerd laments on how so many good movies made so very bad games. Worst contenders include the NES versions of Back To The Future and Ghostbusters.
So when we heard that a Ghostbusters game for Nintendo came out, we were so excited we shit our pants! ... It was two of our favorite things coming together. Should've been like bread and butter. But more like dead skunk and dog shit!
- The movie Street Fighter had a particularly bad video game adaptation, which doesn't seem all that out-of-the-ordinary until you realize that the movie was itself an adaptation of probably the most influential Fighting Game ever made, Street Fighter II. A game based off a bad movie based off an awesome game... The home version for the PS and Saturn were relatively decent by comparison, but the arcade version was really that bad.
- As far as game companies go, Acclaim and THQ were really, really bad for this during the 8- and 16-bit days. Acclaim published most of its licensed games under the LJN Toys, Ltd. label (in the same way Konami did with "Ultra Games", due to Nintendo's strict licensing policies during the NES era). THQ has gotten better with it over the years, but Acclaim didn't learn its lesson, and continued to produce crap until its eventual bankruptcy (and revival as a distributor of Korean MMORPGs).
- The cruel irony here is that Acclaim went under just as it was finished making an exceptionally good licensed game based on The Red Star. The game was eventually picked up by another company.
- Jaws has seen a pair of video games, one on the NES, and a more recent Wide Open Sandbox variation called Jaws Unleashed. Neither received much love from the critics, with the first Jaws game based on the equally craptacular film Jaws: The Revenge. Unleashed fared comparatively better, which isn't saying much.
- One game that many people don't realize was intended to be a licensed game was Acclaim's Warlock, created for the SNES and Genesis two years after the second movie of the same title was released. It included gems like bad collision detection, enemies that would spawn with no warning and had little to no pattern to them, a mechanic that kills you if you fall from a height that's anywhere higher than the height of the playable character, wonky player movements (like the protagonist crouching automatically when firing forward), and having only a single life to get through the game unless you die with a specific item in your inventory (although there was a password system, thankfully) meant the game was particularly putrid. Its only saving grace was an item use exploit that effectively made you invincible and harmful to the touch during the item's effect.
- Animorphs: Shattered Reality for the Playstation is a classic example. Horrific controls, crappy graphics, annoying and downright weird sound, no sense of storyline whatsoever, and the main gimmick only being used in specific (rare) instances in-game; these things make baby Andalites cry.
- The Game Boy Color Animorphs game was kinda fun in a So Bad Its Good "They aren't even pretending they aren't ripping off Pokémon" sort of way.
- Not even foreign films are safe from bad video game adaptations. The PC game Torrente (based on the Spanish cop movie spoof Torrente: The Stupid Arm of the Law) is a mediocre Third Person Shooter whose only unique point is that the protagonist is a fat, bald, dimwitted sluggard.
- There was a video game based on the movie White Men Can't Jump. Not only did it come out four years after the movie, but it was based on the Atari Jaguar system. By this time, Atari was losing in the console war, and in less than a year, they discontinued the Jaguar. They haven't made a console since — in fact, the company doesn't actually exist anymore; the current Atari is a brand identity of Infogrames.
- The Catwoman game (based on the movie) was so bad that a Warner Brothers executive threatened to impose punishments into all future property licenses such that if the videogame didn't get sufficiently positive reviews, the company would have to pay a fine for damaging WB's property. The irony of a WB executive complaining about another studio damaging their property is highlighted when you realize the game under discussion was the tie-in to the execrable Catwoman movie.
- Pick any 6th generation console South Park game. South Park Rally was a forgettable, confusing Mario Kart clone, Chef's Luv Shack was a bizarre game show with questions that didn't even make sense to non-American viewers, and the South Park FPS has been accurately described as "the Mr. Hankey of FPS games: A turd of a game who comes to people who don't read game reviews". It got 8% from PC Gamer magazine in the UK and a 30/100 from a Finnish games magazine which also sourced the previous quote.
- On the other hand, Let's Go Tower Defense Play! for Xbox Live Arcade is generally considered a major improvement over said three games.
- It should be noted that the PC version of the South Park FPS was horribly buggy and had performance issues, which is part of the reason why it was reviewed so badly by most. The N64 version was generally rated much better, although that's not saying much (Game Stats gives it an average of 5.9/10 from the major sites).
- Bebe's Kids shows up a lot of worst of all time lists. (In other news, there was a video game based off Bebe's Kids.)
- It's not that the developers of Jurassic Park: Trespasser didn't try. In fact, the game had numerous innovative aspects going for itself (real-time physics, procedurally generated animations, an experimental no heads-up-display approach where players had to look down at a tattoo on the player character's breast to see their health and the play character counts the number of bullets in her weapon aloud, artificially intelligent dinosaurs) and was a genuinely ambitious project that was to leave its mark on the industry for years... but the publishers wanted the game to come out on time, and the game was already infamous for numerous delays, so many of its supposedly defining features were either severely cut down or left completely unfinished. Fortunately, the game was quickly forgotten after many a gamer's focus shifted to the fantastic Half-Life and the phenomenally awful Daikatana, and in the end the game's attempt at a groundbreaking physics engine was a tremendous inspiration during the development of Half-Life 2.
- As an interesting note, it seems that the game received a spiritual successor about seven years later in the form of the below-mentioned Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, a HUD-less first-person shooter based on a major film by a big-name director where the player uses guns and other environmental objects to kill dinosaurs on a mysterious island. The only difference is that the latter game turned out to be genuinely good.
- Dirty Dancing had a licensed PC game which was released nearly 15 years after the film was made, containing almost no music from the movie, almost no connection to its plot, and gameplay consisting entirely of mostly unplayably buggy minigames, the most functional of which is just a ripoff of Bejeweled.
- Mind you, it doesn't help matters that there was a period in the late-'80s through the early-'90s where apparently it was decided that every licensed character ever had to have its own platformer.
- And this was even worse back in the days before The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983, when pretty much every major corporation had its own video game division, including Quaker Oats.
- Dungeons And Dragons video games tend to be fairly good, possibly due to the fact that D&D was already a game to begin with and merely needed to be electronicized. And then there's Temple Of Elemental Evil, in which The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard.
- And we're not talking your average run-of-the-mill cheating either. Probability distributions on the game's dice show that they are horrifyingly flawed. The AI's d20 rolls go higher than 10 about 90% of the time, and you can safely assume that any chance short of 100% on your end is going to actually end up around 50% or lower. The game also takes some pragmatic interpretations of the random encounter table; if you try to rest, and you're not in an inn, you will be interrupted by monsters, most likely in a group whose EL is greater than yours, and they will get a surprise round. The odds of you actually getting eight hours to recharge your spellcasters' spells are close to zero.
- Well it is called the Temple of Elemental Evil.
- Even worse was Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. Aside from horrible balance issues and a thoroughly dull campaign, it had one spectacularly awful bug—if you installed the game to anything other than the default filepath then tried to uninstall it... kiss the entire contents of your hard drive goodbye!
- Heroes of the Lance is another excellent contender for "worst D&D game ever". If the drab graphics, clunky controls, repetitive music and rotten hit detection don't turn you off, maybe the fact that the game has a nasty Unwinnable condition will do it for you (as described there). Don't suffer through it alone.
- The Star Wars trio: Masters of Teräs Käsi, Force Commander and Rebellions that brought shame to the Star Wars saga in video game world. They are best forgotten among Star Wars fan
- Somewhat more decent, but still below average is the Playstation adaption of the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace film. Excellent audio(which is the common strong point of Star Wars franchises anyway) and fairly looking full 3D graphics aside, the decent level design is doomed by unfitting puzzle/adventure levels tacked on breaking the pace, awkward controls, horrible camera placement, buggy coding, imbalanced weapons and seriously-flawed dueling mechanic can totally ruin your experience halfway through.
- Transformers: The Video Game (the one of the 2007 live-action movie) was not merely bad (A 15-foot robot could get stuck on trees), it was inexorably boring. All you do is drive to your next destination within a time limit with a car that acts like it's driving on ice. Oh, and kick things until they explode. And the graphics were pretty mediocre too.
- I thought it was So Bad Its Good. Also, take a look at TFWiki's article on it. Some of that website's finest work.
- The Transformers for the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum back in the mid-eighties was little better. Memorable incidents include Autobots dying from a fall of any distance, Autobots dying from landing on a slope after flying, Autobots dying from not being pixel-perfectly positioned when switching characters, Autobots dying from the bizarre collision detection, Autobots dying for no apparent reason, Autobots dying... perhaps the game was designed by Decepticons?
- An early Famicom game based on the franchise, The Mystery of Convoy, was hardly any better, thanks to being ludicrously fake-difficult: Your Autobot could barely take a single hit before dying, and the game had an embarrasing A Winner Is You ending to reward players for their efforts.
- Somehow, people at Takara thought the game deserved a sequel in the form of The Headmasters. Despite numerous improvements (could take more than 1 hit before you die, save feature, more than 2 characters), it was still as bad as Mystery of Convoy and was riddled with errors. All but one of the playable characters shared a sprite, the one who didn't was depicted as the wrong character, etc.
- An early '80s game based on the British Series Grange Hill. The target demographic quickly discovered that Real Life offered the same gameplay options with vastly better graphics.
- Brash Entertainment did nothing but these games, with their Alvin And The Chipmunks and Jumper tie-ins receiving some of the absolute lowest scores this generation. Naturally, the studio was quickly shut down 18 months after being formed.
- Incidentally, Brash were working on a Saw game just as they went under; Konami eventually snagged the publishing rights from their ruin and the final game ended up being somewhat decent. Well, except for the combat system.
- The Fellowship Of The Ring for the GBA (licensed from the book, not the movie) was a tedious RPG riddled with bugs, some of them game-breaking. The earlier SNES version of Fellowship is even worse, even by the standards of that console's generation. Good luck trying to get anywhere in that game. If you lose your instruction booklet, you're pretty screwed, as it has the layouts of all of the cave maps.
- The Neo Geo adaptation of Legend of Success Joe, which is widely considered to be the worst game of the system.
- Deal Or No Deal. Let's just let this guy elaborate. Or if you don't wanna follow the video out of fear of the Cluster F Bomb: Just lots and lots of clicking on briefcases.
- Hell, the arcade ticket machine version of the game was more fun, if only because you actually slapped buttons for your choices instead of clicking on cases. And you actually get a tangible reward afterwards.
- The Sword of Shannara video game adaptation, anyone? For RP elements it wasn't too awful, just badly cliched, but the gameplay mechanics — especially the combat engine — sucked horribly.
- Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure (made by Acclaim's LJN label) was most decidedly not truth in advertising. Bogus!
- For a short time Burger King had three Xbox games that starred their namesake King character. Gameplay was simplistic and boring, the graphics were totally underwhelming for the platform and reviews ranged from bad to awful. Their only redeeming quality was that they were $4 and the main character was Creepy Burger King Mask Guy which puts them dangerously close to So Bad Its Good territory. (The game Sneak King involved sneaking up on hungry people and forcing them to eat Burger King food.) With these in mind, they sold millions and became cult classics for many gamers.
- There was a particularly crappy video game adaptation of Fight Club. Perhaps worse is that there are people who actually believe the movie was based off of the video game.
- Well, the main difference is that you're meant to win in the game. And the game rewards you for it. The game based on a nihilistic view of the human race and the human success instinct REWARDS YOU FOR WINNING. Talk about missing the point...
- Notably, it also includes Fred Durst as a playable character. Whether the game is cursed further by his presence or somewhat redeemed by the ability to break all his limbs is up to the player.
- Just pick any film made between 1988 and 1993 and there's a good chance Ocean Software made a side scrolling platformer out of it, regardless of how suitable the subject matter was.
- Terminator: Salvation for current-gen consoles. While the game features decent graphics and great music, and a decent combat system (that feels more than a little familiar), in general it's a pretty lousy game. Sure, the combat's decent - it's just a shame that the battles are so damned repetitive and generally feature the same two enemies: annoying flying robots, and spider-like robots that require flanking to defeat. To flank them effectively, it's best to have your partner keep their attention while you come around back and finish them. Too bad the AI is fairly terrible, and while the game does have a co-op option, it's not online enabled - so if you don't have anybody to play with and don't have Xbox Live, you're pretty much screwed. Oh, and it's very short, but considering how you'll spend those four to five hours fighting the same annoying enemies over and over again, that's probably a positive thing. Unsurprisingly, Salvation was one of the factors behind developper GRIN's shutdown... and it was their only game that can be considered a definite flop.
- In fact, a good deal of Terminator games range from the Bad to the Ugly. With the exceptions of The Terminator for Sega CD, T2 for arcades, and Terminator 3: Redemption for last-gen systems, they've been fairly awful. I'll Be Back...to the store for a full refund.
- LOST: Via Domus for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Windows. It's faithful to the show, and even utilizes the flashback system. The high points are the story, the use of music from the show, and the very realistic environments. The gameplay is slightly reminiscent of '90s Adventure Games, like Kings Quest and Monkey Island, only in full 3D. However, the game is overall lousy. You get a gun, but you only use it a few times throughout the entire game, and there's the recurring (and annoying) fuse-plugging minigame. The actors for Ben, Sun, Desmond, Mikhail, Tom, and Claire lent their voices for the game, but the rest of the characters were voiced by stand-ins. For this reason, they often look and sound a little different than from the show (this hit Locke the worst). To top it all, the game is short, and the ending? A Gainax Ending; you get onto a boat and ride off the island... only to see Oceanic 815 break up and crash onto the island, with you waking up in the beach as opposed to the jungle, and your love interest, who was killed shortly before your flight, having been restored to life, albeit bloodied.
- It should comes as no surprise that the only Lets Play of the game at the time of this writing is actually called "Let's Endure Lost: Via Domus"
- Spider-Man 3 was another one. Graphics were bad and collision-detection was about non-existant, so you got to watch cookie-cutter cutouts of citizens walk through ambulances. Audio was unbearable, as Spider-Man had many catch phrases but repeated them nonstop, and they weren't even that funny. Citizens also sometimes switched voices when you interacted with them. Story was broken to little bits and the game was artificially lengthened with a billion terrible side-quests and various missions (though the one to "retrieve the delicious fruit pies" was an amusing Call Back to those who recalled the Hostess cake ads). If anything, it also owes its mediocrity to Sequelitis, as the other Spider-Man games are genuinely good (See the Spidey paragraph in the below section).
- In a rare example (see the others below) a Star Trek-based licensed game was a real stinker. Well, sort of Star Trek. Some of the elder statesmen out there might remember a tactical fleet game called Star Fleet Battles. Complex even to the point of Dungeons And Dragons 3.5, but balanced out over years and years of play to create a strong thinking-man's starship wargame. It even had a "turn sequence" which set out in detail which step was to follow which — basically writing the subroutine for the players. Now, what happened when somebody finally figured out you could put something like this out as a computer RPG and wash your hands of all the pencil-based bookkeeping? The game version of Star Fleet Battles, that's what happened. Missing several core races in the original release, horribly buggy at the best of times, sometimes could not even install on your computer WITHOUT THE GAME CRASHING THE MACHINE AS IT WAS TRANSFERRING FILES.
- And there's the terrible videogame adaptation of Gods And Generals that came out in 2003. It was a Civil War-themed FPS, riddled with bugs, topped with more bugs, sloppy gameplay, horribly outdated graphics for the time, and to top it off, terrible AI and more bugs to top it off. Either way, the movie it was based on a terrible movie adapted from a passable novel.
- Bandai's SNES Fighting Game adaptation of Ultraman (actually Ultraman: Towards the Future) shows up on a number of "worst of" lists.
- The Eragon video game was somewhat bad - though the soundtrack is amazing.
- The music was the only half-decent thing about the movie, too.
- The NES Wheres Waldo game, owing to the severe graphical limitations of the system, was barely playable (as all the people in the crowds are identical stick figures) and has none of the visual fun that made the books memorable.
- There was the King Arthur And The Knights Of Justice game for the Super Nintendo which, while it ended the story, sucked pretty hard.
- Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge. As if being based on the abysmal 2nd Pumpkinhead movie wasn't bad enough, developer
BAD BAP Interactive thought it was a brilliant idea to set the game in a metaphysical netherworld completely unrelated to the movies, where you were forced to wander through repetitive corridors and view clips from the movie in order to obtain items, and endure pointless crystal collecting segments every time you killed an enemy. Even something as mundane as replenishing health and ammo was needlessly convoluted. And worst of all, you could be punished for taking items you weren't supposed to take with you by having your entire inventory cleared out without ever knowing which item it was you shouldn't have brought along. Spoony's grilling of this piece of shit was long overdue.
- The Backyard Sports games have been falling into this since 2002, when Humongous ditched all its other franchises and kept this one because of the big name stars in the games. The writers eventually stopped caring.
- There was a Nickelodeon Guts game for the SNES. However, it suffered from repetitive gameplay (Basic Training and Tornado Run were one and the same, but obviously given different names), annoying music, and the fact that the Aggro Crag, the final event, was just a glorified Basic Training level. Also, you had to get a certain amount of points in the firstplayer mode, there were more girls (6) than boys (2) when you chose your player, and there was no Mike O'Malley! Moira "Mo" Quirk, on the other hand, was there.
- In a twist on this trope, Frogger: The Great Quest got a license to make a game about a classic arcade game. While some earlier Frogger remakes were actually surprisingly good, this one attempted to make it into a 3d action platformer and failed miserably. You attacked enemies by spitting at them, and when close enough you used frog-fu (no, we're not making this up, this is the exact terminology the game used). The controls were horrible, the only difficult thing was figuring out what the heck you were supposed to do, there was no replay value unless you wanted to start the whole game over again, and the voice acting was somewhere between bad and the kind of voice that makes you want to take a hammer to your head.
The Good and the Not-Quite-As-Bad
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