The game (center) and the novels written by Jiro Akagawa.
Video Games are a medium that can easily be adapted from a book or comic series. Typically, to gain a mainstream audience a book is adapted into a movie. A less common occurrence is when a book is adapted straight into a game. These were common in the late 1980s and early 1990s when graphical computer games were becoming popular.
Examples:
- Tom Clancy is the Trope Codifier for this, with the Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell series. Tom Clancy examples go all the way back to the late-1980s sub sim based on Red Storm Rising.
- Telltale Games' Bone game and the Sam & Max: Freelance Police series.
- The Discworld books have had a few games based on them: a Text Adventure based on The Colour of Magic, two Rincewind-centric games that took elements from multiple books, and Discworld Noir, which had an original protagonist and storyline. (There still haven't been any big-screen films yet, just TV movies.)
- Infocom's adaptations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) and Shogun
- Two for The Great Gatsby (not entirely serious).
- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
- American McGee's Grimm and Alice games take liberties with the source material, but are essentially Grimmified adaptations of books rather than any of the films based on the original written material.
- A few comic-book games have adapted specific stories rather than general material or movie and TV versions of the characters or series:
- Asterix has been adapted into several games on several platforms.
- The Superman SNES and Genesis games adapting the "Death and Return" arc from the comics.
- Ultimate Spider-Man, which was supposed to be in-continuity with a current arc of the comic. It didn't quite work out.
- Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is a loose adaptation of the Civil War Crisis Crossover.
- Years before that, Captain America and the Avengers was an even looser adaptation of the "Acts of Vengeance" crossover.
- The Iron Man/X-O Manowar game adapts the intercompany crossover of the same title.
- The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction got a Recursive Adaptation comics miniseries released simultaneously with the video game, creating an ambivalent example. Like the Ultimate Spider-Man example, it was supposed to be comic-book canon but didn't end up fitting properly.
- The Ur-Example comes from Tellarium Games in the early 1980s. They adapted several books into games with varying degrees of success from In Name Only (Swiss Family Robinson) to canonical sequels to the author's original work. The most famous of these was their Canon sequel to the Green-Sky Trilogy, which got the greenlight from Zilpha Keatley Snyder provided they use the game to reverse a decision she regretted making in the final book. She actually drew the map of the tree city Orbora for the game, and her music-professor husband, Larry, wrote the music.
- Ray Bradbury also helped write a Fahrenheit 451 game for them that acts as a sequel to the book.
- In 2010, Dante's Inferno was produced as an action-adventure game. The weird part is that the tie-in novel... was the actual 700-year-old epic poem, just with branding and art from the game.
- The game Megami Tensei was born from a novel series, Digital Devil Story, that would become a large series containing plenty of spin-offs, such as Persona series, as well as many sequels using the original Megami Tensei name.
- The official website for the Inheritance Cycle has an Interactive Fiction game
, Alagaesia Adventure Game. Considering that it's featured on the official site, it's probably at least a semi-official adaptation.
- Companions of Xanth, a 1993 adventure game based on one of the Xanth books. Fittingly enough, the book in question is about someone playing a computer game that allows the player to explore Xanth.
- One of Interplay Entertainment's early games was an Adventure Game based on Neuromancer.
- Callahan's Crosstime Saloon was also adapted (by Sierra) into an Adventure Game.
- Metro 2033 is based on a Russian novel of the same name.
- Suikoden was based off The Water Margin.
- Parasite Eve was the sequel to a novel.
- Rendezvous with Rama was also adapted (by Sierra) into Rama. There was going to be a movie...
- Robot City was adapted from the novel series of the same name, set in Isaac Asimov's universe.
- The Ancient Art of War was based on Sun Tzu's The Art of War, a 2,500-year-old treatise on military strategy. Sun Tzu appears in-game as the most challenging opponent.
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game is based on the comics rather than the movie, but the game and comic book were released in tandem.
- While the Harry Potter video games are mostly based on the films, they sometimes contain elements from the books which were not included in the movie versions.
- The Tick game was primarily based on the Animated Series, but also used several characters exclusive to the comics, such as the Running Man, the Red Scare and Clark Oppenheimer.
- A Game of Thrones: Genesis, based on the book but released alongside the TV series
- The Cat in the Hat had a game to go with the live-action movie version. While the movie is not considered to be all that good, some versions of the game are actually pretty good.
- The 1989 Infocom game Circuits Edge was based on George Alec Effinger's middle-eastern Cyberpunk novel, When Gravity Fails.
- Around the time The Lord of the Rings movies came out, The Fellowship of the Ring (book, not movie) was adapted into a so-so Action-Adventure game. The same publisher released a game adaptation of The Hobbit the following year, well before The Hobbit films.
- The Coraline video game is a rare example of a game adapted from both the book and the film it is based on. It also predates the animated movie's release by a week.
- Majotachi no Nemuri is based partly on two novels written by Jiro Akagawa's two novels, namely Majotachi no Tasogare (Twilight of the Witches) and Majotachi no Nagai Nemuri (Long Sleep of the Witches).
- The Witcher was based on an obscure Polish series. It became a surprise hit that brought the books to the attention of a wider audience, which in turn spawned more games and a Netflix series.
