Hollywood and the games industry have been trading material for decades. Plenty of films end up as board games, toys or merchandise, but a smaller number get turned into something playable.
The results are uneven. When an adaptation does land, though, it lets fans control the characters they watched on screen, whether that means a hero or the monster. Here are five films that became games, from a giant ape to a cybernetic cop.
King Kong
Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) performed well at the box office and did respectable business in gaming too.
Ubisoft put out Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, a cinematic hybrid that switched between first-person and third-person and let players control both Jack Driscoll and Kong.
Reviewers singled out its atmosphere, its survival mechanics and its decision to drop the traditional HUD entirely. It still ranks among the better film adaptations of its generation.
Players who spend time on online casino platforms may also recognise the King Kong Cash Slot, which has built its own following.
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park has produced a steady stream of games since the 1993 film. The early ones were 16-bit platformers on the SNES and Genesis.
More recent entries include park management titles like Jurassic World Evolution, where the goal is building the dinosaur attraction rather than escaping it.
Between fighting raptors, outrunning a T. rex and designing your own park, the licence has stretched to fit almost any genre.
That flexibility is why it has stayed in circulation for more than thirty years, with something for action players and strategy players alike.
Die Hard
Bruce Willis’s action classic produced several adaptations across different systems. The NES version built itself around the film’s one-man-against-many premise.
Die Hard Trilogy (1996) on PlayStation earned cult status by bundling three separate styles into one release: third-person shooting, light-gun action and high-speed driving.
Quality varied from game to game. Fans turned up anyway, mostly for the chance to play out John McClane’s wisecracking fights against terrorists.
Batman
Batman started in comics, but his film appearances have generated tie-in games for decades. Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) led to NES and Genesis versions. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight produced spinoffs of its own.
The character’s best games came later, with the Batman: Arkham series. Those aren’t direct film tie-ins, but their tone and cinematic presentation borrow heavily from the movies that came before them.
RoboCop
Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi action film was an obvious fit for games. Early arcade and console versions leaned into the gritty shootouts of Detroit’s cybernetic police officer, and later releases expanded on his fight against crime and corruption in the city.
He has returned more recently in RoboCop: Rogue City (2023), an adaptation that keeps both the heavy action and the satire that ran through the original film.
Final thoughts
Film-to-game adaptations have a mixed record, but King Kong, Jurassic Park, Die Hard, Batman and RoboCop all show what the format can do with the right treatment.
Surviving Skull Island, running from dinosaurs, trading one-liners as John McClane, patrolling Gotham, enforcing the law in Detroit: the two industries keep borrowing from each other, and these games are the reason it keeps happening.
