10 Of The Best Movie Universes That Expanded In Video Games

Hollywood loves to make sequels and prequels, taking something that has already been successful and expanding it into further installments is not only simpler than making something new, it is also more likely to be a success due to that sweet brand recognition. 

Countless terrible movie tie-in video games try to make a quick buck for the studios cashing in on the recognisable name yet often having very little effort put into them. Many of these poorly made games will only copy the basic story from the film adding in interactive sections or more action and fighting. 

But at times something different happens, you will be treated to something new, something that wasn’t in the movie, some piece of the story that takes place either before or after the big screen adventure, making these games a must-play for fans.

Let’s look at some of these amazing examples.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

PS2, PS3, PSP, PS4, Wii, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Switch & PC

Who ya gonna call?

If you ever wanted to live in an alternate dimension where the original cast of the classic Ghostbusters movies made a 3rd installment, unfortunately we don’t have the tech to get you there, but we may have the next best thing.

Originally released in 2009, twenty years after the 2nd film, Ghostbusters The Video Game released on multiple platforms, and unlike other Ghostbusters games that came before or since, this game not only features the likenesses and voices of the 4 original cast members (plus some of the actors from the films) but was also partially written by both Dan Akroyd (Ray) & Harold Ramis (Egon).

The game was set two years after the 2nd film and finds our team of Parapsychologists have become city contractors who are authorised and insured to capture ghosts in New York City. The team needs more help so recruit our silent player character who is lovingly called ‘Rookie’ by the team. Your main role is to support the team and to field test their newer more dangerous equipment, Egon is smart enough to have any of the original team test this stuff.

The crew fights off enough ghosts and other paranormal baddies to fill out a whole two extra movies even traveling to the Afterlife dimension (no connection to the 2021 movie of the same name) the team saves the day but realises that they are overstaffed. Instead of sending Rookie on their way to find a mundane desk job, they offer them the chance of being the head of a Ghostbusters franchise in a new location.

What makes this video game so great?

The simple fact is the excellent writing and performances from the cast give the game the level of authenticity that fans of the films will be looking for.

Harold Ramis had stated when asked that he considered this game and its story to be the 3rd film in the series, unfortunately, five years after the game was released Ramis passed away leaving this as the last Ghostbusters project that features the four original cast members.

Luckily for fans of the series, the game was available on multiple platforms and as of 2019, the game’s 10th anniversary and 35th anniversary of the original movie was remastered on PlayStation 4,  Xbox One and Nintendo Switch meaning you can bust ghosts while on the go.

Back To The Future: The Game

PC, PS3, iOS, Wii, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One

Great Scott!

Yes my friends, through the magic of video games you can experience a Back To The Future video game set after the classic trilogy but before the animated series (who else remembers that great theme tune?)

Picking up 6 months following Doc and his family leave on the Train Time Machine, Marty and his father George are sorting through Doc’s home as the bank is about to foreclose on the property. Suddenly a DeLorean appears outside the house with Einstein inside and a message from Doc saying the time machine would arrive there if Doc ever got into trouble.

What follows is a 5 part adventure from legendary narrative studio TellTale which takes Marty back through Hill Valley’s past to save his best friend with each episode ending with a shocking twist and a tease of what is to come next.

If you are a fan of the films you will likely enjoy this additional adventure, and if you are familiar with TellTale’s video games (who make another entry later in this list) from their Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us series you will know what to expect from the gameplay, lots of exploring 3D environments and interacting with NPC’s with some light puzzle solving. 

This game came about as a licensing deal with Universal Studios and as such the movie trilogy co-writer Bob Gale (who also co-created and co-directed with Robert Zemeckis) and the studio even put out an online survey to ask where fans would be interested in the story going.

Christopher Lloyd reprises his role of Doc Emmett Brown and although Michael J Fox could not reprise his role, actor A. J. Locascio does a great job as Marty while Fox would return to voice some McFly descendants in the final episode.

Another surprising casting is that of Claudia Wells returning to voice Jennifer Parker after she left the series before parts 2 & 3 due to personal reasons.

When the game was re-released for PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in 2015 for the 30th anniversary of the original movie Thomas F Wilson reprised the role of Biff Tannen re-recording the lines originally done by Kid Beyond.

Unfortunately, the game fell to a similar fate as many other licensed titles and was removed from digital storefronts meaning that physical copies are difficult to find and expensive to buy, but from one BTTF fan to all the others out there I say give the game a go if you can.

(hot tip, if you had PS+ back in Jan 2012 you may still be able to download it to your PS3 console)

The Amazing Spider-Man

PS3, PS Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, PC, 3DS, Wii

2012 not only gave us our first superhero team-up movie with the MCU’s Avengers (or Avengers Assemble if you’re in the UK) but we were also waiting to find out how a Spider-Man reboot was going to work following the successful Toby Maquire trilogy.

Of course as with those Spider-Man films, a video game tie-in was released but unlike the previous tie-ins something was different.

As you may have guessed the story of this game was set a short time after the events of the film. Peter and Gwen are investigating Oscorp as they believe the new Director Alistair Smythe is continuing Dr Connors’s cross-species experiments.

What is great about this story is that because Spider-Man has such a large gallery of animal-based enemies, we get to see some excellent alternative versions of characters in this game including Rhyno & Scorpion. Spidey even has to break out and work with Connors/Lizard to take on some of these enemies.

This story of course is non-canon as we did get an Amazing Spider-Man 2 movie and none of these events are tied into it, one example of this is Felicia Hardy appearing as a version of Black Cat in the game, but when she showed up in the movie sequel she only an assistant to Harry Osborn with her presumably being set up to return in future as the anti-hero.

Overall The Amazing Spider-Man game is a great tie-in to the movie as it bucks the trend of copying the story of the film and stuffing extra characters in to fill out the length. The story is worthwhile and Manhattan is excellent to swing around, also the developers added a great web zip mechanic that slowed down time and let you aim your web zip from beneath Spideys mask. The game also had a DLC pack called The Stan Lee Adventure that allowed you to play as Stan Lee with all of Spider-Mans powers and features missions made for Spider-Mans 50th anniversary.

Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son

PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive

Watch that first step, it’s a doozy.

As was proved with the Ghostbusters video game, you can indeed make a video game sequel to a classic Bill Murray movie and it can be good. In 2019 Tequila Works the studio behind such brilliant titles as Rime & The Sexy Brutale, took us back to Punxsutawney, this time in VR as Phil Connors Jr the son of Murray’s Phil Connors.

As you may expect Phil Jr finds himself in his own time loop and must do what he can to help the residents of the town and figure out how to end the loop.

This video game takes on a 3D cartoon graphical style for its rich-looking environments and features plenty of voiced NPC’s to interact with. The gameplay is puzzle-based as many come to expect from VR titles but it does also feature a great Rockband-esqe guitar mini-game.

Like Father Like Son plays well but does have some issues with its gameplay, the biggest issue is having to use teleportation and click-turning to get around, but the game reviewed well back in 2019 and is something all fans of the original movie should consider checking out if they have the right hardware.

Stranglehold

PC, PS3, Xbox 360

Tequila lot of people.

Now you may not know this but action shooter Stranglehold is a sequel to the 1992 John Woo classic Hard Boiled starring Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Tequila Yeun.

Now if you’re an Asian cinema fan in the UK you may be thinking that Hard Boiled 2 already happened, however, that movie not only has nothing to do with Tequila it wasn’t even directed by Woo. This movie was originally called The Last Blood in Hong Kong and when later released in the Philippines it was called Police Protectors. Movie localisations truly are a weird and wonderful rabbit hole to fall down.

Stranglehold is a 3rd person action shooter video game where players take control of Inspector Yeun as he fights through the streets taking out gang members by using a variety of guns and using special moves. Inspector Yeun can shoot from behind cover and dive through the air as well as slide down handrails all in glorious Woo-esqe slo-mo.

As for the story, Stranglehold takes the sequel style of telling a new and unrelated story featuring a familiar character, much like how Hollywood handles a Die Hard movie. Inspector Yeun goes against his Chiefs orders to find a missing police officer all while three different Triad gangs are fighting a turf war, chaos and glorious gunfights ensue.

Inspector Yeun was meant to return in another video game outing called Gun Runner, but due to developer Midway going bankrupt in 2010, this sequel was unfortunately cancelled.

Maybe we could one day see Inspector Yeun return as a DLC character in that little-known former Midway fighting series Mortal Kombat.

Enter The Matrix

Gamecube, PS2, Xbox, PC

Ok, strap in folks, because this entry goes places.

First, let’s talk about 2003’s Enter the Matrix, which doesn’t directly continue any of the films’ stories, but it plays an important part in the Matrix’s cross-media narrative, which was a pretty new concept back then.

The game sees you taking on the role of Captain Niobe and her First Mate Ghost as they fight the machines and try to protect Zion alongside Neo, Trinity & Morpheus filling in some gaps from the 2nd Matrix movie.

Ever wonder where Niobi gets the news that the machines are digging? Or why Persephone killed her bodyguards with silver bullets? Maybe you’ve been wondering how Niobe managed to turn up in a car during the highway chase just in time to catch Morpheus? These answers and many more are in the deeper lore found within The Animatrix and the Enter The Matrix game.

Enter The Matrix works well as a video game companion to the movies and features fun gameplay using bullet time moves to run up walls and fight just like the characters in the film. At the time of release, many were left disappointed at getting a Matrix game that didn’t let you play as the all-powerful Neo, this would later be fulfilled by The Path Of Neo which allowed you to play the entirety of Neo’s journey with a slightly wackier ending.

The main reason that Enter The Matrix is worth playing is how it ties into and contributes to the story of the movies linking itself directly to the first episode of The Animatrix. Niobe and Ghost have to retrieve a tape from inside the matrix left by the crew of The Orisis after they lost their lives getting the news of the machines digging towards the resistance. This immediately precedes the meeting from the beginning of Reloaded and sets up the story for the two sequels. As well as this the game takes place throughout the 2nd movie and weaves itself alongside and through its narrative.

The Matrix Online

PC

If you thought the story of The Matrix universe ended in 2003 with The Matrix Revolutions then you’d be very wrong. The following year PC players were treated to The Matrix Online, an online game that looked to continue the story following the death of Neo. Once players create their character they then need to choose one of 3 factions,

Zion; who fights for humanity,

Machines; who fight to protect The Matrix,

Merovingian; who aren’t bothered with the conflict of the previous 2 and only get involved when it serves to be advantageous to their group or the Exiles they are helping.

During the online game, players were treated to snippets of story and some cut scenes which are all canon to the overall story. These include such important details as Morpheus mentioning that Neo’s body was never returned from the Machine City even though there was peace between them and Zion, and the machines would not confirm that his body had been recycled.

Then in a later story, Morpheus steps up his attack on the machines to find out what happened to the body of Neo, setting off bombs that although harmless to humans plugged into the matrix, were devastating to all red pills within the blast area. Whilst setting one of these bombs, Morpheus was ambushed by an assassin who had an incredible skill to bend the rules of the Matrix and Morpheus fell to his bullets.

But this isn’t the end of Morpheus’s story within The Matrix. Later The General, a program that commanded the machine army that attacked Zion, created a digital fabrication of Morpheus to be used as his own weapon. Still, this program grows to gain its own self-awareness and defies The General even to the point of fighting against his own deletion which possibly helps to explain the alternate version of Morpheus that we see in the Resurrections movie.

Following many more story missions the game was eventually shut down on June 31st 2009, with some questions left unanswered especially those about Neo who never appeared in the game but was rumored to have been alive, at least in some sense.

This was the end of The Matrix’s story at least for the next 12 years. In 2021 The Matrix Resurrections hit cinemas to follow on from the 3rd movie and surprisingly to many it also seemed to take into account the story of The Matrix Online as well, with Morpheus having died and a program created with his personality to replace him, and Neo and Trinity resurrected by the machines. All in all, when The Wachowskis set out to make the story of The Matrix a cross-media product, they certainly achieved something never seen before or since in Hollywood, and I for one love it.

The Warriors

Xbox, PS2, PSP

Come out to play-ay.

The movie that rewired your brain to fear the sound of clinking bottles. Where a gang is wrongly accused of killing a gang leader and then chased across NYC in the course of one night while they try to make it back to their turf at Coney Island. The film is iconic, so a video game adaptation was going to need an iconic studio to take it on. In steps mid-2000’s Rockstar, hot off the heels of releasing GTA San Andreas and boy did they knock it out of the park once again

The Warriors casts you as the titular gang as they defend their home turf and fight other gangs, with some of the best melee combat Rockstar has produced to date. The game acts as an adaptation of the film and its plot letting you play levels based on key moments and fights, but it also includes a prologue mission set 3 months before the events of the film with The Warriors taking out a rival gang known as The Destroyers. Then you play through the events of the film and over 18 missions and unlock 5 Flashback missions that show how some members of the gang came to join.

Rockstar attempted to keep the game as faithful to the movie as possible, with many scenes from the movie recreated in cutscenes and even going as far as casting 6 actors from the film to voice their character in the game, including Michael Beck as Swan and James ‘Dexters Dad’ Remar as Ajax. 

The Warriors stands as one of the greatest movie tie-in video games ever made, what more would you expect from Rockstar of course.

Now Can You Dig That Suckas.

Blade Runner

PC 1997 

Enhanced Edition PC, PS4, Xbox One & Switch 2022

Do gamers dream of pixelated sheep?

How do you take one of the most beloved sci-fi movies of the 1980s and make a video game adaptation in the late 90s when nobody can decide on the definitive edition of said movie? Do you adapt the story of the film or make a sequel? Well Westwood Studios (no not that Westwood, thankfully) decided to dodge the Voight-Kampff machine of fan’s expectations and made what has been referred to as a sidequel. A video game that plays out alongside the story of the movie it is based on. 

You play as Blade Runner Ray McCoy, a rookie who is on the hunt for replicants suspected of killing animals. The gameplay consists of Lucasfilm-esqe point and click adventure with McCoy needing to analyse clues, talk to suspects and find evidence. While McCoy is presumed to be human when you start, the game may imply otherwise throughout its run time with some of its 13 different endings either confirming if McCoy is human or a replicant while others will not confirm either way. 

Deckard is not featured in the game but his actions from the film are mentioned in the game as you progress. Much like The Warriors video game, Blade Runner does have several actors from the films voice their characters once again including Sean Young as Rachael, James Hong as Hannibal Chew & Joe Turkel as Dr Eldon Tyrel.

If you still need more Blade Runner in your life then I recommend seeking out the 3 sequel novels by K.W.Jeter, they’re an excellent continuation of Deckard’s story that was written before the 2nd movie was confirmed.

Jurassic Park: The Game

PC, Xbox 360, PS3, iOS

There have been plenty of Jurassic Park games since the film franchise first hit cinemas in 1993. From action platformers to shooters, park builders to strategy games and even a Lego entry.

In 2011 we got something a little different, from the good folks at Telltale Games, another example of the sidequel video game, at least partially. Set over 4 episodic stories the first of which sees Dennis Nedry’s contacts from the dock enter Jurassic Park to recover his canister of dinosaur embryos only to end up having to deal with dinos themselves. Episode 2 is set following the movie with a team of mercenaries sent in to rescue other survivors, why did we always assume nobody else survived? Episodes 2-4 continue to follow these other survivors and the mercenaries sent to rescue them who become stuck on the island themselves.

Unfortunately even for a Telltale game, Jurassic Park: The Game wasn’t the huge success many had hoped for with only a 54% rating on Metacritic making it one of the worst received games from the team, and much like with Back To The Future the licensing agreement ran out and it is now practically impossible to play the game.

Unfortunately, like many licensed games before and since, Life Cannot Find A Way.

The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay

PC, Xbox

With a title like The Chronicles Of…. we were really hoping for more of an expansion to the Pitch Black spin-off universe when the 2nd film to feature Vin Diesel’s shiny-eyed serial killer launched in 2004. Yes, we did eventually get another film with 2013s Riddick, but the series has not reached the great heights that many had hoped. Luckily video games can help to ease some of that pain.

Launching alongside the film in 2004 The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay was an action stealth video game that would fill in some of the blanks from Riddick’s past, especially the infamous eye-shining story. Riddick himself Vin Diesel had a role in producing the game and of course, voicing the character. 

Escape From Butcher Bay is a prequel to Pitch Black and is, in the official timeline, the earliest entry in the Riddick saga. Featuring Riddicks stealthy and murderous escape from the infamous prison. The game was critically praised and has the rare distinction of being possibly better than the film it is based on.

Escape From Butcher Bay received a sequel in 2009 titled Assult On Dark Athena which was released on PC and Xbox but additionally on PlayStation 3 and featured an enhanced remaster of Butcher Bay on all systems. Dark Athena continued where Butcher Bay finished and led up to the events of Pitch Black. 

Final Thoughts

These are just a few examples of some of our favourite films that had their stories continued in video games and there are bound to be plenty more out there in the wild.

However, with AAA video game budgets ballooning over the years, it seems less likely that a big studio would risk making a game tied directly to a movie, especially as they would have to start development long before filming starts. Maybe we can see a trend starting for smaller studios to get the chance to put their own unique stamp on our favourite film stories.

If you could spin off any film story into a video which would you choose?