Gamers miss the good-old days of video game movie tie-ins

Gamers are looking back at the time when seemingly every feature film had a video game adaption, with some wishing they’d return.

I’m sure we’ve all played a film tie-in game at some point, right? One that either retells the story of a film, expands on or acts as an entirely standalone story in that film’s universe.

Take a look at Marvel's Spider-Man 2 below.

Some of my personal favourites from when I was a small gamer were The Incredibles, Spider-Man 2, King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie and of course, GoldenEye 007. While they tended to differ in terms of quality or replayability, often being a quick cash-grab that took advantage of the hype surrounding the latest films, some of them were incredible titles that are still worth playing today.

You’d find most of them on the PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and original Xbox, typically really cheap as well since they’d only appeal to a younger audience, meaning they filled up bargain bins very quickly. Over the years though, they’ve seemingly gone extinct, as you just don’t see them anymore, leading Reddit user kneehighonagrasshopr to wonder why.

They created a post saying: "What happened to video games based on every single movie? I remember growing up in the early to mid-2000s and they'd make a video game for just about every movie out there … I'm not saying they were all good by any means but it's kind of weird that one day they all just stopped.”

Fans discussed the disappearance in the comments, with many blaming the video game industry’s transformation into a direct competitor to films, as well as the explosion of new IPs that don’t need to be tied to an existing franchise.

“They didn't sell well and the lead times for games have outpaced movie marketing timelines," said one wise user. “They died out because games aren’t as cheap to make anymore since the expectations are much higher, they were designed to be cheap cash grabs, if you want to do that nowadays you can just put out a mobile game or put an event out in a pre-existing game whilst getting more revenue," added another.

Sadly, it seems we’ll never see any tie-in film games ever again, mainly because, as some of the commenters correctly pointed out, they just won’t sell well compared to the latest AAA releases.