It’s 2008, and I'm buckled up in the backseat of your dad’s Kia Sorento, my head buzzing with all the residual thrills of the movie you just saw. My hands, meanwhile, are clenched with a passion around the Nintendo Wii version of... Speed Racer The Video Game.
My brother and I loved the (grossly underappreciated) racing movie so much that immediately after leaving the cinema, we both begged hands and knees to drop by Target so that we could exchange our perilously-earned pocket money for a copy of the tie-in game. On the cover between my hands, Speed Racer is ripping up technicolor tarmac in his unbelievably cool Mach 6, just like he did in the unbelievably cool movie. The credits might have rolled to a close in the cinema, but there's more yet to come courtesy of The Video Game.
Today, licensed movie tie-ins like Speed Racer The Video Game are a dwindling kind. While some of 2023's bigger video games so far have indeed been based on panmedia franchises (Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, and, um, Peppa Pig World Adventures, to name a few), the list of movie tie-in games released this year is incredibly brief, consisting as it does of 0 (yes, that's zero) titles. Punctuated though our year might be with movies based on video games, we are experiencing a drought of video games that directly tie in with movies.
Now, I’m not about to exhaustively list all the reasons as to why the industry has left movie tie-in games in the dust: it’s already been done. The short of it? Consumer demand for these titles has decreased over recent years, and the most prolific movie tie-in publishers of yesteryear—THQ, Activision, and Disney Interactive—having (respectively) flirted with bankrupcy, moved on to other, original projects, or been absorbed back into their parent company, licensed movie tie-in games have long since been fading from store shelves as a result. Fast-forward to today, and these kinda games just... ain't really around no more. They're gone. I get it, I do.
But though I do get it, I still miss the flood of tie-ins we used to have.
In the mid-2000s period, it was common for any given blockbuster to have its own tie-in game—which is why we ended up with the likes of the 2008 Iron Man game, Inkheart (remember that Brendan Fraser flick?), and Coraline: The Game. Not to mention, of course, the numerous Disney/Pixar video games of the same name as their cinematic counterparts, which sometimes released with a "The Video Game" tacked on, and almost always released for all platforms, as was the Disney/Pixar style of the time.
As was the style of the time more generally though, movie tie-in games were advertised with the same zeal as the movies they tied in to. No bus stop or TV spot was spared either an ad for the movie or for its video game accompaniment. Ad-littered websites would have at least one for, say, the Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa video game. With all this advertising, it was nigh impossible not to know that whatever latest blockbuster was 'Now Showing' in cinemas, it was Coming Soon to consoles, too (that's if it wasn't already out for consoles, what with some tie-in games releasing days or weeks in advance of the movie).
Marketed with fervor, and so widely available, tie-in video games made their cinematic counterparts feel that much more momentous—not just a film that happened to be showing that month, but a cross-media event. You’d book a 12:30PM Saturday session for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 and you'd go to watch it knowing full well that if you really, really liked it, there was a tie-in game of the same name waiting right there on your local store shelf for you to pick up and play post-credits no matter what console was plugged into your TV back home.
Me, I wouldn't just watch some Pixar, Dreamworks, or action blockbuster in the cinemas once and then move on with life. I'd watch the movie, and then I'd play the tie-in game on my GBA, or on the PS2 at my friend's place, or via the Nintendo Wii at a party. I'd pop it into my DS to take with me on summer vacation, or on the bus, or anywhere. Everywhere. For hours. For days. The movies we saw never elapsed a runtime of longer than 90 minutes, but those tie-in games would keep us occupied no matter where we went for weeks if not months after the fact.
Things are a little different in this current era of ours, however. Blockbusters aren't expressively punctuated as they were in the past, as the vast majority of theatrical (and, I guess, streaming) releases tend not to be directly complemented by tie-in video games. Pixar’s 2022 family film Turning Red, for example, released last year, and was it accompanied by a console or PC release? Nope, and this coming from a director who was inspired by video games when making the film.
Ditto Lightyear, one of the more recent releases by Pixar. Ditto Disney’s Encanto, and Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and Jungle Cruise, and Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, and Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Among Thieves—all movies which undoubtedly would have received tie-in games had they released in any age prior to the present one. But they didn't, and I feel that their cultural impact was lessened as a result. With no cross-media presence, these movies came and went. With no reason for us to stay, we moved on too.
I went to see Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness in cinemas at the time of its release, and honestly, writing this article right now, this is the first time I’ve thought about that movie since. I sometimes forget I watched it at all, and I can’t help but wonder if this would be the case had the movie released with the same procession of licensed tie-in games like those movies of the mid-2000s and earlier.
I miss that momentous feeling, I miss driving home from an awesome movie with every intention of playing the video game, excited to enjoy that world for myself, not simply as a passive spectator but rather as an active participant. Whether these licensed tie-in games were as awesome as I remember isn't really the point. The point is that I remember them, and by extension so I remember the movies into which they tied.
Licensed tie-in games made each movie feel like something bigger than it was—not just an ephemeral blip in a cinema, but a cultural event spanning several hours, and consoles, and (if the console was portable) even locations. The credits might have rolled to a close in the cinema, but there was always, always more yet to come courtesy of 'The Video Game.'