Of course how could I forget Xwing and Tie Fighter, two of my all time favorite games! Also those console starwars games are pretty Rad, espe the Gamecube ones.

What the game developers should be doing is not replicating the movie into a game, but trying to find the themes and the feel of the movie (or of any existing franchise) and turn it into a new and different experience. This is something that Battle for Middle Earth succeeded in (or so I gather, I haven’t played the game). Then again, the problem is probably as much in the constraining IP as it is in the non-imaginative designers.

Ofcourse there always the one game that was not only based on an existing IP and a sequel but also created a totally new genre or games: Dune II.

@Jay: I totally forgot Indiana Jones adventure games – those rocked big time! X-wing was also nice to play.

@Lund: What you say seems to resonate with what I wrote earlier about quality/time/money. Why not share some insight about your product bit earlier? ;)

Basically there are two kinds of licenses:

1) The license is for a movie already released and therefore you don’t have insane time constraints. On the other hand publishers going for this model are typically not very likely to give you a “proper” budget to work from and therefore either scope or quality must suffer on the altar of development budget / time. Production value suffers.

2) The license is for an upcoming movie and therefore you have a lot of time pressure. This forces you to use “tried and tested” gameplay mechanics often makng the games uninteresting. Furthermore the graphics are typically rushed as there is typically high production value and lots of content to produce but not so much time. Quality suffers.

Of course there are notable differences (Godfather, already released movie, huge budget, mediocre game or Chronicles of Riddick, upcoming movie, new game production company, unproven studio, excellent game).

At this particular moment in time I’m working on a project that has a different approach (thank god for forward looking movie production companies) and I’ll be happy to tell you all about it in a couple of years :-)

Three things were working in their favor that few movie-licensed games have:

#1 – I’ll bet they got the license “cheap,” as part of the company that owned the I.P. That was more money to spend on actual development.

#2 – They were existing movie licenses for already-released movies. They didn’t have to constrain the schedule to match a film’s release to hitch a ride on the same hypewagon.

#3 – They didn’t attempt to mirror the events of any movies too closely. They used the setting and some characters from the license, but told their own story, one that worked for a game. Of course, they did have you blow up the death star in X-Wing. But they let YOU do it – they didn’t force you to be Luke Skywalker. That’s more leeway than they’d probably have given an external developer with the canon, I think.

It would surely turn out quite differently, if movie production and game production were not constrained too much, e.g. if there are years between the movie and the game and they decide “let’s make a really cool game based on the movie” instead of “we run out of money, let’s convert our movie into a stupid FPS” ;)

But there are of course exceptions. In fact, I enjoyed Ghostbusters on the C64 and The Lion King on the PC ;)

As for the other way round, the Silent Hill movie is pretty neat, and Resident Evil was OK.

But year it’s fairly rare to see a successfull “port” either way.