These days it almost seems like a given. A popcorn movie hits theaters, a huge marketing blitz follows, and a video game limps into stores to the joy of no one. Uniformly awful, it sells few copies, banished instead to the five-dollar bin at your local Best Buy. It’s a routine that Hollywood can’t appear to shake.
It wasn’t always this way, though. Time was, fifteen or twenty years ago, that developers seemed to take great pride in making their movie tie-ins the worst possible game imaginable. Meaningless obscurity wasn’t enough for these intrepid creators; no, they would not stop until new terrible heights had been scaled in the field of game design. Their lives were not complete until every good memory you had of a film was negated, and bad films were turned into terrible atrocities against mankind. At one point these games were simply wastes of a good two weeks’ allowance, but now they take on a classical significance, giving us insight into a time when people still worked up the enthusiasm to create a truly awful game to accompany a film.
Think, for example, on Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Not only did it miss the release date of the movie by nearly six months, but the game itself was filled with roughly a thousand anachronisms and absurdities. What does one say about a game which features a spontaneously combusting Kevin Costner avatar? Or one that requires you to search dead bodies for apples they may have been carrying when they expired?
If this game is to be believed, every man in Mediaeval England had a satchel of apples with him at all times, just in case it came up. Be prepared to collect a lot of apples, fight mustachioed gentlemen, and investigate many trees. I spent many hours with the game, and I only encountered something resembling the plot of the film right before I gave up and beat my friend’s NES to death.“Maybe it was the fact that it was only a marginally-successful film,” you say. “What about the mega-hits? Surely they are impervious to poor game design?” I tell you in reply that we are going to take a quick look at all of the games made for Jurassic Park. This film made over a billion dollars in its initial theatrical release, spawning a devotion not often seen in movies. Some of the tie-ins, such as the line of dinosaur toy replicas or the myriad books about the making of the film, were well-produced and lived up to the film’s high quality. The games, however, were as useless as a warm blanket in a Manhattan summer. There were definitely two camps to the awfulness, the both of which dictated which sort of suffering you would endure throughout 1993 and into 1995.
Nintendo gave its loyal subjects a cavalcade of Zelda-esque crawlers, emphasizing finding objects and traveling through large buildings over actual dinosaur encounters. Sega offered a busted and unplayable view of every boy’s fantasy: making the raptor the lead character. Both of these systems gave us startlingly bad renditions of what should have been a simple concept to execute. Jurassic Park was every bit a triumph of popular entertainment, but the success apparently let the programmers think that anything with the Jurassic Park name would sell. Instead of a game which let the player throw themselves into the film’s incredible action sequences, Sega provided a game which allowed the player to become irrevocably stuck in a tree if they happened to hit the C Button as the game was starting. Nintendo, capitalizing on this failure, made a dungeon crawl so appallingly boring that not even the most fervent Phantasy Star player could stand it. Our reaction as children in the early 1990s was to flip the system off and find another game to power through. Nearly fifteen years on, we can view the game through the hazy lens of nostalgia, but still none of us want to play the damn thing.
As bad as the video trips inside the Park were, they were nothing compared to the horror wrought by a truly pitiful film. It turned out that it took a complete failure of a movie, a turkey of epic proportions, to create a game worse than possibly all the other bad games combined. Ladies and gentlemen, you can blame Bruce Willis, because Hudson Hawk is that game. In the words of noted online critic Seanbaby, Hudson Hawk is “notably shitty.” In a world filled with uninspired or lacking video game adaptations, here was a game that failed on all levels. Your guy looked nothing like Bruce Willis, the backgrounds gave you no idea of where you were, and your controller didn’t seem to do anything. I was fully convinced that I had accidentally plugged the toaster into the controller port for several minutes as I struggled to get my little Willis to understand the concept of jumping. It turns out that I was indeed holding the correct implement and that the system was working perfectly; the designers of this particular game had forgotten to program any game into this game.
They must have been clairvoyant, as they were the only people to anticipate the staggering failure that the film would suffer in theaters. I found the ten minute cycle of Hawk jumping from the roof of a New York auction house time and time again rather soothing, and more entertaining than the smirking lounge-act in-joke that was the film. Amazingly, the game was almost hypnotizing in its awfulness, enjoyable in how unenjoyable it was. I’m sure that, if I had figured out how to actually play the game, that I would have eventually found a veritable black hole of awfulness somewhere around the third level. Although I doubt that a third level existed, given the state of the first.Where have these days gone? Why must the Game Boy Advance suffer a slow death at the hands of innumerable games based upon Disney Channel shows, ones that are programmed by designers who may well be trying their hardest? No, there is no need for these games. What we need are games based on Stealth, Flyboys, The Island, and other big-budget monstrosities which are bound to be hoisted by their own petard when the public gets ahold of them. There’s three months until the popcorn season kicks in, Hollywood, so get the game companies ready. We need a new Fantastic Four game! Die Hard is making its triumphant return to a noncommittal audience, and lord knows that Bruce Willis has terrorized gamers before! And I’m issuing a challenge to you: let’s see how bad you can mess up a Bourne Ultimatum video game. Don’t let me down.
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