Riddick Rises: 2004 was the year movie tie-in video games stopped sucking
2004 broke a long streak of awful movie and TV tie-in video games, courtesy of great showings from Spider-Man, Vin Diesel's Riddick, and more
![Riddick Rises: 2004 was the year movie tie-in video games stopped sucking](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/08/14093413/2004-Game-Tie-Ins.jpg)
![Spider-Man 2](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212135/TieIn-SpiderMan.jpg)
Treyarch’s video game adaptation of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie was actually a pretty fun beat-em-up, and even featured a credible attempt to capture the web-slinging action of Peter Parker’s ever-stressful double life. But its sequel—not unlike the film it pulls its plot beats, its staggering ambition, and its genuinely delightful Bruce Campbell cameos from—was a revelation on a whole other order. For the first time, players were given a full version of Manhattan to swing around in—a first for mainstream superhero gaming—complete with crimes to foil, villains to fight, and, yes, runaway kids’ balloons to re-capture. (It doesn’t hurt that, in addition to Campbell, Activision also got the other stars from the movies to reprise their roles, too.) Every really good Spider-Man game of the last 20 years (and there have been several) works from the template set by what could have been an easy cash-in—had Treyarch not taken this particular great responsibility so seriously.
![The Lord Of The Rings: The Third Age](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212227/TieIn-ThirdAge.jpg)
![Def Jam: Fight For NY](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212307/TieIn-DefJam.jpg)
Almost undeniably the greatest video game ever made in which Henry Rollins will teach you how to suplex a dude through a set of speakers, Fight For NY, as the name implies, isn’t a tie-in to a film or show, but to the famous record label. Which is to say that it is—like the earlier Def Jam: Vendetta—a wrestling game in which the stable of wrestlers is made up almost entirely of Def Jam rappers all designed to look as swole as possible. (Also, Carmen Electra is there, because the “2004” is strong with this one.) Beyond the novelty of seeing Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, Method Man, Ludacris, Flavor Flav, and many, many other very famous rappers face off in the ring, though, Fight For NY cracks this list because it’s just a ridiculously fun version of video game wrestling: Quick-moving, just technical enough to be interesting, and with the ability to deal out some extremely satisfying hits. (It’s a bit like the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater of wrestling games—if THPS had an extremely bullshit final boss fight where Snoop Dogg gets to use a gun in a wrestling match, which we’re still mad about 20 years after the fact.)
![Tron 2.0](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212349/TieIn-Tron.jpg)
Alas, Tron 2.0: Eclipsed by history, forgotten by canon, and probably not even the most popular Tron interpretation to pop up in video games in the mid-2000s. (Kingdom Hearts 2, with its “Space Paranoids” chapter, came out the following year.) But as an artifact of aesthetics, Monolith’s efforts to revive Disney’s most nerd-happy franchise 6 years before Tron: Legacy remains genuinely fascinating. Tron had done well in video games before, of course—its 1982 arcade cabinet is arguably a better time than the Jeff Bridges film itself—but Tron 2.0‘s designers did their damnedest to create a reputable version of The Grid supposedly lurking inside our various devices that actually looked better than the film. The story itself is mostly rote (as opposed to Legacy, you’re playing as Bruce Boxleitner’s digitized kid, instead of Bridges), and the actual gameplay, while a well-enough-made shooter, didn’t set the world on digital fire. But it’s nevertheless an able expression of the idea that gaming tech had gotten good enough that you could out-do a one-time technical marvel in the interactive space, provided you cared enough to pull it off.
![Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212427/TieIn-Kotor.jpg)
There had been good Star Wars games before KOTOR 2, and there have been good Star Wars games since. But no Star Wars game, we’d argue, has been more interested in sitting in critical conversation with Star Wars than Obsidian’s odd, technically flawed, spiritually gorgeous RPG. (A sequel to a much more pedestrian, but popular, effort by BioWare the year before.) Centered on an exiled Jedi returning to the galaxy after years of seclusion—only to find themselves hunted by the sub-titular Sith Lords, and accompanied by a steadily accruing crew of highly damaged personalities—KOTOR 2 is buggy, unbalanced, and occasionally a slog to play. It’s also thought more about the Force, the Jedi, the Sith, and this whole ridiculous, wonderful setting in more and better detail than any 5 other games in the franchise, showing that video games couldn’t just recreate their contractually licensed source material, but critique, analyze, and improve upon it.
![Astro Boy: Omega Factor](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212504/TieIn-Astro.jpg)
![The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212550/TieIn-Riddick.jpg)
![Dishonorable Mentions: The more things change…](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2024/07/31212630/TieIn-Fight.jpg)
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