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

By William Hughes | August 14, 2024 | 9:00am

Games Lists 2004 Week

Riddick Rises: 2004 was the year movie tie-in video games stopped sucking

The movie or TV tie-in game has had a long, storied, and mostly craptacular history in gaming. If you’re like us (i.e., extremely old, bordering on dust) you probably remember perusing the rental shelves of a game store way back in the day, seeing the poster of your favorite movie staring back at you from an NES box… and then finding out what, exactly, developers had done to poor Kevin McCallister in their deeply underwhelming versions of Home Alone. (Okay, actually, the Home Alone NES game is kind of fascinating—it’s a trap-based simulator where you’re being constantly pursued by the Wet Bandits, with no direct way to stop them except leading them into peril—but it’s not good.) There were exceptions to the rule, of course, with Capcom’s Disney adaptations for Nintendo an early and obvious series of successes. (To say nothing of the big, if sporadic, wins that Star Wars occasionally eked out in gaming.) But for the most part, harried developers, rushing to hit movie release windows, didn’t seem to worry quite as hard about those games that came with a big movie license attached. In the late ”90s and early 2000s, though, that trend began to shift. Every now and then, you’d get something like the N64’s Goldeneye, or hyper-ambitious Matrix interquel Enter The Matrix. In 2004, that trend hit full fruition: As the home gaming consoles of the PlayStation 2/GameCube/Xbox era started to get more powerful, developers began to realize you could actually make video games that did right by beloved film characters. You didn’t have to have E.T. walk around falling in holes, or drop the cast of Antz into a Mario Kart-style go-kart racer. You could, heaven forfend, make a video game wherein Spider-Man did Spider-Man shit. It wasn’t perfect—2004 is also infamous for some of the worst movie tie-ins of all time, which we’ll cover in a second—but it was the first year where a lot of developers realized that getting assigned a movie tie-in by their cash-starved bosses didn’t mean their end product had to suck. Starting with, obviously:

Spider-Man 2

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.

Most Popular

The Lord Of The Rings: The Third Age

Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings movies actually did pretty well for themselves in gaming, producing a series of competently made action games that accompanied each of the films’ early-2000s releases. But The Third Age was altogether more interesting: Created by EA Redwood Shores (the team that would, eventually, go on to create the Dead Space games as Visceral Studios), it tried to craft an original, “Look, this is what we’ve got the rights to” narrative within the gaps of Jackson’s movies, constructing an alternate fellowship that’s sort of lurking right off camera, doing stuff very nearly as important as what Frodo and his buddies are up to. It’d be a goofball idea, except the designers had also clearly been playing a hell of a lot of Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy X, and had cribbed together a surprisingly fun version of its fast-moving turn-based battle system to accompany all this non-canonical silliness. (It doesn’t hurt that it lets its fanservice instincts fly, never moreso than when it turns out you get to be Gandalf’s never-mentioned backup when he’s battling the Balrog on The Bridge Of Khazad-dûm. Silly, yes, but also exhilarating.) For a bonus “surprisingly good” tie-in, check out the GBA adaptation, which includes a unique mode where you get to play as Sauron’s forces in a strategy RPG setting.

Def Jam: Fight For NY

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

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

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

The late, great Japanese game studio Treasure was never a stranger to a quick licensed game: The studio’s second title, released right after they’d blown away basically every other game on the Sega Genesis on both a technical and a design level with 1993’s Gunstar Heroes, was McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventures. And because Treasure, which specialized in vibrant, technically gorgeous 2D action, was a good studio, many of those games were good. But few were as subtly good as their 2004 update on the largely hoary Astro Boy anime franchise. The surface pleasures of Omega Factor are quickly apparent: Treasure-standard solid punching and kicking, with enough brain to it to make you sweat as you avoid attacks and manage Astro’s various beams and meters. But the brilliant elements only trickle in slowly, as more exploration or puzzle-solving aspects make themselves known from level to level (including one of the most clever expression of a “stage select” mode we’ve ever seen in a game.) At the same time, the game starts grabbing from wider and wider swathes of Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezkua’s celebrated body of work, eventually transforming itself into a time-traveling, canon-spanning effort to save one of Japanese animation’s most beloved universes. Not bad, for a game that could have just punched and kicked its way to modest success; but that, of course, was never Treasure’s style.

The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay

If there’s a single factor that unites the entries on this list, it’s the sudden decision for all involved to care, after decades of doing basically the exact opposite. Nowhere is that sudden realization of the sheer power of giving a shit clearer than in a title that should, by any metric, have been the most godawful of shovelware: A Pitch Black prequel game timed to the release of Vin Diesel sci-fi vanity project The Chronicles Of Riddick. There is no reason for a video game that explains what *sigh* “Richard B. Riddick” was up to before he wound up on a planet full of monsters to be even functional, let alone great. And yet, that’s exactly what Butcher Bay is, blending stealth gameplay, exploration, and a genuinely inventive take on first-person hand-to-hand combat to make a game that’s probably more fun than all 3 extant Riddick movies combined. And the give-a-shit factor extends all the way to Diesel himself, who was intimately involved in the creation of the game, giving one of his better performances as Riddick. (Other stars include Cole Hauster, reprising his Pitch Black role, Ron Perlman, and, for some reason, Xzibit.) More than any other entry on this list, Butcher Bay represents a sea-change in the way tie-in games were both made, and received: It was no longer safe to simply laugh them off or dismiss them, lest you miss out on a genuinely great game.

Dishonorable Mentions: The more things change…

Don’t get us wrong: We stand by the basic thrust of this piece. 2004 was the first year that movie and TV tie-in games started being consistently made like they could be good, and the trend would only improve from there. (The groundbreaking King Kong game would arrive the following year, as would the surprisingly good video game version of Walter Hill’s The Warriors.) But not everybody got the memo, which is why 2004 is also the year that produced some of the absolute nadirs of the form. Catwoman the video game is the rare piece of superhero media you’ll see rated worse than Catwoman the movie, and Mission: Impossible and Bond both got some absolute stinkers in 2004. But to our mind, nothing embodies The Bad Old Ways made new again like the Fight Club video game adaptation, a title which arrived fully five years after David Fincher’s lightning rod of a movie, and whose sole major selling point is that it’s the only video game we know of in which you can make Meat Loaf and Fred Durst fight. (The late Loaf was the only actor to reprise his role from the film; Durst, meanwhile, was briefly in every video game, because he made it a condition for licensing Limp Bizkit songs for games.) The Fight Club game is ugly, no fun to play, and, most importantly, operates at every level like no one involved gave two fucks about what they were doing—i.e., it kept the “traditions” of the lousy tie-in game well and truly alive.