Did Little Nicky, Mean Girls and Dirty Dancing need to become video games? They did anyway.
Not every movie is meant to have a video game adaptation, no matter what the SVP of Vertical Integration and Synergy tells you. “I mean, it won the Oscar, we should do it. Each of the 12 levels of the game can represent one year as a slave!”
Often, common sense prevails and mediocre, unpopular or inappropriate movies don’t receive video game adaptations. Sometimes it doesn’t. This list is devoted to that case.
Here are 11 obscure video games based on movies that really didn’t need video game adaptations in the first place…
1 | Dirty Dancing
This game came out right at the height of Dirty Dancing‘s popularity: 2007. The description says it involves “fun mini games” — man I hope one of those is trying to put babies in corners.
2 | Bebe’s Kids
Bebe’s Kids was a fairly anonymous animated movie in 1992. I remembered there was a video game around it (I was really into video games back then) but I thought it was for the regular Nintendo. They would slap together a video game out of anything for the regular Nintendo. (See: Noid, Yo!.)
3 | White Men Can’t Jump
You know a video game has a weird license deal when the only platform it comes out for is the Atari Jaguar. The 3DO people wouldn’t shell out the cash?
4 | Toys
I have no memory of the game but distinct memories of the movie being disappointing. If they were going to turn a Robin Williams movie into a video game, why not Dead Poets Society? All of the bosses at the end of levels could be poets you have to kill. Take that, Tennyson.
5 | The Haunted Mansion.
Ah yes, the game based on the movie based on the ride. I’m not sure who designed the cover image — haven’t they been on the ride and heard there are “no windows and no doors”? That picture is ALL windows and doors.
6 | Little Nicky.
They could’ve turned Waterboy into a football video game. They could’ve turned Happy Gilmore into a golf video game. They even could’ve turned Billy Madison into a trivia/dodgeball/adventure video game. But instead, they made Little Nicky into a… something?… video game.
7 | Mean Girls.
The reason you’ve never played this is because it only came out in Europe; Nintendo pulled the plug on an American version. It’s probably for the best; the reason Lindsay Lohan isn’t on the cover is because of questions about possible royalties, which portends horribly for the game as a whole.
8 | Anastasia.
For those younger readers who have no idea what they’re looking at, once upon a time, a company called Tiger made these handheld “video games” that featured minimal controls and limited black-and-white animations. They were a big hit before home video game consoles had solid market penetration. Meanwhile… this Anastasia game inexplicably came out in 1997, which lines it up in history with the Nintendo 64 and Sony PS1.
9 | 3 Ninjas Kick Back.
They didn’t make a video game for 3 Ninjas, or the third movie in the franchise, 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up — but somehow the middle movie of the trilogy got a game. The reviews call both “mediocre.”
10 | From Dusk Till Dawn .
This was the first Quentin Tarantino movie to be adapted into a video game. (A Reservoir Dogs game would come many years later.) The main character of the video game is George Clooney’s character, which you can totally tell from the box art.
11 | Waterworld.
This game came out in 1995, during the TINY window of time when (1) people thought Waterworld would be a hit and (2) people thought the Virtual Boy would be a hit. Seriously, that period lasted for like six hours on a Tuesday in April of 1995.
