Weirdest Movies You Didn't Know Have Games to Play

There was a time when almost every movie release was accompanied by a game, with most of those games being re-skinned versions of much better games or unashamedly cash-grabs. There were some gems, such as most of those around the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars prequels, but for the most part, they weren’t great.

The craze led to a fair few movies that wouldn’t lend themselves to the entertainment medium getting games, with some proving popular to this day, while others have sunken away already. So, these are the weirdest movies that ended up delving into gaming, with some of them still being playable today.

Fight Club

Fight Club may seem like a great title for a game, but the movie itself is far from a beat’em up. David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic critiques consumerism and overly masculine knuckleheads and is far from a film that’s just about a bunch of people fighting in a secret club.

Regardless, in 2004, Genuine Games released the official Fight Club game. Not only does releasing a cash-grab of a game fly in the face of the film’s undertones, but it also just took it for its name value, focussing on some sub-far fighting gameplay and little else.

The Goonies

Another classic movie, but this time from the mid-80s, The Goonies was Steven Spielberg’s proof that you can make a cheerfully gruesome film for moviegoers of all ages. Being so well-loved over the years, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the IP was ripe for the game treatment, and this time, the type of game fits the theme.

Drawn from a movie based on finding hidden pirate treasure, The Goonies Return fits well into the library of bingo slots online. Featuring a progressive jackpot, characters from the film, Lucky Coins, and the Hey You Guys feature, the game draws as much as it can from its source material.

Sharknado

Syfy’s so-bad-that-it’s-good movie franchise is, without a doubt, tremendously successful. Starting life as another jokey creature feature, the Sharknado franchise of movies cleared $4.5 billion before it was done. So, of course, they sought to get out a mobile game to capitalize on the movie’s strange amount of fame.

Sharknado: The Video Game was based on the second movie and released alongside it in 2014. Using the same formula as the likes of Temple Run, the Sharknado game was an endless runner, with you needing to run on top of buses and, as you’d assume, dodge sharks falling from the sky. In line with the fifth movie, they launched an augmented reality mobile game called ShARkmented Reality so that you could experience a Sharknado in the real world.

Terminator

The Terminator franchise certainly hasn’t shied away from gaming in the past, but most that came out around the time of the movie releases were rather poor, with perhaps the arcade unit games being the better ones.

What’s weird is that out of the blue in 2019, the Teyon games title Terminator: Resistance launched without much of a promotion campaign, but was quickly rated by fans as the best Terminator game out there. Set during the Future War glimpsed in the first two movies of the franchise, it’s not only a good Terminator game, but it also ticks the boxes to be a good action-adventure RPG as well.

Fight Club, The Goonies, Sharknado, and Terminator are all weird picks for games when the games did come out: some of them work well, others not so much.