The Strange History of Games Created to Promote Movies

Film studios have been turning their releases into games for almost as long as home consoles have existed, and the results have ranged from genuine classics to cartridges that ended up buried in the desert. The logic always looked simple. A movie builds an audience, a game lets that audience stay in the story a little longer, and one marketing plan covers both. What actually happened, again and again, was far messier. When a Blockbuster Needed a Cartridge The early 1980s set the pattern. Arcades and the Atari 2600 were everywhere, and studios noticed that the kids lining up for a film were also lining up at the machines. Raiders of the Lost Ark got an Atari adaptation in 1982, and Tron reached arcades the same year with a cabinet that split the film’s light cycles, tanks and glowing grid into separate mini-games. For a while, a famous license alone seemed enough to move a cartridge off the shelf. The problem was time. Films run on release dates that nobody moves, and game development does not compress neatly. When Atari secured the rights to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, programmer Howard Scott Warshaw was given roughly five weeks to finish a game that had to be in stores for Christm...