Oscar Winners in Games

Sure, they’ve won the respect and admiration of both the film industry and the movie going public at large. But how do you know a film is truly great unless it has a rushed out, money grubbing tie-in videogame?

Here are the greatest videogames based on Academy Award Best Picture winers.

The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Widely regarded as one of the best licensed games ever made, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King used the likenesses and voices of the film’s cast, and integrated footage from the film into the game itself. I’ve always thought the way it shifted from film clip cut scenes to in-game graphics was pretty slick.

It looked like the movie, sounded like the movie, and let you fight through some of the more interesting battles of the movies. This one is a good game in its own right, but given the low expectations that usually come with movie tie-in games, this was amazing.

The Godfather: The Game

EA’s never-ending quest to rip off any sort of successful originality often takes the form of licensed games. The Lord of the Ring: The Third Age was their attempt at copying Final Fantasy X. And who can forget The Simpsons: Road Rage landing them in court with Sega for ripping off Crazy Taxi? Well, when it came time to take a shot at Grand Theft Auto, where better to turn than The Godfather. The Godfather: The Game featured an open world, many actors from the film reprising their roles, and a focus on gaining respect and power through violence and intimidation.

A pretty decent game, really.

Platoon

Well, it wasn’t exactly good, per se, but it might be the only military game where you have to keep your moral up, and one of the final missions is to frag your superior officer. (In case you didn’t know, the term frag originated in the Vietnam war, and not Quake. The more you know!)

Platoon for the NES (and about a dozen old computers no one cares about) is an odd attempt at staying true to a movie about the horrors of war, while making those horrors fun.

Braveheart

In true entertainment industry fashion, the game is a shameless cash grab. Originally developed under the title Tartan Army, this PC strategy game was bought up by Eidos once it became apparent that Braveheart wasn’t going to be the next Ishtar. Braveheart the game has almost nothing to do with Braveheart the film, aside from kilts that is, but it’s an interesting footnote in gaming history… and I needed a fifth game for this article.

Rocky

There have been several games based on the Rocky movies over the years, but for this post I chose Rocky for the Sega Master System. Not because the game is really that much better that the others, but because it came out in 1987, meaning it doesn’t acknowledge the crapfest that was Rocky V or 60-year-old, ‘roided-out Sylvester Stallone trying to find enough movie magic in Rocky Balboa to convince us he wouldn’t have been beaten to death before the end of the first round.

Screenshots via MobyGames. Header image source: The greatest moment in Oscar history.