The 25 Best Video Game Adaptations of All Time

Much like the games that inspired them, the Resident Evil movies began as single location-based horror stories that capitalized on gore and dread before quickly veering into half-brained action. For the films, it only took the first sequel to eschew the text, but the first Resident Evil at least nailed it once out the gate. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (whose career spans multiple video game adaptations, including Mortal Kombat and Monster Hunter), the 2002 film stuck to the premise of the original 1996 game, dropping a group of woefully unprepared people into a shady mansion whose gruesome horrors run deep.Before she became a super soldier, Milla Jovovich’s Alice begins a “normal” person (with amnesia), brought to the mansion that houses an experimental genetics lab in its basement that the Umbrella Corporation has lost control of to the resident artificial intelligence. With a group of commandos and scientists, she’s tasked with taking back control before the viruses and creatures within breach containment. It’s a simple haunted house thriller, but Resident Evil manages to deliver some nightmarish visuals and stomach-churning deaths (creating a perpetual fear of lasers for many). And while it’s a very loose adaptation at best, it gets the closest to what made the games great before its successors went off the rails entirely.

When Peacock announced a streaming TV adaptation of PlayStation’s vehicular combat game Twisted Metal, most people were left scratching their heads. There hadn’t even been a Twisted Metal game since 2012, let alone a good one since a decade prior to that. But the appeal was clear: stick a punch of kooky characters in different cars and smash them together, Death Race-style.And yet, that’s not quite what the show delivered. Instead, it tells the story of a drifting courier played by Anthony Mackie, who traverses the Mad Max-like work to deliver resources between different communities. Along the way, he crosses paths with other shady folks, each with their own backstory and motivations — much of which is played as much for laughs as drama. Twisted Metal is a flat-out comedy, arriving in 30-minute chunks, and occasionally delivering some pretty good action. If you’re not into the sardonically reference-heavy Deadpool tone, it’s just not for you. But as season two approaches this summer, the series will hopefully be veering closer to the tournament-based struggle that made the action of the games a favorite.

When it came time for Nintendo to dip its toe back in and give Mario a second chance at cinemas, the only choice was through animation. After 1993’s live action movie ended up a gonzo take on Total Recall instead of anything resembling the Mushroom Kingdom, there was a need to play it safe. And it doesn’t come safer than Illumination movies; the studio behind Despicable Me and Minions has a clear track record of making billion-dollar children’s films that would neatly suit the goals of Nintendo without fret.But with their direct involvement, Nintendo managed to make something better than just another Minions-like, dropping the potty humor and mind-numbing character voices for a smartly designed hero’s journey filled to the brim with references to the games. Although the casting of Chris Pratt as Mario made everyone’s eyes roll, more ingenious choices like Charlie Day as Luigi and, of course, Jack Black as Bowser gave the Mario movie enough juice to warrant a second chance. And it worked — to the tune of some $1.3 billion at the box office. And now until the end of time, it’s going to be Mario’s world. We’re just living in it.

What made Sonic the Hedgehog 2 work so well was its confidence to lean deeper into the silliness of the games, and by going even further, the latest sequel manages to reach new heights. Wisely, the movie sidelines its human characters almost entirely, instead spending more time with what kids want to see: Sonic and his pals screwing around and doing really cool action moves.Just like the stroke of brilliance of bringing on the gravely voiced Idris Elba to play the brooding echidna Knuckles in part two, Sonic 3’s big play is the casting of Keanu Reeves as the dark visage of Sonic in Shadow the Hedgehog. The product of experimentation with a tragic backstory, Shadow works better here than he does in the games — where his immensely dumb “Poochie the Dog” bit sticks him with being a lazy, edgy version of the hero … but with guns!But the most inspired part of the trilogy capper is tripling down on the work of Jim Carrey, here playing both Dr. Robotnik and his long-lost grandfather. The Sonic movies have been a modern day renaissance for the Ace Ventura actor, whose chameleon-like ability to morph his face works like gangbusters in the Sonic-verse, making him the only human of the bunch worth watching. Outside of the action theatrics, these movies all belong to Carrey, so much so that they’ve continually delayed his oft-mentioned retirement.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that Werewolves Within is based on a video game. As a VR game released in 2016, most people don’t even know it exists. The game is a social-deduction exercise in the vein of games like Mafia or, more notably, the global sensation Among Us. Players must chat with each other around a virtual campfire to deduce who among the group is a secret werewolf. That’s a pretty straightforward setup for movie whodunnit.Directed by CollegeHumor alumni Josh Ruben, the movie version of Werewolves Within is an indie-styled mystery caper with tons of comedy credentials. Its cast is a veritable “who’s who” of sitcom talent, with Sam Richardson (Veep), Milana Vayntrub (Other Space), and Harvey Guillén (What We Do in the Shadows) all playing potential victims/killers as glorious archetypes pulled straight from Clue. It’s a smaller movie, lacking in the star power and name recognition of other franchise IP, but in the end, it’s just a great comedy that happens to be based on a video game you’ve likely never played.

Unlike the big budget action movie that bears its name from the same year, 1994’s Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is very much entrenched in the DNA of the franchise. A retelling of the game’s lore that you likely would’ve missed when playing in the arcade (it’s literally just a couple lines of assorted text), Street Fighter II arrived right at the height of the game’s popularity as it spawned update after update and spin-offs like Street Fighter Alpha. In the days before corporate-owned YouTube channels to spoon feed players backstories, fighting games in the Nineties were often left to their supplementary materials to give hungry fans more to chew on than just the gameplay.Street Fighter II fills in the gaps and lays out all of the drama between characters like Ryu and Sagat, and the purpose behind the mission of heroes like Chun-Li and Guile to take down M. Bison and the Shadaloo criminal organization. Crafted with a gritty Nineties-era anime aesthetic, it’s a visceral watch during the fight sequences — a highlight of which is a particularly savage and unsettling encounter between Chun-Li and the clawed fighter Vega, which has some skin-crawling moments.

Like with Werewolves Within, you’d be forgiven for not knowing what Gangs of London even is, let alone what game it’s based on. A spin-off of PlayStation’s The Getaway, a Grand Theft Auto-like affair based on the British crime movie style popularized by Guy Ritchie, the game itself is adapted from 2006’s entry Gangs of London, although no deeper knowledge is required.Instead, Gangs of London works entirely on face value as a Snatch-coded crime show that would fit nicely in after a binge of Peaky Blinders. But more than just a crime drama, the show is known for its bone-crunching scenes of violence — which makes sense given that it was co-created by Gareth Evans of The Raid (2011) fame. Like he did with The Raid and its sequel, two movies that helped usher in the wave of hyper choreographed and gory combat in modern hits like the John Wick series, Evans brings the pain to viewers on the AMC+ show with style. If you like twisty crime dramas punctuated by the occasion throat puncture, Gangs of London is one to watch.

Known as the granddaddy of “bad” video game movies, Mortal Kombat is the kind of film that everyone says is trashy but will openly gobble up when it pops up on TV. Paul W.S. Anderson’s first foray into game adaptations set the standard for how to take the dumbed down premise of a narratively thin game and hones with razor sharp focus on what people want to see.Dubbed a “martial arts fantasy,” Mortal Kombat opens in another dimension where a brutal tournament between combatants from the Earthrealm and Outworld has just finished in death. The opening sequence is iconic, with Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s Shang Tsung striking the killing blow on a doomed hero before staring right down the barrel of the camera to declare, “Your soul is mine.”After cementing its place in quotable b-movie history (alongside a banger theme song), Mortal Kombat settles into a sometimes funny, sometimes cheesy balance of scenes where fan-favorite characters go toe-to-toe for fans to chew their nails awaiting the outcome. When Liu-Kang (Robin Shou) takes on Sub-Zero (François Petit) there’s a feeling a genuine peril, because players have seen the aftermath time after time when they themselves have slaughtered their friends as the cryomancer ninja.

In the last few years, Netflix has become the premier platform for okay-to-excellent video game adaptations, bringing everything from Dragon’s Dogma to Devil May Cry to the screen when most other networks or studios might be shy. One exception aside, its best effort has been the one-two punch of Castlevania and its sequel, Nocturne. Produced by Adi Shankar, whose other work includes Captain Laserhawk and Devil May Cry, Castlevania is exceptionally well-made example of adult animation that can help bring video games to other mediums without major sacrifice to their authenticity.As it tends to do, the story begins and ends with Dracula who, after finding true love with a human woman, pledges mass death on humanity after they kill his beloved wife. Both series follow the aftermath through the eyes of the Belmont clan (Trevor in the first, Richter in the sequel), and combine fantasy violence, romance, and a genuine knack for comedy that make both series a breezy binge despite their darkness. And while Castlevania has been a long dead franchise for Konami, their spirit lives on in a duology of shows that are among the most entertaining series Netflix has ever produced.

If you’re going to adapt an open-world game, there’s obviously going to be plenty of routes to go. What’s the canonical golden path? Can it be strayed from? Prime Video’s Fallout series takes the most logical step by saying, “Yes.” It can all be canon, or none of it. Set within the game’s universe that sees the denizens of an irradiated wasteland in a post-retro-futuristic alternate history, Fallout tells its own story in an area of the games previous left unexplored and builds multiple stories that each could be what you’d be doing as a player.Centered on three protagonists, including vault dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell), Brotherhood of Steel scribe Maximus (Aaron Moten), and the internet’s current boyfriend Walton Goggins at the duster-clad Ghoul, Fallout charts parallel plot lines that each follow a thread that could be a quest line in the games.While some adaptations are comfortable being merely “inspired by” the source material, and others working to slavishly recreate it, Fallout falls into an unprecedented middle ground where every detail — from the minutiae of the lore to the handcrafted props modeled on in-game items — feels wholly authentic. It is the world of the games come to life, without any of the baggage of prior knowledge, or the work of trudging through hundreds of hours of gameplay to get there.

When imagining what kind of video game IP could break through the stigma held by non-players to become a cross-cultural hit, a multiplayer online battle arena game like League of Legends would probably end up pretty low on the list. But surprise hit of Netflix’s Arcane proved that it doesn’t matter how obscure the original text may be, good storytelling will drive people to watch.Adapting the story of Jinx (Hailee Steinfeld) and Vi (Ella Purnell) from the game could’ve proven difficult. In League of Legends, they’re just two of dozens of playable characters who’s style and move set are more important for the competitive esport than anything else about them. In Arcane, their tragic history and subsequent falling out is brought front and center as the sisters each join different sides of a political battle that embroils their world.Under the work of French animation studio Fortiche, Arcane is one of the most visually arresting animated stories of the last few decades, opting not to lean one way or the other into illustrated anime or full-on rubbery CGI, instead resembling a fluid rendition of an oil painting in motion. Its story is harrowing and heart wrenching, filled with sweeping battles and poignant quiet moments. Arcane could be considered the quintessential gaming adaptation for its ability to do more with its material than the games ever could.

When it was released in 2013, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us reinvented the entire concept of what storytelling could be in a video game. It wasn’t about player choice or immersion (although both are present in varying degrees); it was about telling a story using the tools of a video game that could match the heights of the best-made movies or shows. When it came time for the HBO adaptation, there wasn’t any need for changes — it was all there already, laid out as a full script and storyboard.The Last of Us is easily the most accurate video game adaptation ever, with everything from its dialogue and story beats to its visual framing and wardrobes all pulled 1:1 from the game itself. There are a few embellishments, like an entire episode dedicated to fleshing side characters from the game that ended up being one of the best episodes of television ever produced, but overall, it’s a painstaking recreation of one of the greatest stories created in gaming.The story of Joel and Ellie’s cross-country odyssey to find a cure for the zombie-like infection plaguing humanity is the heart of the show, just as it was in the game. And while season two will likely cause division among viewers (just as the second game did for players), it’s impossible to deny that the chops are there. The Last of Us (the game) showed people that truly cinematic storytelling could be accomplished in a video game, and its adaptation is proof. If you lift every beat, every frame from the game — just removing the parts where you have to mash buttons to fight — the result is one of the best shows on television. The only difference is that the game provides even more, making it an equally unmissable experience rather than something to be supplanted.