Games vs Movies: 20 cutscenes compared

If you’ve played a movie-based game in your lifetime, we’re sorry. We’re sure you know that most games strive to stick as close to the film as possible. Even when taking “creative license” with the source material - in cases like Superman Returns, Hulk or any other boring action film - you’re bound to see some semblance of the movie’s story acted out in glorious 3D.

But back before 3D cutscenes were the new hotness, classic games from the 8- and 16-bit era had only so much technology. These games couldn’t replicate full cutscenes from the movies. What they did instead was focus on a few iconic incidents from the films they replicated. These games gave us screenshots complete with text to guide the plot and - BAM - we thought we were playing the movie!

Here we present to you 20 movie-to-game comparisons for your viewing pleasure. Note: we added some newer games in there for fun.

We don’t remember exactly when this image of Schwarzenegger took place considering the whole freakin’ movie is a bunch of guys walking slowly through the jungle against exciting music. The light blue glow of Ah-nuld against a starry sky just might coincide with the fact that the Predator alien came from space. Or it could’ve been simpler to use one color.

We know - this is just the poster. Stallone on one side, Snipes on the other. They even kept in the tagline on the Start screen. In the poster, Stallone looks pumped and ready to fight. Yet in the game version, he appears vaguely bored. Maybe Snipes just beefed.

Ellen Ripley having survived two movies of aliens finds she’s been made preggers by a facehugger during hyper-cryo-spacesleep. What a twist! At the very end she leaps backwards into smoldering steel to kill not only herself but the just emerging-alien. In the SNES version, the steel is portrayed by futuristic Mode 7 effects. Fancy!

Not much to say here. Pretty much a dead ringer. Fun fact: Bat Dance was not featured in this sequel.