Today marks a monumental moment for the saga of video games: it is the 20th anniversary of the release of Strangelite’s Starship Troopers PC game. On October 28, 2005, the world received a truly terrible game based on a truly excellent film, a concept that modern audiences couldn’t even hope to understand. A phenomenon I truly miss. What ever happened to the wildly incongruous video game adaptations of action movies?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, every Hollywood action outing would receive a tie-in video game. Publishers would have a side-scrolling platformer or 2D action game ready to accompany any major movie, no matter how utterly inappropriate or gloriously irrelevant it might be. And no, we’re not talking about some obscure, backwater companies you’ve never heard of—we’re talking the biggest names in the industry. Thus it was that in 1989 you could visit your local gaming store and pick up a copy of Activision’s Die Hard, developed by Tribes legends Dynamix, or the abysmal NES release Who Framed Roger Rabbit made by [double-checks notes] Rare.
These tie-ins weren’t exactly famous for sticking particularly closely to the films on which they were based. While the Die Hard I mention above is very much set in Nakatomi Plaza, another version was made for PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16 that, incredibly, has you battling through jungles and rivers to reach the Nakatomi building in scenes that would feel more at home in a game set during the Vietnam war. More normally, however, these games were primarily about stripping out all nuance, subtlety, and subversion to create a straight-faced action game.
Who can forget Ocean Software’s 1988 Amiga tie-in RoboCop, for instance, a surprisingly great side-scrolling action game ported from an arcade machine release? A beloved game it might have deservedly been, but it’s perhaps fair to say it might have somewhat missed the satirical elements of Paul Verhoeven ‘s film. Or perhaps the best example of all time: 2004’s Fight Club, released for PS2 and Xbox. And yes, that’s right, 2004. You aren’t losing your mind, David Fincher’s deeply subversive and satirical film was released in 1999, and this—wait for it—fighting game came out a full five years later. Was it, too, a treatise on the self-destructive psyche of male violence? No, it was not. It was a game about the actual fight club, the men beating the shit out of each other, and had you winning fights to rise up the ranks, until you’re eventually able to unlock Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst as a playable character. I’m not making that up. It took an anti-capitalist, anti-violence film and said, “I like the bit where the man punched the other man.”
There are obviously a squillion examples of truly horrendous movie tie-ins, like the notorious E.T. disaster or 2003’s Charlie’s Angels flop, but my favorite examples are always the ones that just woefully miss the point of their subject matter. And that’s why 2005’s Starship Troopers has such a fond place in my heart.
Once again, no, you aren’t slipping loose from time. Paul Verhoeven’s wonderful Starship Troopers was released to theaters in 1997, a full eight years before Empire Interactive released this outstandingly terrible video game tie-in. The anti-war film certainly was, and still is, willfully misunderstood. That’s not because there’s any ambiguity, but because a lot of people aren’t very clever, misunderstanding its loudly telegraphed satire as a sincere representation of militaristic campaigning, seeing its excoriating portrayal of the modern military’s fascistic core as some sort of enthusiastic thumbs up for Nazism. Whether furious because they thought it was endorsing fascism, or delighted to think it was, people failed to understand this film from impressively diametric positions. (We can put aside the much-debated nature of the book on which the film mostly wasn’t based, given Verhoeven’s vision was clearly distinct and—given his childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland—not exactly in favor of the obvious baddies.)
But the film isn’t exactly a work of subtlety. From its gruesomely silly “WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?” propaganda commercials to its sequences directly spoofing movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, Starship Troopers wears its furious satire on its sleeve. Verhoeven’s genius in films like this and RoboCop (heck, even Total Recall if you look beyond the cheesy veneer) isn’t delivered quietly, but rather with unavoidable brutality. Which is all to say, no, this was never a film about brave Americans fighting off the cruel bug armies. Can you sense the foreshadowing?
My favorite thing about the Starship Troopers PC game was the way it would lock up my PC, forcing hard reboots. This offered merciful little moments between having to play the game for the review I was writing at the time. Created by a British studio called Strangelite (who would go on to be bought by Rebellion and folded into the teams developing the Sniper Elite games), the game made its failure to comprehend its source material apparent before you’d even taken it out of the box. “Hesperus, a planet perilously close to Earth, has fallen to the bug menace,” it stated, ensuring you knew that a) it wasn’t going to try to recreate the events of the movie, and b) woefully didn’t realize that the Bugs never were a “menace.” That was kinda the point.
The game, a first-person shooter, was meant to be about taking on vast hordes of the arachnoid Bugs, desperately fighting to survive against the odds. Although those odds would often turn in your favor when all the dozens of identical enemies would choose to attack a nearby rock instead of you, kindly standing still while you shot them all in the side. It was a spectacular clusterfuck of atrocious graphics, dismal load times, lines of voice dialogue overlapping each other incoherently, and then to really drive home how bad this all was, super low-quality clips of the movie played at you to point out what it wasn’t portraying. (This reminds me of an utterly awful movie you hopefully never saw called Carrie 2: The Rage, that frequently included clips of Brian De Palma’s 1976 masterpiece to make sure you had constant context for just how outrageously terrible this sequel really was.)
It sucked. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Really sucked. And you know what? I kind of miss that, a bit.
Of late, we keep getting movie/TV tie-ins—albeit often years or decades later—that are really good! Games like 2023’s RoboCop: Rogue City, and 2022’s TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, that embrace the point of the source material in a winsome fashion. Which is brilliant, and bring it on! But there’s definitely a part of me that wishes 2025 could have seen a side-scrolling beat ’em up based on One Battle After Another, or a Kpop Demon Hunters platform game about collecting microphones. Where’s my egregiously misguided The Fantastic Four: First Steps third-person action game that tries to recreate major scenes from the film through minigames? We didn’t even get a top-down racing sim based on F1 The Movie.
So happy 20th birthday, Starship Troopers, you colossal pile of shit. You were one of the last of your kind.
