5 Games Based On TV Shows That Have Me Jumbled And Befuddled

These past few years have been big for TV shows based on video games, but what about the weird games based on TV shows?

Game shows, for example, make perfect sense in terms of being turned into video games. When you’re watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and contestant Shonky Tumps is sweating over the correct spelling of mayonnaise, you can’t help but scream at your TV, “It’s C, you bumbling buffoon! Curse you Shonky Tumps, you are the undeserving of the hot seat that you lay your foolish rump on!”

Alas, game show video games let you be Shonky Tumps, putting you in full control over how to spell mayonnaise. It just makes sense.

A lot of animated TV shows get turned into video games as well, which is a given (for most). I like to think we all remember the golden age of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network having a vast array of great Flash games on their websites back in the day.

What really gets me going though are the TV shows that have no business being made into video games, and yet they were. TV shows that simply exist to tell a story or an ongoing story, and that’s it. No interactivity is required, these characters are their own people. TV shows that showcase real-life situations, are completely normal and sometimes even very sad. It’s bananas to me.

YouTuber minimme is one of my favourite content creators for this reason, as he regularly looks at TV show and movie video games that exist for some reason. It rocks!

There are a lot more of those than you think, so let’s have a look at them and question their existence.

Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!

This one is probably one of the more well-known titles thanks to Game Grumps’ let’s-play of it.

Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! was a game published by Absolute Entertainment and developed by their in-house studio Imagineering. It was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1994, with plans for a Sega Genesis release that sadly never came to fruition.

The game follows Tim Taylor as he retrieves his special little tools, all the while fighting to the death with dinosaurs and mummies. The game came with no instruction manual, as “real men don’t need instructions”. Truly spectacular.

I cannot fathom why this game was made other than the fact that the opening theme of Home Improvement shows the children of the show in a video game. Perhaps someone in Disney’s higher-ups saw this and said, “Hey. Hey. What if we did that but it was Tim Allen beating the shit out of a dinosaur?”

Little Britain: The Video Game

Ah yes, a game based on a TV show that aged like regurgitated milk.

Little Britain: The Video Game is a mini-game collection published by Mastertronic Group under their Blast! Entertainment label, and developed by studios Gamerholix and Gamesauce. Released on PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and PC in 2007, this stinker is considered one of the biggest!

Similarly to the sketch show, the game presents its mini-games in a sketch-like format. Each mini-game finds you playing as notable characters from the series as they do all kinds of garbage.

As mentioned prior, this game is considered one of the worst games of all time. It’s been critically panned pretty much everywhere you go. It’s hard to say why this game was made, or if it should’ve been made at all.

Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game

The video game embodiment of ‘for the fans’.

Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game was a game developed by Longtail Studios (now Ubisoft Halifax) and published by Ubisoft. It was released in 2009 for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii and PC.

The game is set in the fourth season of Grey’s Anatomy and follows multiple characters in the show as they navigate a diphtheria outbreak in the hospital. It’s a puzzle-based visual novel that sees the player taking part in melodramatic moments between characters and mini-games like surgeries and ‘controlling emotions’.

Critically, Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game was considered average-to-bad. It holds a Metacritic score of 36/100, with IGN giving it the most forgiving score of 60/100. However, it seems like the Grey-diators hold a special place in their heart for this one, so it seems like it was made solely with them in mind.

The Young Ones

While this one is a head-scratcher, the coolest part about it is how one of the programmers actually responded to the video above.

The Young Ones is a video game developed by Orpheus Software. It was released in 1986 for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. In the game, you can play as any of the four main characters from The Young Ones TV show, and the aim of the game is to move your items out of the house as quickly as possible.

In the comments of Zeusdaz’s gameplay video, former director of Orpheus Software Paul Kaufman jumped in. Kaufman explained that while creating the game, they had several meetings with the cast and management of The Young Ones in order to get it right, and mentioned that it ‘nearly killed’ the team to get the game ready in time for 1986 Christmas.

Kaufman also revealed that the game was actually released twice, as the first release had a bug that made the game impossible to complete. I don’t know why this game was made, but from the sounds of it, all parties involved including the original cast seemed to be keen on its creation, which I think is just neat.

M*A*S*H

Why?

M*A*S*H is a game designed and programmed by Doug Neubauer and published by Fox Video Games. It was released in 1983 for the Atari 2600, Atari 8bit, ColecoVision, Intellivision, TI-99/4a and VIC-20.

Gameplay involves players controlling helicopters and army doctors to rescue wounded soldiers. It’s a weird one, as the lack of humour, personality and depth that the TV show had almost makes it seem like a trivialisation of the Korean War.

Also, while it was quite funny at times, wasn’t M*A*S*H also horrifically sad? Pretty hard to get that across in an Atari 2600 game.

Honourable mentions

• Desperate Housewives: The Game (2006), PC – The Sims but with the housewives who are desperate.
• Cory in the House (2008), Nintendo DS – Adventure stealth game where you are Cory and you are indeed in the House, but in a sneaky way.
• Cops (1994), Arcade – Police simulation game involving shooting armed criminals and car chases. Wasn’t this a reality show?
• Thunder in Paradise (1995), Philips CD-i – Interactive version of an already-existing episode of Thunder in Paradise.
• Yes, Prime Minister (1987), Commodore 64 – A text-based adventure where you play the British Prime Minister Jim Hacker, not Boris.

There are so many video games based on or adapted from TV shows, so I’m sure I’ve missed some strange ones. I purposefully didn’t include The Sopranos game because I can completely understand why it was made, it just happened to be not very good.

Have you got any favourites that seem like strange additions to the video game realm? Let us know!