Rogue City Should Spark a Revolution

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home January 7, 2025 21 Views 6 Min Read
Rogue City Should Spark a Revolution



Often called one of the best games of 2024, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a towering achievement for both MachineGames and Microsoft, indicating that the Xbox ecosystem still has some heavy-hitters to unleash on the market. Set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle feels, in so many ways, like the most appropriate adaptation of Spielberg’s classic films imaginable.

Oddly enough, this new Indiana Jones game has quite a bit in common with 2023’s Robocop: Rogue City, though the latter wasn’t quite as well-received as the former. Naturally, classic films have been adapted into video games before—there was an era where it seemed like just about every blockbuster movie had a movie tie-in—but these newer games are attempting to add to the mythos of their source material, not just perform a cheap imitation. Like Great Circle, Rogue City takes place between two Robocop films, making it loosely connected to the series’ canon while still being an original story. Both games are also played from a first-person perspective with third-person in-game cutscenes, and character models that emulate the likenesses of the films’ actors—interesting parallels, if nothing else.

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The Benefits of Folding Classic Movies Into the Gaming Medium

For better or worse, Hollywood is constantly trying to revive old IP for the modern era. Looking at just the two aforementioned series, RoboCop saw a new movie in 2014, and Indiana Jones got a new chapter in the form of Dial of Destiny in 2023—neither of these films were anywhere near as well-received as Great Circle or Rogue City. This can be attributed to a number of factors, not the least of which being the usual suspects like writing and direction, but the central conceit of the gaming medium, what sets it apart from film, can’t be overlooked.

Perhaps one of the reasons why these classic movie reboots tend to fail is that they are trying to recapture the magic of a bygone era. The truth is, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny never stood a chance at being as exciting as Raiders of the Lost Ark, because audiences have seen Indie travel the world and triumph over massive threats time and again. But playing as Indiana Jones is necessarily novel, especially in a game as cinematic as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. And it’s not just novelty that makes this concept work: game designers can use interactivity as another tool to tell stories within established franchises, deepening them and forming a unique bond between the player and the protagonist. They can serve to flesh out an existing franchise in ways that new films cannot.

Classic 1980s Movies That Can Get the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Treatment

Making faithful, cinematic, in-universe video games based on older franchises could be the next industry goldmine. Action games based on Die Hard, open-world Lethal Weapon crime games, and horror games set in the worlds of Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street could all learn from the likes of Rogue City and Great Circle. Maybe these games could be first-person and connect to broader series canon, or they could be third-person with only a casual connection to the original film series, but either way, it’s not hard to see Indiana Jones and RoboCop paving the way for such ambitious adaptations.

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