This sort of question has come up many times, and my knee jerk reaction is to always say E.T. for the Atari 2600, but I have actually played a worse licensed game that could arguably be said was an adaptation of a movie. It was Superman 64 for the Nintendo 64. It is just an utter failure of a game. It is boring, buggy, and frustrating. It looks bad, controls bad, plays bad. At no point does that game approach "fun".

In the spirit of the post, one could argue that this isn't specifically about the Superman movie and could be more about the comic books. I never read them, so I can't say. Honestly, the game was so bad it was hard to tell which inspired it.

sorry. not an answer. your question though just made me think about movie and game adaptations because before the majority was movie to game but I kinda think now game to movied dominates.

Ghostbusters on NES.

I was a kid that inherited an NES from a family member, so they already had a ton of good games. Double Dribble, Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island. A lot of hits.

But there were also a bunch of cool games, or so I thought. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That looks cool. Ah, this is kinda advanced for a kid. It must be a me problem. Well, let's check out this Ghostbusters game.

That's when I realized that games could be dogshit. The whole game's music is a 30-second loop. The gameplay doesn't even make sense, and to this day I have not tried to learn it. Nay, I refuse to.

I felt so vindicated when I found the AVGN as I got older.

To my knowledge, Gearbox has never managed to fully shake the allegations that they took Sega's money for Alien: Colonial Marines and diverted most of it to Borderlands 2.

They also outsourced most of the development to another studio, and covered up that fact before release. After release, they happily pointed the blame away from themselves and onto the other studio, which promptly closed. The whole thing was basically set up to fail.

Home Alone for the Game Boy. It was just a generic jump and run. It was just super boring.

Charlies Angels on the Gamecube. I worked at a blockbuster at the time and just used it as a free rental as I was curious. god damn it was by far the worst game I had ever played.

Honestly, I think I lucked out with movie licensed games. Spiderman, Star Wars, X-men origins wolverine, I'm struggling to think of a bad one that I've played outside of displays in stores.

Okay, I looked it up to make sure there was a movie for this and easily the worst one I've played is Bionicle. I literally beat it the night I got it and was so disappointed. If it wasn't so short, it could've been pretty good.

I had few licenced games, I realized they were mostly crap early (especially back in the 80s/90s when I began playing video games).

But I had the Fifth Element tie-in game. It may not be the worst licenced game (it's certainly not good either) but it's very weird.

They went all alternate scenario on it, with story points diverging a lot from the movie... But they still used actual clips from the movie to introduce each level. How you ask? By doing their own wild cut of the movie, taking half of the clips out of context and reordering them to fit the new plot.

This means for example that Leeloo keeps her lab resurrection "outfit" (three bandage rolls) for half the game, just because the iconic diving scene has been repurposed and happens very late, and she's in that outfit in the movie scene. It makes sense in the movie, she's supposed to be running from the lab just after being resurrected and normally she gets all Jean-Paul Gaultier'd very shortly after that.

Other deviations from the plot include Korben being involved from the beginning instead of meeting Leeloo by pure chance (the taxi diving is intentional in the game), or a bomb minigame in a spaceport where Korben has to defuse a dozen of phones rigged to explode based on a movie one-off scene where Zorg executes one person this way (and Korben isn't even there to witness it).

Also a stupid chase for the four elements through the whole game. You know you need some dirt to "open" the Earth stone in the Egyptian temple at the end? Well, that's why you need to collect a specific flower pot from a random apartment in NY a couple levels before. Instead of, you know, a pinch of sand from that very temple. LIKE THEY ACTUALLY DO IN THE MOVIE.

There were a lot of absolutely awful ones when I was kid, so many I just forget them all. Back then we had a ZX Spectrum and the games cost like £2.99 each so you can imagine how much effort was put into them. I understand why the studios keep cranking out crappy movie tie-ins and why they keep selling well, because when I was a kid if there was a movie I loved I’d jump at the chance to buy the video game for it. Back then there was no internet to instantly check reviews so you just bought whatever had good box art.

I remember the Jaws game being particularly depressing. It was one of those classic games where it just drops you in an environment with no instructions on how to complete the game or anything. It was just a maze with loads of moving things that instantly killed you. I generally just moved around until I ran out of lives then tried again.

I never played it, but E.T. The Extraterrestrial caused the near death of the entire video game industry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)#Effect_on_Atari

The Avatar game from 2009. Honestly, it was only fun because it was so buggy you could basically get anywhere on the map and do anything you wanted.

It was from an era where a good story driven game was not only possible, but common, and it managed to be the worst story and the worst game of the year.

this is going to be a super obscure one.

so there's this popular swedish movie franchise that started out as an adoption of a danish movie franchise, but blew through all of their scripts and outgrew it after just three films. it's about a trio of thieves who try to steal high-stakes targets by means of ludicrous plans[^1] but usually fail due to sheer incompetency, only to then have the treasure land in their lap by sheer luck at the end. and in the late 90's, when macromedia shockwave was the big thing, a couple of shockwave-based point-and-click adventures were released with the trio as protagonists. each character has their own special skill, and you need to switch between them to use them. a fun premise, and a fitting one. i had both, but only got the second one much later. the first one is seared into my mind.

the problems start almost immediately. the first puzzle in the game is to blow up a door using dynamite, and at your home base you have five different bags of dynamite to choose from, from one to five sticks. if you pick three, you get through the door. if you take any more, you blow the whole wall out and the police are immediately alerted. game over. if you pick less, you make too much noise and the police are immediately alerted. game over. and if you pick them all up and select the right one, the rest stay in your inventory for the entire game. the inventory is a bar at the bottom of the screen you have to scroll from left to right, and there's so many junk items to pick up that you can easily spend minutes searching for every puzzle. and you don't know what items are junk without playing because while the heist and the items needed for it is planned out beforehand, getting those items always involves hilarious hi-jinks and inventory puzzles. and then the actual heists involve hilarious hi-jinks, inventory puzzles, and extremely exact timing. in a game running on shockwave. at something like five frames per second.

my family gathered around the pc and managed to get through it after many gruelling nights, but only because my mum repeatedly flirted with the studio's it support guy over the phone so he would give us hints.

[^1]: ::: spoiler like for example there's this one heist where a unique diamond necklace is being transported through stockholm in an armored van for display at a high-security museum, and they decide to intercept it en-route. for this they acquire 100 helium balloons, a big bone, a tiny dog, a flagpole, and a sandwich. guy 1 and his kid use the big bone to lure away a guard dog at the marina while the guard is distracted, then replace the guard dog with the tiny dog so the guard faints when he looks at it. the kid then sneaks into the marina to steal a dinghy, and together they mount the flagpole on it so it has a really tall mast. meanwhile guy 2 and 3 hide on a bus to its end stop, where there's usually a bathroom for the driver. when the driver goes in, they steal the bus but leave the sandwich so he has something to eat before calling it in. guy 1 runs up onto the roof of a nearby building to look for the van. when he sees the van approach a lifting bridge, he releases the balloons as a signal to the others. the kid approaches the lifting bridge in the dinghy with the really tall mast so it has to open. while the armored van is stopped at the bridge, guy 2 drives up next to it in the bus and opens the back door, where guy 3 picks the lock, climbs in, and starts putting the diamonds in his bag. but because guy 3 is a pompous ass, he stops a bit longer to pick up some champagne that's also in the armored van for some reason. at this exact moment the bridge closes the van starts moving with him inside. luckily guy 2 manages to also open the front door of the bus exactly as guy 3 steps out. victory! ...and then guy 1's wife gives the bag with the diamonds in it to charity because it's old and ugly and she didn't look inside and they're gonna be rich because of the diamonds anyway so who wants an old, ugly bag. women!

There was a kinda odd mistake with the Xenomorph AI in this game. There was a typo in the .ini file.

https://amostagreeablepastime.com/2018/08/02/the-full-story-of-the-one-letter-bug-that-broke-the-ai-in-aliens-colonial-marines/

Though personally i have an irrational phobia towards Xenomorphis and i just can't play anything against them, regardless of how bad the game or AI is.

I remember back in the Amiga days when every movie tie-in game was a crappy 2D platformer.

Too many to name as the 80s through to early 2000s was full of them. Star Wars on the original Gameboy comes to mind though.

Men in Black (1997). I played this as a kid. Think of this like playing Call of Duty with RE1's camera and tank controls. Here's a video of the game if anyone's curious.

Goblet of Fire. Complete trash compared to what came before.

Speaking of which, Deathly Hallows Part 1. Everything about it was awful. Part 2 at least has a decent action shooter combat system, but it didn't feel Harry Potter at all.

Back to the future based on the third movie for the genesis made me cry as a kid.

'Star wars : rebel assault' was a masterpiece of awful - at least on DOS. I don't know if it was better on console and just a crappy pc port.

I actually enjoyed playing it because of how awful it was. I think i made it about half way through the levels - hard to know - hoping it might get better, but many of the levels the controls were so bad it was pretty much perseverance and luck. The gameplay was tedious, yet also hard due to the controls - which tbf might be realistic for how actual space shooting would be.

Whenever you did pass a level the feeling was relief that it was over, and thankfulness for the luck, certainly not triumph. Save points were not after every level which was especially tiresome, and proved that it was luck more than skill.

I don't think I can blame my pc or my joystick, as this came out around the same time as the legit brilliant 'Star wars: X-wing' . The contrast between the two was remarkable. X-wing played very well even on what was probably a potato of its day. I reckon I'd have bought rebel assault based on the strength of X-wing and trust for lucasarts as a brand (until this game).

I think it was hyped due to having full motion video sequences or something or maybe just starwars fanboys, but gameplay was utter dogshite.

To cue anyone's memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_based_on_films

Blair Witch Project. From the little I remember from the very little I played it, the objective was to kill stick things. So bad

I've played very few movie-to-game adaptations, but one that I did play was Total Recall for NES. It's fairly ass, imo.

The game does follow the movie fairly well, although I can't say I recall Arnie pummeling dozens of hobos in a cement factory in the movie x)

The controls were fairly stiff and difficulty quite high up there, it was on NES after all.

The godfather 2, was pretty bad, the first one is one of my favourite games of all time, but the second one... stinky