RoboCop

RoboCop arrived in video games just a year after the premiere of the 1987 film of the same name - in 1988 Ocean Software released an action platformer that brought the movie's brutal atmosphere to the Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum as a sequence of shootouts and close-quarters fights layered over classic platform jumping. It was a typical film tie-in of its era, where gameplay was dictated more by budget and release deadline than ambition, but a striking hero, his unmistakable walk and the film's famous theme helped it stick in players' memory longer than most movie adaptations of the time. Reviews at the time praised its atmosphere and faithfulness to the film, while the controls and uneven difficulty were often what took the shine off the experience.

The turn of the 80s and 90s brought RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1991), which kept the series on the same recipe - left-to-right progression, shooting and punching - just on further home computers, consoles and the portable Game Boy. A detour came with the arcade and console crossover RoboCop versus The Terminator (1993), which combined both film franchises, became known for its exaggerated brutality and faster, more aggressive action than earlier entries had offered, and is still remembered among fans as one of the series' better titles. Beyond the main line, various spin-offs and ports appeared for different home platforms, so by the turn of the 80s and 90s the RoboCop name showed up on practically every widely used system of the day.

After a run of arcade and home titles the series fell silent for a long stretch, not returning to players until 2023 with RoboCop: Rogue City for PlayStation 5 and other modern platforms. Polish studio Teyon abandoned the platformer layout in favor of first-person action built around the hero's lumbering, unstoppable strength and his Auto-9 pistol, leaning less on the pace of action games and more on atmosphere, dialogue and a tone faithful to the original film.

The path from a hasty platformer cash-in to a carefully considered modern game also reflects how the approach to film licenses changed over three and a half decades - from a quick cash-grab on a movie's popularity, RoboCop eventually became a respected attempt to tell, in game form, what made the original film distinctive, and Rogue City is now cited by players and critics alike as one of the better modern movie games.