Terminator

Terminator brought one of cinema's most iconic sci-fi concepts - an unstoppable cyborg from the future - to nineties consoles and handhelds, turning it into a series of action games that differed from platform to platform depending on what the license and the hardware of the day called for. As early as 1991, The Terminator arrived on the Mega Drive as side-scrolling action full of shooting and close-quarters combat across several difficulty stages; the SNES version and a game based on Terminator 2: Judgment Day built on a similar approach adapted for their console, while the Game Boy titles relied on simpler, more direct mechanics suited to the handheld's limited screen and capabilities.

The games leaned mainly on the atmosphere and iconography of the first two films - abandoned industrial settings full of machinery, robotic frames under scorched skin after a hit, chases with a relentless pursuer, and music evoking the tension of the original movies - without ambitions to tell their own sprawling story or dig deeper into the mythology of time travel. The series thus remained more a string of independent licensed titles tied to whichever film was current than a unified game saga with its own continuity, confirmed by a mobile Java game released in 2003 to tie in with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

As new console generations arrived and the classic licensed platformer and action game gradually faded, Terminator went quiet as a gaming brand for a time, and its nineties games remain today mostly a memory of an era when a film license alone was enough to find an audience across several platforms at once.