[Neil Jones]

I don't think a lot of the tie-in games back in the day did much other than promote the film or TV show, which were making enough money on their own anyway that it didn't matter if the games flopped, but companies started to become more particular over who they were handing out the licensing rights to to produce product because of the bad PR.

No end of games in the 80s and early 90s that had tie-ins to film and TV shows. And most of them were crap, sometimes because of the limitations of the hardware (particularly on 8-bit machines), sometimes because of crap programming (usually because a lot of 8-bit games started on the Spectrum, got ported to the other 8-bits and no attempt was made to do it properly so they looked like Speccy clones) and other times because the concept was crap.

Spitting Image got a game back in the day (and on the 8-bits as well), it was fighting game/beat-em-up. About as detached from the TV show you could possibly get. Then there was Count Duckula 2 based on the cartoon... oh dear. Even Mr Blobby appeared in a video game, but had no references to the House Party at all (Blobby of course being the break out star from House Party) and it turned out to be another crappy game that had been repackaged - with the crapness still intact.

So game tie-ins don't always work. They may work better for film tie-ins (and there are some good examples) but for TV shows, well even with decent hardware they're still mostly crap.