[tellyblues]

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.

I think the main reason films can make better games is they are character and story based, so there's a lot more for developers to work with and players to get into. There are good games of TV shows, quiz shows providing the most faithful adaptations, but they aren't as exciting as playing along with the real thing and you could finish an "episode" in a game in two minutes, which is terrible value for money. A Gladiators game could maybe have a training mode so it could last longer and injuries to make it realistic and harder to complete but all that would need time to get right.

I'm not surprised the Mr Blobby game was crap but what else could you do with a one joke character? Oh, a theme park...