Music, Film and Game Tie ins

Impman66

This lockdown has meant I've had a lot of time on my hands to think about things, one of them is this. How many Retro games have made it to the big screen as a film and had a hit song made about it. I have come up with just 2 so far that cover both of these. Although technically for one of them the film came first. I am still counting it.

Mario Bros game, Mario Bros film (with Bob Hoskins), and Almost Unreal by Roxette which was the film titles theme song and reached number 7 in the UK ( R.I.P Marie )

Never Ending Story Film, Never Ending Story game, Never Ending Story song by Limahl reached No.1 in UK.

You could have films like Pixels (Centipede, Galaga, Donkey Kong, Pac-man, Tetris), but didn't have a hit song.
The latest film Sonic, again no hit song

Then you have films made or characters from films made to a game

The Last Starfighter was never originally an arcade game, until the film was made, and lately Fix it Felix from Wreck it Ralph was made very recently to look like a retro game but before the pixar film it never existed.

There must be a ton, but as I have said I can only think of the 2 that also had the hit song.
I just wondered as it would be nice to have a retro arcade build, based on a retro game, and have the retro song playing as background to go with it.

flamnel

Would you count Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I mean technically it was a comic book first, but you had the all of the games that came out in the late '80s and early 90's, and the first movie from 1990 was pretty successful. Song-wise, I can only think of that Vanilla Ice song at the end of the 2nd Turtles movie (man I feel old...).

quicksilver

@flamnel said in Music, Film and Game Tie ins:

Song-wise, I can only think of that Vanilla Ice song at the end of the 2nd Turtles movie (man I feel old...).

Not a hit song in the technical sense but this TMNT song made me dump a lot quarters at the arcade when I was a kid :)

Impman66

Could add that one, I was also thinking of Mortal Kombat, dreadful film, but I am pretty sure someone released a record, but don't think it did that well.
There are plenty of movie tie ins, but as i said, not many hit song tie ins at all :-)

flamnel

@Impman66 Ah yes I forgot about Mortal Kombat! I do still remember that title track all these years later...it's on Netflix right now, I might give it a re-watch at some point!

simpleethat

Goonies and the Goonies II game for NES both had the Cyndi Lauper song "Goonies R Good Enough" which was her fifth top 10 hit.

Ghostbusters and the song "Ghostbusters" (reached #1) by Ray Parker Jr, I'm fairly certain that the song is featured in the game(s).

Those were both films first. There haven't been as many video games made into films as the other way around.

simpleethat

Not really a tie-in but The theme from the show Peter Gunn was used as the music for Spy Hunter and also featured in the Blues Brothers movie.

MAME ROW for this week reminded me.

Impman66

@simpleethat said in Music, Film and Game Tie ins:

Not really a tie-in but The theme from the show Peter Gunn was used as the music for Spy Hunter and also featured in the Blues Brothers movie.

MAME ROW for this week reminded me.

Great finds, forgot all about Ghostbusters, The fact that it was number 1 as well leaves me feeling a bit stupid.

simpleethat

I'm fairly certain that most of the Disney tie-in games had chiptune versions of the music. I don't really have time to look up which songs charted right now but there's a lot of games that fall into that category.