I miss the old days of movie tie-in games, so whenever I see a modern movie that would be perfectly suited to a video game adaptation, it always feels like a missed opportunity. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is the most recent example, or at least it was until I saw Scream 6 this past weekend. But then, Scream began in the ’90s. Surely it’s had at least one video game, right? The Terminator has had six. Rocky has had nine. Top Gun? 13. Jurassic Park? 22. But Scream? Zero. So this is not about how much I would love to have Scream 6 in the lost art of a movie tie-in game. It’s now me asking how the hell have we never had a Scream video game in the first place?
We haven’t even come all that close. In fact, Ghostface has only officially appeared in two video games, and they could not be further apart. The first, as noted by Bloody Disgusting in its history of Scream video games, was a Fruit Ninja crossover in 2011. The second came a decade later, in Call of Duty. In between that, Ghostface also arrived in Dead by Daylight, but because of copyright mumbo jumbo, it’s someone pretending to be Ghostface rather than the real thing, and lacks the classic Roger Jackson voice. The closest we’ve come to the actual thing was an itch.io game by Stefano Cagnani, which has since been taken offline.
It’s not just that I like Scream. It’s that the set up is so perfect for a video game. In all six movies, the plot is simple yet gripping. There is a masked killer, and it could be anyone. It has never been the protagonist herself, so you wouldn’t lose any of the tension by playing as a single character and therefore locking one of them in as innocent. Video games have been built on far weaker plots, and each movie has a sense of identity you could draw from. Scream 3 had the most set-pieces (quite literally, as it was on a movie set). Scream 5 had the most surprising kills. The original had the smaller tension and perfect execution of the genre. Scream 6 had the biggest location and the goriest slays so far. Each movie is unique, yet familiar. It’s perfect for a video game.
But then, this is bigger than Scream. Most of what I’ve said goes for slashers as a whole, even if I find Scream to be the best and cleverest version of the genre. And yet we don’t have many slasher video games. There’s Dead by Daylight as I already mentioned, but that’s an online multiplayer rather than a curated experience with twists and turns. Ditto for The Evil Dead: The Game, Friday the 13th: The Game, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. That one doesn’t tell you it’s a video game, for some reason. The closest example is probably Resident Evil 2 or Alien: Isolation, neither of which fill the glass of slasher tropes even halfway the way up.
I get that there’s a dark thrill in playing as the killer, but that’s not what slasher movies are about. If we get a Scream video game I want to play as Sam Carpenter and actually be Sam, to see her in fresh situations and watch her kick ass while she defends her friends and tries to figure out who the killer is, not some generic Good Guys character who looks like Sam and has one power-up that kinda links to her arc in the movies. There’s no intrigue with these online slasher games, there’s just preordained good and bad, which robs them both of their power and development.
Scream seems like it would be ideal for a video game, and maybe the series is enduring enough that it can have a tangentially related game like Guardians of the Galaxy, rather than recreating any given movie. Slashers have been slacking in video games, and Ghostface is the perfect villain to whip them into shape. Hopefully a few years from now we’ll hear “What’s your favourite scary video game…?” during a big showcase reveal.
