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35 Best Movies About Video Games

Everyone knows about the video game curse, that movies pulled from the medium are doomed to mediocrity. Arguably the hex has been broken recently by the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu, and definitely on TV with The Last of Us. (And that’s not even to say that, for lovers of weirdo cinema and re-appraisers of 1993’s Super Mario Bros., the curse never existed to begin with.)

But for movies about video games, things have been on another level. In 1982, after Space Invaders and Asteroids set up the arcade scene in the late ’70s and Ms. Pac Man set the world on fire in 1981, Disney released TRON, their state-of-the-art adventure about a game designer sucked into his own arcade game. WarGames, The Last Starfighter, and Cloak and Dagger continued the positive trend of the decade.

By the time of the NES and console revolution, actual real games started becoming the focal plot point, like the infamous Super Mario Bros. 3 competition in 1989’s The Wizard. Eventually, we came to have films like 2021’s 8-Bit Christmas, which looked back at this era with comedic nostalgic affection.

The intersection of movie special effects and game world immersion is plainly evident, and filmmakers have explored that arena with Free Guy, the Jumanji reboots, Ready Player One, Gamer, Wreck-It Ralph, and even Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase.

The crowd-pleasing 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was big in refreshing arcades in people’s mind, along with the arcade bars popping up in metropolitan areas all over the country. Recently, we’ve been given a peek into wild, behind-the-scenes dramatizations of game development, like Tetris and Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game. (Arguments about whether or not that belongs on a video game movie list will not be taken into consideration at this time.)

Finally, we also included some fringe elements, like 1983’s Nightmares (a horror anthology featuring a creepy arcade segment), and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, probably the only movie that actually feels like a game, centered on a dude who see his universe through a prism of pixels. To sort this list of movies based on video games, we feature Certified Fresh films first. —Alex Vo