Mark Twain once said, “There is no such thing as a new idea.” Everything takes inspiration from something else. Even Star Wars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s legendary film The Hidden Fortress, which itself took inspiration from Japanese history. Even movies copy movies sometimes.
But, there is a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. Some borrow aspects from a source but then run with that idea in a new direction, others copy products wholesale. It’s the difference between making Star Wars’ lightsabers more realistic (mostly) in No More Heroes and completely remaking Super Mario Bros and replacing Mario and Luigi with a girl named Giana. While some games take inspiration from movies, others just straight up copy them. The following will look at games that either take inspiration from movies or outright copy them. Just a bit of warning, though: every one of these entries will include spoilers.
Spec Ops: The Line – Apocalypse Now
Games That Were Heavily Inspired by (Or Ripped Off) Movies
When Spec Ops: The Line was in development, studio Yager Development stated it took inspiration from the movie Apocalypse Now, which was based on the novel Heart of Darkness. But, if you examine the story beats and themes, you’ll see Spec Ops was more than just inspired by Apocalypse Now.
Both Spec Ops and Apocalypse Now revolve around soldiers who search for an ex-officer who became insane and led his own band of mercenaries. As each mission continues, tensions rise, your sanity is questioned, and the villain makes the age-old (and clichéd) claim that he and the hero are not so different. Except in the game and movie, the the hero and the villain really aren’t different, especially in Spec Ops when the villain turns out to be nothing more than a hallucination. Both Spec Ops and Apocalypse Now force audiences to wonder what really is the difference between a good and evil.
