Depending on who you ask, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is either one of the best action movies ever, one of the best movies in any genre, period, or just the best movie of all time, full stop. But regardless of how you rank it, there’s no debate that this film lends itself to games — robots, lasers, explosions, chase sequences, boss fights, and a whole lot of guns — so naturally, it’s gotten its share of adaptations. Some have tried to translate the Terminator franchise’s most explosive moments into an interactive experience, some have woven original lore into the series' tangled rat’s nest of a timeline, and some aren’t actually related to James Cameron’s creation whatsoever, but figured it couldn’t hurt to throw a killer robot or two into the mix.
Alas, there’s never been a definitive T2 video game, but this year, Terminator 2D: No Fate is attempting to change that. Much like an advanced cybernetic organism sent back in time to alter the future, a group of game developers is using cutting-edge technology from the year 2025 to make the Judgment Day game we’ve wanted ever since the movie was released back in 1991. So, come with me if you want to learn… about the best, worst, and weirdest Terminator video games ever made… in this timeline, anyway. But please, remain clothed. This isn’t that kind of time travel.
Terminator 2 Console Games
One of the best things about Terminator 2 is the sheer variety of its action scenes. It’s got multiple chase sequences with cars, bikes, trucks, and a chopper. In between chases, it’s got shootouts that make use of a whole arsenal of distinctive weapons, and it pits a nearly unkillable protagonist against an even less killable villain. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, there’s a nice glimpse of future warfare full of flying laser robots and cyber tanks and chrome-plated skeleton men. Now imagine you’re tasked with combining all those things into an interactive experience that’s as fun to play as it was to watch on the big screen, while also making sure it fits on a floppy disk. Add to it that you’re on a tight deadline to get it shipped while the movie is still fresh in people’s minds. Oh, and one last thing: you haven’t actually seen the movie yourself.
Well, that was the case for several of the Terminator 2 video games that gradually trickled out in the two years following its theatrical release. Before hitting theaters, T2 was a closely guarded secret, so while the developers were allowed to read a draft of the script and see relevant reference materials, they had to fill in a lot of blanks, figuring out how the finished product would look. So while they weren’t quite flying blind, they were definitely gunning it down the freeway full speed with their headlights off, and it shows in those earlier games.
The T2 game that suffered the worst from these circumstances was Ocean Software’s officially licensed cash-grab, released exclusively in PAL territory in time for the film’s European theatrical release. This one is such a bizarre mess that IGN’s sister-site Eurogamer produced a whole video about it, titled “The Terminator 2 Game That’s Very Weird,” and while that’s an apt appraisal of that game in particular, there are quite a few others that fit the same description and were developed under equally challenging conditions.
Stateside, one of the first T2 games to market was for the Game Boy, released in time for the holiday shopping season of ‘91. It did an admirable job compressing the explosive events depicted on the big screen onto a monochromatic chartreuse display the size of a sugar packet. Like Ocean’s version, it too featured a mix of sidescrolling run-and-gun platforming levels and on-rails driving sequences. In between, there were multiple circuit puzzles in which you had to reprogram the Terminator – just like the unforgettable scene in the film where John and Sarah Connor void the T-800’s warranty by tinkering with its CPU. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the developers as they scrambled to make a game based on a movie they hadn’t seen yet, that scene would be cut for the theatrical release, so those levels probably seemed especially tacked on to players at the time.
It’s funny to think about a movie studio splitting hairs about actors’ likenesses on a screen with such low fidelity, but it was genuinely a bone of contention. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s likeness couldn’t be used for the T-800 in-game (something that’s still the case for Terminator 2D), so there are no close-up images of him. It’s possible that’s why his character sprite looks more like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens than it does Arnold in T2, but that’s more likely a byproduct of it being twenty pixels tall.
Monochromatic low-res renditions of John and Sarah Connor do appear briefly to explain the story, and apparently, Linda Hamilton’s portrait in particular was the cause of some confusion. In an interview years later, it was revealed that UK-based developer Bits received feedback from T2’s production company that Sarah Conner’s bangs weren’t big enough. They were referring to the hair covering her forehead, which is referred to as fringe in the UK, but the developers briefly thought this was American slang for breasts. Thankfully, based on the finished product, this mix-up eventually got sorted out.
In 1992, a similarly shaped Terminator 2 game made its way onto the NES before getting ported to the Sega Master System and Game Gear. Like the Game Boy version, this broke up the movie into side-scrolling platforming levels and driving sequences, but thankfully scrapped the circuitry puzzles - suggesting that the developers of this version were actually able to see the film they were making a game about. While it’s a fairly boilerplate video game tie-in for the era, there is one rather ingenious wrinkle. Just like in the movie, John Conner gives his pet Terminator a scolding for terminating too many people, and this is reflected in-game by requiring the player to complete the mental hospital level non-lethally. Shooting human enemies while standing will result in a mission failure, so the player is forced to crouch and shoot them in the legs instead. Infuriating! But clever.
In December 1993, Terminator 2 games finally arrived on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. These versions benefited from the more powerful hardware and extra development time, but they didn’t exactly strike while the steel was still molten. By the time they were released, time-traveling robots from the future had become obsolete, and genetically resuscitated dinosaurs ruled the world, following Jurassic Park’s box office success that summer.
Despite featuring larger, more varied environments and side objectives like collecting scattered future tech, the 16-bit T2 was not received well. Aside from frustrating players mechanically, it underwhelmed visually, especially when compared to other console games on store shelves at the time, like Ecco the Dolphin and Star Fox, or ports of arcade hits like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Though, bonus points for the authenticity of starting the first level with a butt-naked Terminator walking into a biker bar.
Terminator 2 Arcade Games
Considering that T2 shows the future savior of humanity gleefully burning through tokens in Afterburner and Missile Defense at his local arcade, it’s only fitting that the film got an arcade game of its own, which started appearing in arcades in 1991, before the movie had left cinemas. Compared to the scattershot attempt the console games made at distilling the film’s action setpieces to an interactive format, the original arcade game was more of a straight shooter, as in, all you did was shoot stuff, straight in front of you.
An on-rails shooting gallery played with cabinet-mounted light guns, T2: The Arcade Game let up to two players take on the role of the T-800. The score screen would refer to each player as an individual terminator, though it makes more sense canonically to pretend each player is controlling one of the T-800’s arms. After all, in the movies, he cocks a shotgun one-handed and dual-wields assault rifles, and sending twin T-800s back in time would just be silly. In fact, you can even play this game while dual-wielding, poorly, so if you have a couple of rolls of quarters you need to get rid of quickly, that’s one option.
The first five levels of the arcade game take place in 2029 — the near-future hellscape ravaged by the Skynet and resistance war depicted at the start of Judgment Day — with players blasting wave after wave of endoskeletons, including higher-level gold-plated ones, before eventually getting sent back in time to shoot stuff in the 1990s. The first ‘90s level takes place in the Cyberdyne offices, where the primary objective is “destroy everything,” which includes dozens of Cyberdyne Systems staff members in hazmat suits inexplicably hurling Erlenmeyer flasks full of chemicals at you. Why do they even have chemistry stuff here? Isn’t this a robotics company?One of the big selling points of the arcade game is that it used the digitized likenesses of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edward Furlong, and Robert Patrick, as well as authentic audio clips from the movie. Of course, the context in which they’re used is less authentic. When the T-1000 finally shows up at the end of the Cyberdyne level, he delivers this chilling one-liner: “Are you John Conner?” Which is extremely funny, as it suggests that he’s still not 100% certain this child he’s come all this way to kill is in fact the guy he’s after.
Like the movie, the final showdown takes place in a steel mill, and the T-1000 must be doused with liquid nitrogen, shattered, and ultimately knocked into a vat of molten metal. However, unlike the movie, in between those sequences, the T-800 must protect John Conner from a bunch of gun-toting steel mill workers who come in rappelling from the ceiling, who are apparently really not happy about this robot fight interrupting their smelting of ingots or rebar or whatever.
T2: The Arcade game isn’t perfect, but it could’ve been a lot worse: it could’ve been about rescuing Aerosmith by launching CDs at stormtroopers dressed like MC Hammer… which is the premise of Revolution X, another Acclaim game that was sold as a conversion kit for the T2 cabinet. I would love to say I have fond memories of playing the original T2 arcade game, but for whatever reason, the proprietor of my local movie theater decided a game about Aerosmith made more sense in a multiplex lobby than a game about one of the most successful motion pictures of all time, but couldn’t be bothered to replace the cabinet art. So, I have very fond memories of the T2 cabinet, just not playing the game it advertised.
Terminator 2 PC Games
While arcades and home consoles were thriving in the early 1990s, PC gaming was evolving at an almost geometric rate. Alongside Terminator 2, a brand new Terminator game arrived for personal computers in July 1991, but it wasn’t actually based on the sequel. Rather than scramble to gamify all of T2’s massive setpieces, one studio had the bright idea to tackle something smaller: the first film, which hadn’t gotten a game at that point.
The Terminator was released in 1984, a year after the entire video game industry crashed, and when it was still in rough shape. Even if that hadn’t been the case, nobody was about to greenlight a game based on a low-budget horror flick from the director of Piranha II: The Spawning. But, as James Cameron would demonstrate, from humble beginnings come great things. Meanwhile, the studio behind this ambitious Terminator PC game hadn’t done much besides a handful of sports games, but that would change. The studio’s name? Bethesda Softworks.
These days, Bethesda is known for making massively ambitious games set in sprawling open worlds, and in many ways, The Terminator was the studio’s first step toward developing genre-defining RPGs like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Upon loading up The Terminator, players have the option to play as Kyle Reese or the Terminator. Playing as the former meant protecting Sarah Connor, while the latter was tasked with the titular termination. In either case, the scope of how and where players accomplished this was ridiculously ambitious for the time. The game took place in an almost 1:1 recreation of central Los Angeles that was roughly ten miles across. For comparison, Skyrim is only around 4 miles from Markarth to Riften.
Like in so many sandbox games that would follow in its stead, the player would have free rein to run or drive around, buy or steal weapons and other items, and avoid the police. That said, this was 1991, so it wasn’t exactly easy on the eyes, looking like somewhere between Duck Hunt and a Dire Straits video. It also wasn’t easy on the fingers. Later games of this ilk would let players commit grand theft auto with the press of a button, but vehicular theft in Bethesda’s first outing was only slightly less complex than hotwiring an actual car and then operating a stickshift to get it moving.
Bear in mind, this was 1991. Wolfenstein 3D was a year away, and the idea of a game where players fired a gun from a first-person perspective in a three-dimensional space was far from a surefire game mechanic, never mind doing it in a three-dimensional space the size of Los Angeles. Bethesda’s Terminator game did well enough to warrant a sequel, but rather than follow The Terminator with a game based on T2, the developers sidestepped the film’s many narrative and technical moving parts and set the game post-Judgment Day during the war against the machines.
Released only a year after the first game, Terminator 2029 shows noticeable graphical improvements, which were likely one benefit of its substantially narrower scope. Rather than attempt another open world, 2029 was broken up into levels. Instead of making players pick between a human or machine protagonist, 2029 gave them the best of both worlds: a member of the human resistance, outfitted with a cybernetic exoskeleton that could be outfitted with an arsenal of high-tech weaponry and futuristic gadgets.
A year later, Bethesda followed 2029 with The Terminator: Rampage, which further narrowed the scope and scale of the experience to a more conventional corridor-based shooter. Set entirely within a Cyberdyne Systems facility in the year 1984, players controlled a commando sent back in time by John Connor to destroy a computer that itself had been sent back in time and had begun manufacturing terminators. Rampage was released in December 1993, arriving on store shelves just in time for the holidays. Unfortunately, anyone with a PC and an interest in shooting stuff was likely preoccupied with DOOM, which was not only a much better game; iD launched it by releasing the first chapter for free online, under the correct assumption that players would eagerly pay for the rest of it.
Rampage might not have been the smash hit that Bethesda was hoping for, but its lead designer Vijay Lakschman’s next project for the company would more than make up for it: a little fantasy RPG called The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The Elder Scrolls would go on to become Bethesda’s most successful property, largely thanks to the ambitious vision of game designer Todd Howard, who’s since become a household name - at least, a household name in homes that own multiple swords. But long before venturing off to Tamriel, Howard would carve out his corner of the Terminator timeline.
Howard’s first producer credit at Bethesda was on The Terminator: Future Shock, which was released in 1995, but improved on the studio’s previous efforts tremendously. For one, it featured an unprecedented amount of 3D assets at a time when most shooters were still mostly 2D sprites in a three-dimensional space. Even more revolutionarily, Future Shock is the first PC game that used the mouse to look around - something Todd Howard makes no secret about.
And before you say Bungie did it first with Marathon, that was technically released on Mac, not PC. An expansion pack was planned for Future Shock, but it eventually grew into a standalone game titled Skynet. Skynet lived up to its supercomputer namesake by iterating upon its predecessor to a shocking degree, adding a multiplayer mode and refining the visuals. Okay, so maybe the FMV cutscenes haven’t aged great, but for the time, it was pretty nuts: Skynet’s complex indoor environments and large outdoor areas could be explored on foot or by vehicle, giving it a sense of scale that wasn’t quite as commonplace in games back in 1996.
There’s no saying what the state of Terminator games would’ve been like had Bethesda continued to develop them, but Skynet would be the studio’s last use of the license. Todd Howard would shift his focus from future wars to high fantasy, acting as project lead for The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard - one of the most hated entries in the series - before following that up with Morrowind, which would become one of the most beloved RPGs of all time. No fate but what we make for ourselves!
From T-1000s to T-Viruses
For the late 90s and early 2000s, the Terminator franchise was largely in standby mode. However, a little survival horror series had begun to infect the gaming space: Resident Evil. While Capcom’s long-running series is clearly its own thing, we’d be remiss not to mention how much it owes to James Cameron’s work.
At face value, Resident Evil is mainly about horror of an organic variety - or at least, biological - so a series about shiny metal robots isn’t the first thing to come to mind. But the devs at Capcom took some major cues from the team at Cyberdyne Systems: For instance, in the original Terminator, the T-800 shows up looking like a big, scary human man who pursues the heroes relentlessly until he’s revealed to be something decidedly not human and eventually defeated. In Resident Evil 2, Mr. X has a similar trajectory, shedding his human disguise eventually to reveal his more monstrous Tyrant form. When developing Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, producer Shinji Mikami specifically credits the T-1000 as the inspiration for the titular bioweapon.
Much like Cameron did with T2, as well as Aliens, the Resident Evil series has also had great success by pivoting from horror to action, with things heating up in RE3 before exploding into the nigh-perfect action-horror masterpiece that is Resident Evil 4 - and then perhaps getting a bit too action-packed in subsequent games. But hey, making sequels to nigh-perfect pieces of media is not easy - as the Terminator franchise would soon show us, repeatedly.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Games
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines hit theaters in 2003, a decade and change after its predecessor. T2 is an impossibly tough act to follow, and T3 ultimately didn’t need to exist, but the fact that it emerged from a decade and change in development hell due to convoluted rights issues, it’s kind of a miracle that it’s as decent as it is. For context, the Terminator 3 Wikipedia page spends 600 words summarizing the plot of the movie, which isn’t exactly straightforward, and more than 4000 words describing the amount of back and forth that took place before filming even began.
Since T2, the gaming landscape had changed a fair amount, and console games were beginning to be taken more seriously as a form of entertainment for mature, discerning consumers. This may have had something to do with Arnold finally allowing his likeness to be used in the first Terminator 3 game, and based on the trailer, that was one of its biggest selling points: “For the first time ever, fight as Arnold Schwarzenegger!”.
Unfortunately, star power in a video game isn’t enough to carry it when the rest of the experience sucks. When the Rise of the Machines video game arrived alongside the film’s home video release, it got torn apart by reviewers and fans alike for its subpar graphics, loads of bugs, and AI so stupid that it kind of undermined the premise of the movie it was based on.
PC players didn’t have it any better - they got Terminator 3: War of the Machines, a team-based multiplayer experience vaguely reminiscent of Battlefield 1942, but set in the post-judgment day wasteland. One widespread complaint was the half-baked animations, with one reviewer noting it made sense for a Terminator to die by rigidly falling over like a wobbly store mannequin, but it was less convincing when a human did it, which, bafflingly, was still showcased in the official trailer.
In 2003, developers of console and PC games might have been targeting a more discerning crowd of gamers, but for hastily produced shovelware based on any license that wasn’t bolted down, the Game Boy Advance was the wild west. But, ironically, the GBA version of Rise of the Machines was the least worst adaptation. An isometric action game, it followed a similar structure to T2 games. Players took control of the T-850 and fought robots in the future for several levels before traveling back in time to get shot at by the LAPD instead. One really cool detail is when the T-850 takes damage, it’s reflected by his sprite’s appearance in-game - the lower his health, the more his metal endoskeleton is visible. However, picking up healthpacks makes his skin and clothing grow back, which makes absolutely zero sense… if you somehow forgot we’re talking about a Game Boy game.
A year after Rise of the Machines, Terminator 3: The Redemption was released for consoles and PC - and its title seemed more self-aware than Skynet on Judgment Day, especially after how the previous two games were received. Redemption began development around the same time as Rise and War, but was given extra development time due to its larger scope, which it benefited from greatly. When it was released in 2004, many critics lauded it as “The best Terminator game yet!” Unfortunately, that’s not really a high bar, and a bunch of 7 out of 10s didn’t quite redeem the franchise as a viable basis for more video games without a new movie to attach themselves to.
Terminator Salvation Games
Fast forward through several more years of legal tug of war, and it was announced in 2007 that The Halcyon Company was the proud new owner of the Terminator Franchise and had plans to produce a fourth film, which was intended to kick off a whole new trilogy. Shortly after that news, Halcyon announced the formation of Halcyon Games, which would handle the official video game tie-in in-house, ensuring it arrived alongside the film in 2009.
In some ways, the Terminator Salvation video game is a lot like its movie counterpart: it’s got decent visuals, lots of explosions, almost as many robots, a somewhat forgettable story, but the overall experience could be hell of a lot worse. In other ways, the game is nothing like the movie: John Conner looks and sounds nothing like Christian Bale, as the actor didn’t lend his likeness or voice to the project. The game takes place two years before the events of the film, so it could’ve had a totally original protagonist, and it narratively wouldn’t have made much of a difference. The console versions received pretty mediocre reviews, but the mobile game fared slightly better, largely thanks to its impressive scope compared to the average iOS and Android games of the time.
What’s most interesting about Terminator: Salvation is that it marks a major sea change in Hollywood’s approach to making games based on movies. Video games were starting to be seen as a lucrative entertainment medium of their own, rather than just another form of merchandise. The results of Terminator Salvation’s approach might have been middling, but it’s a substantial improvement from, say, farming out the license to the highest bidder who would then turn it over to a studio that hadn’t even seen the movie they were supposed to make into a game. Unfortunately, The Halcyon Company’s halcyon days were short-lived, and they declared bankruptcy two years after Salvation’s release.
Terminator Genisys Games
Several more years were spent wrestling over the franchise, and soon enough, Terminator Genisys rose from the ashes with lofty ambitions of rebooting the whole space-time continuum and, yes, also kicking off a whole new trilogy. But, no plans were made to return the video game space, and it’s not hard to see why: By 2015, the amount of time and money required to develop and market a AAA video game had begun to regularly eclipse that of your average Hollywood blockbuster. The closest thing we got to a new Terminator game in 2015 was a mode in GTA Online inspired by the film, where players driving semi trucks had to run down bike-riding opponents in an aqueduct.
Okay, so full disclosure: I consider myself a pretty huge Terminator fan… and I never got around to watching Genisys, and based on everything I’ve seen and heard since it was released, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. From the jump, it looked like a cross between one of those fan-made trailers cut together from other movies, and a really expensive Super Bowl ad for a free-to-play mobile game…
So, it’s fitting that two years after Genisys hit theaters, Terminator Genisys Future War was announced for mobile devices with an explosive, extremely polished CGI trailer… which, like many mobile game trailers, may have oversold the actual gameplay just a tad. Awkwardly enough, by the time this Genisys mobile game was released, it had been announced months earlier that the next Terminator movie was in development.
Terminator: Dark Fate Games
Terminator: Dark Fate arrived in 2019, acting as a reboot-sequel hybrid that planned to pick up where T2 left off, ignore the events of all the movies released since then, and - yes, once again - kick off a whole new movie trilogy. James Cameron was actually involved this time around, and Linda Hamilton was back - so it seemed promising enough. Anyway, yet again, it didn’t get an official video game, at least not until Terminator: Dark Fate Defiance, which was an RTS that was rather unstrategically released almost five years after everyone had done their best to pretend this film never existed. However, leading up to its release, Dark Fate did align itself with gaming.
At E3 2019, the T-800 crashed two press conferences. On the Xbox stage, it was revealed that the pre-order bonus for Gears of War 5 would be a whole Terminator: Dark Fate character pack, allowing players to run around as lancer-wielding T-800 endoskeletons or turn Sarah Connor loose in horde mode. Meanwhile, Ubisoft hyped up Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint by teasing plans for Terminator DLC coming post-launch, which would introduce a whole mode that let players rage against the machines.
Mortal Kombat 11, another of 2019’s biggest games, also got Terminator DLC, with the T-800 added to the roster weeks before Dark Fate hit theaters, featuring a fully fleshed-out moveset and the requisite fatalities. This was received so well that Mortal Kombat 11’s sequel, Mortal Kombat 1, would later add the T-1000 to its roster. Given Mortal Kombat’s inscrutably tangled timeline and irreparably mangled spinal columns, it stands to reason that a couple of time-traveling murder robots would make a good fit.
In the years since Dark Fate, not to promote any movie in particular, Terminator characters have made guest appearances in Fortnite and Call of Duty, where they fit in a lot better than plenty of DLC crossovers that have popped up since. Dark Fate’s director, Tim Miller, got his start producing video game trailers with Blur Studios, and it’s likely he was fully in support of this kind of brand synergy, if not partially responsible for how heavily his film aligned itself with gaming. Sadly, Dark Fate’s title turned out to be as prophetic as the frantic warnings of a naked man from the future, and it bombed at the box office, vaporizing any chance of a sequel anytime soon.
Post Dark Fate Games
Weirdly enough, a substantial Terminator game WAS released alongside Dark Fate, but it had nothing to do with that movie, presumably for boring legal reasons. If there’s one thing more convoluted than the Terminator continuity, it’s who owns the rights to it at any given time. My understanding is that a publisher named Reef Entertainment secured the rights to make games based on Terminator and Terminator 2 way back in 2013, but not any of the other films - and by the way, they’re also who are publishing Terminator 2D: No Fate, the game that’s the whole reason we decided to make this video in the first place.
Anyway, Terminator: Resistance was announced in September 2019 with a November 2019 release date. Generally, this short of a turnaround between the announcement and launch of a game is cause for skepticism, and that goes double when it’s based on a movie license that’s had as many bad games as this one has. Now, tack on that it was developed by Teyon, the studio behind the infamous Rambo: The Video Game, and you can see why gamers might’ve steered clear. If you're unfamiliar, Rambo is one of the worst-reviewed games of 2014: on Metacritic, out of hundreds of games, it’s the 7th lowest scored by critics, and 5th lowest based on user reviews.
Upon launch, Terminator Resistance was slightly better received, generally being lauded as mediocre, in some cases flat out bad (Let the record show that I did not review that game for IGN) but you can’t say it wasn’t trying: in addition to having a clear respect for the source material, this little AA game was juggling more complex systems than anyone was likely expecting. In addition to shooting robots, it’s got crafting, stealth, sidequests, and multiple romance options, with sex scenes. Is it a little janky? Yes! Low budget? Definitely! Surprisingly horny? You betcha! But you know what else was? The original 1984 film that kicked off this entire franchise. Since Resistance was first released, the team at Teyon dropped an enhanced version and a handful of DLC, and have since amassed quite a following of players evangelizing all the stuff this game does right.
As a follow-up, Teyon tackled yet another beloved 80s cyberpunk cult classic with Robocop Rogue City. No one was expecting much, but Rogue City improves considerably on what Resistance was attempting, while still maintaining that same palpable appreciation for the source material - it’s a little bit janky, but it also kicks ass and is expecdtly funny - just like Robocop. Like you can throw dudes through walls, but there’s also a sidequest where Robocop has to stand behind a desk in the police station and respond to outlandish citizen complaints to uphold the public trust. These guys understood the assignment. So, whatever 80s movie Teyon announces they’re turning into a game next, keep an eye on it
Anyway, speaking of Robocop as I’m prone to do, that’s the perfect excuse to talk about Robocop Vs. The Terminator! Which I should’ve talked about sooner, but this franchise isn’t chronological, so why should this video be? Released in 1993 for almost all the handhelds and consoles on the market at the time, this delightful crossover was based on the Dark Horse comics miniseries written by Frank Miller, who, fun fact, also wrote Robocop 2 and 3. Anyway, there’s not much in the way of story in the video beyond Robocop shooting a bunch of T-800s and gold T-800s and then a really big T-800, but the music absolutely slaps, and periodically just says “TERMINATOR” for no reason. Also, when you start the game up on SEGA, Robocop says, “EXCELLENT.”
Man, how cool would a modern RoboCop Versus The Terminator be? Oh, if only there were some studio that had experience making Terminator AND Robocop games, and had a bunch of screen-accurate assets lying around just waiting to be mashed together.
After all, there have been weirder combinations. Like say, Terminator and CHESS. Yup, they did that in 1993 too with Terminator 2: Chess Wars, which was probably pretty exciting when it came out, since chess computers were some of the most terrifyingly smart AI in existence back then. Don’t fact-check me on that.
If you prefer PE to math class, you might prefer Terminator and WRESTLING! Yeah, that was also a whole thing in WWE 2K16. Despite not wanting his likeness used in dozens of Terminator games based on Terminator movies he was in, Schwarzenegger not only signed off on it appearing here, he also agreed to recreate the whole opening bar scene of T2, where he walks naked into the biker bar, but this time, they had WWE superstars playing all the bikers. They must’ve paid Arnold the big bucks for that. Hey, speaking of big bucks, did you know there’s a Terminator mode in BIG BUCK HUNTER? Yup, that's right! You shoot Terminators. You probably could have put that together.
What does the future hold? Well, it may involve us banding together to scrounge for resources and fight for our lives in a scorched wasteland wrought by artificial intelligence. Worst case scenario, we’re doing that in real life, but more optimistically, we’re doing it in the open-world game Terminator Survivors, which was announced way back in 2024, but which keeps getting kicked down the road - so who knows when or if we’ll ever get to see it in action. There you have it, MOST of the games based on the Terminator films, featuring Terminator characters, or somehow loosely connected to this storied franchise. I skipped over a few. The future is not written.
Max Scoville is a senior writer, host and producer for IGN covering video games, movies, toys and collectibles. He has 15 years of experience in pop-culture media, previously writing for and/or appearing on Current TV, Destructoid, Revision3 and StarWars.com. He has been involved with several podcasts, including The Comedy Button, Weird Heat, Podtoid and you can currently find him hosting IGN’s weekly PlayStation show, Beyond.
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