It's easy to forget now that 15 years have passed since our last ogre-centric trip to Far Far Away, but Shrek wasn't just a big, lucrative movie franchise. It was also a big, lucrative video game franchise.

Shrek Has Starred In Way More Games Than Samus

Since the first movie hit theaters in 2001, there have been four console games adapting the movies (with an additional four handheld ports), five kart racers, four party games, four educational games, and (by my count) 36 other games that are based on or include characters from the Shrek film series and the Puss in Boots spin-offs. All told, there have been north of 50 games including Shrek and Company.

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That's a lot, and most of them weren't good. But Shrek's heyday was the '00s and that was the prime decade for movie tie-in games. DreamWorks, in particular, was pumping them out. Whether you remember a DreamWorks animated movie — like the franchise spawners Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon — or have completely forgotten about them — Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, Over the Hedge — they’ve almost definitely received interactive adaptations.

Sometimes multiple for one movie, as in the case of Over the Hedge, which got a traditional adaptation and Hammy Goes Nuts!, which focused on Hammy, the squirrel voiced by Steve Carell.

What Happened To Tie-In Games?

This was the business. Sometimes a game was genuinely great (the SNES/Genesis-era Disney platformers), and sometimes it was so bad it lived in infamy (like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on Atari 2600). But most of the time they were just the right amount of bad for the industry to keep chugging along. Rugrats: Royal Ransom and Tarzan: Untamed weren't my favorite GameCube game, but they got close enough to replicating a world and characters I loved that I still have fond memories of them.

But something started to happen at the end of the '00s, and kicked into overdrive in the '10s. In 2009, Rocksteady released Batman: Arkham Asylum. It was the rare licensed game that proved that games based on existing IP could be not just good but among the best games of the year. With its follow-up Arkham City in 2011, Rocksteady proved it wasn't a fluke and this new era of licensed games was up and running. Throughout the 2010s, some of the best and biggest triple-A games were based on comics (Marvel's Spider-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy), books (Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, The Witcher 3), movies (Alien: Isolation, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order), and TV shows (South Park: The Stick of Truth).

Flight Of The Cash Grabs

As the quality of tie-in console games rose, the cheap cash grabs migrated to mobile. Big breakout hit TV shows of the 2010s and beyond were much more likely to get adapted as a game you could play for free, rather than as something you would pay full price for on your console. I'm talking about Pocket Mortys, Stranger Things: The Game, Game of Thrones: Conquest, Westworld, Mr. Robot, and Reigns: Game of Thrones.

There have also been tie-in games that did come to PC and console — Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics — but they were much smaller scale than those games would have been in the aughts.

Some were good, some were bad, but all were cheaper than making a 3D action-adventure or platformer, which is what similarly sized hits would have spawned in the '00s. In a world where triple-A games take upwards of five years to develop, it doesn't make much sense to adapt anything but the sturdiest of IP.

Is this a good development? A bad development? Both? On the one hand, licensed games getting better is obviously good. But tie-in games were crucial vertebrae in the spine of double-A, and as they scaled up and down, the meat of the middle vanished. Many developers you love got their start making crappy licensed games and, without them, it's harder to get a start in the industry.

Could Shrek 5 mean a return for fighting games and kart racers based on movies? Maybe! But, I think it's more likely that, as with Shrek's animation style, his return will remind us how much has changed.

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