The Last of Us on HBO and Fallout on Amazon Prime proved that video game adaptations can be genuinely great television. Both shows found audiences far beyond their gaming fanbases and both received critical acclaim that most shows would be happy to get. The question is no longer whether games can work as TV. The question is which games deserve to be next. Not all of them. Some games, like Tetris, Minecraft, etc. work as games and nothing else. But some have stories, worlds, and characters that feel like they were built for a prestige drama format that gives them room to breathe. These are the ones that I think should be next.
Best Games to Adapt into TV Series
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Mass Effect
- Gears of War
- BioShock
- The Elder Scrolls
- Hades
- Metal Gear Solid
- Control
- Death Stranding
Red Dead Redemption 2
This is the obvious answer and the fact that it has not happened yet is genuinely puzzling. Arthur Morgan is one of the best-written characters in gaming, a morally complex outlaw wrestling with loyalty, mortality, and the fading of the old west. The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is enormous and full of characters and storylines that a TV series could explore without ever repeating itself. The tone is already cinematic. Rockstar essentially made a prestige drama and attached a game to it. A series following Arthur and the Van der Linde gang in the years before the events of the game, or adapting the main story directly, would be appointment television. Think Yellowstone meets Deadwood with better writing than either. Plus who wouldn’t love a potential Sadie Adler spinoff show?
Mass Effect
The Mass Effect trilogy is a space opera on the scale of Star Wars with better character writing. Commander Shepard leading a diverse crew of alien and human companions against an ancient machine threat across three games worth of relationship building, political intrigue, and galaxy-scale consequence has everything a multi-season prestige drama needs. The challenge is committing to a version of Shepard, male or female, paragon or renegade, but that creative choice is exactly what an adaptation should make. The sprawling space opera series would make a great multi-season TV show. Amazon is already producing a God of War series. Mass Effect is a bigger universe with arguably more interesting characters. It should be next.
Gears of War
The emotional core of the Gears of War trilogy is Dom Santiago’s search for his wife and what it costs him. That story, set against a war of extermination on an alien planet, is the kind of thing that turns a military action franchise into something that actually affects people. A Gears TV series that committed to the relationship between Marcus and Dom the way the games do, treating the war as the backdrop rather than the point, could be extraordinary. The scale of the Locust War across Sera is also exactly the kind of world-building that works better in a ten-episode season than in a two-hour film. With Gears of War: E-Day coming soon, the timing has never been better.
BioShock
Rapture is one of the most fully realized fictional worlds ever built in a game. An underwater city built on Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy, corrupted by its own ideals and torn apart by civil war, with a cast of characters communicating through audio diaries found scattered through flooded corridors. A great setting with the underwater city of Rapture, a twist-heavy story, and those Big Daddies are just a few of the reasons that make a strong case for an adaptation. Netflix has a BioShock film in development with Francis Lawrence directing and Michael Green writing. That is the right approach on paper, but a multi-season television series would serve Rapture better than any single film. There is too much world to compress.
The Elder Scrolls
Fallout worked as TV because Amazon committed to building an original story within the game’s world rather than adapting any specific game’s plot. The Elder Scrolls offers the same opportunity at a fantasy scale that would rival Game of Thrones. Tamriel is a continent with thousands of years of history, dozens of factions, and a mythology deep enough to sustain decades of storytelling. Like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls games are relatively light on plot and incredibly long on context, so a TV show could follow in Fallout’s footsteps and mix together the best parts of various games to tell an original-ish story. With The Elder Scrolls VI still years away, a TV series would be the perfect way to keep the universe in people’s minds.
Hades
Hades is already written like a television show. Zagreus fighting his way out of the underworld across hundreds of runs while the relationships between him, his father Hades, his mother Persephone, and the assembled gods of Olympus develop through dialogue that changes with each attempt. The voice performances are outstanding. The character work is exceptional. The games have a ton of well-drawn characters who play out a variety of tightly scripted dramas, so a lot of the work would already be done for whoever adapts this story for TV. An animated series in the style of Arcane, with the same commitment to character and the same visual ambition, would be one of the best things on television.
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid has been discussed as a film for decades and nothing has ever materialized, largely because condensing Hideo Kojima’s famously dense lore into two hours is essentially impossible. Television solves that problem. Making Metal Gear Solid a TV show would give the story the space to spread out. The original Metal Gear Solid, following Solid Snake infiltrating Shadow Moses to stop a nuclear threat while uncovering the conspiracy behind his own existence, has the bones of a great prestige thriller. The codec conversations alone could sustain an entire show’s worth of character development. Give it the budget it deserves and the season count to breathe and Metal Gear Solid becomes the spy thriller television has been missing since The Americans ended.
Control
Remedy Entertainment’s Control is set in a brutalist government building in New York City that is larger on the inside than the outside and full of paranormal phenomena that the Federal Bureau of Control has been quietly managing for decades. Jesse Faden arrives looking for answers about her past and ends up becoming the Bureau’s director in the middle of a crisis. The show practically writes itself as a Twin Peaks meets The X-Files workplace drama with supernatural horror and a genuinely strange protagonist who talks to herself constantly and wields telekinetic powers. The world has enough depth for multiple seasons. The tone is distinctive enough to stand out in a crowded streaming landscape. We already know Remedy can make compelling live action, as their last game, Quantum Break, had live action segments in it. Remedy is already developing film and television adaptations of their properties through Annapurna Pictures. Control should be first.
Death Stranding
Death Stranding is the hardest sell on this list and also potentially the most interesting. Hideo Kojima’s post-apocalyptic delivery game about a fractured America connected only by a courier named Sam Porter Bridges sounds almost deliberately unfilmable. A man walking across an empty landscape delivering packages while invisible creatures hunt him and ghosts of the dead pull him underwater. And yet the themes underneath all of it, loneliness, connection, the fragility of society, and what it costs to rebuild something that has been destroyed, are exactly the kind of thing that great prestige television is built on. The cast of the game already reads like a prestige drama lineup. Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Lea Seydoux, Lindsay Wagner, and Guillermo del Toro all appear in the game, with del Toro as a character rather than just a cameo. A television adaptation would need to commit fully to the strangeness of the world rather than trying to make it more conventional, the same risk Amazon took with Fallout and the same bet HBO made with The Last of Us. Both paid off. Death Stranding deserves the same chance. A slow, atmospheric prestige drama about rebuilding human connection across a broken America is exactly what television needs more of, and Kojima already did most of the creative heavy lifting.
The Games That Are Already Happening
Several of the most obvious choices are already on the way. Ghost of Tsushima is set to be directed by John Wick filmmaker Chad Stahelski, and fans can also look forward to an anime series based on the game’s Legends mode. Amazon is moving ahead with a Life is Strange TV show starring Maisy Stell as Max, and its God of War adaptation with Ryan Hurst as Kratos is also in production. Tomb Raider is getting a live?action series written and produced by Phoebe Waller?Bridge, with Sophie Turner stepping into the role of Lara Croft.
The pipeline is full. The real question is which franchises get the call next — and based on what television has proven it can do with the right source material, these are the video games that should be TV shows.