10 other classic characters that deserve their own "violent, sexy Pinocchio game"

We’ll start with an obvious pub-domain superstar: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (Not to be confused with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is absolutely still under copyright—and which already got a number of video game adaptations back in 1993.) Stoker’s most famous creation has already shown up extensively in games, of course, most notably in Konami’s Castlevania series, which even contains a few installments that let you play as the Count himself. (Most notably, 2010’s Lords Of Shadow 2.) None of which changes the fact that a brand new game in which you play as the infamous bloodsucker as he terrorizes London would work extremely well, incorporating abilities like flight, transformation, and more into an action-heavy rampage, or letting players use stealth to silently stalk their prey as a creature of the night.

You can already picture it, right? Your aging hero, armed to the teeth and covered in armor, crests a hill in the countryside, desperately searching for his lost courtly love. A shape looms over him in the darkness—a windmill? Don’t be foolish: It’s a giant, slamming its fist down to destroy the man of La Mancha at last. Games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice have proven that dark action games can support narratives that translate struggles with mental stability into more literal metaphors. Applying that to Cervantes’ form-defining novel feels like a natural fit, literalizing the battle between the reality of Alonso Quijano, and the fantasies of Don Quixote, as they battle the monsters (real, and imagined) of the world.

There’s already at least one really good video game set in the world of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet—the 2019 adventure title Elsinore, which tasks players with helping doomed Ophelia try to navigate a way out of tragedy (with time loops!). But while you would have to turn his action-avoiding indecision down a tad, it’s easy to see the story of the Prince Of Denmark’s revenge play out through a more traditional, and violent, character action game: Ghosts on the one side, goading you into battle, while your evil uncle gloats from his throne. (Nice of Shakespeare to already include a final boss fight in the stage play, too—although we’ll probably have to nerf the poison on the blades a bit.) Hamlet persists (and has been endlessly adapted) in part because its basic story structure is so easy to grasp, even as Shakespeare’s writing imparts nuance to his characters. You’d lose some of that beauty with the translation into gaming, but you’d still be left with an incredibly satisfying skeleton to base your battles on.

Like several of the works on this list, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde has actually already been adapted a few times for video games. (Most interestingly with a 1988 NES adaptation that tried—with surprising ambition—to capture the push-and-pull of its two title characters with the gaming tech of the time.) The basic idea remains fairly underexplored, though: The transitions between good but frail Henry Jekyll and the malevolent Edward Hyde. Simply using Hyde as a sort of “super mode” would be the most first-thoughts approach for this kind of game, obviously, if also a bit rote; more intriguing would be to find ways to set the characters’ objectives against each other, even as their short-term goals might overlap—with levels depending on which character is more dominant at different points.

It’s been years—specifically, the 10 years since Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag came out—since we’ve had a really good single-player nautical action game. And, sure: Whaling is not the most relatable profession for a video game player character to adopt. But part of the fun of Lies Of P is the way it twists Carlo Collodi’s original Pinocchio story in strange and ugly directions; maybe in this world, whales are actually eldritch beasts, and Ahab is an anti-hero sailing the seas to take revenge on one—and, incidentally, keep humanity safe? Imagine the opportunities for sea shanties, if nothing else!

This one has less to do with the Edgar Rice Burroughs character himself—that “Confederate Army captain” thing hasn’t gotten more palatable since Disney’s 2012 film adaptation attempt died hard in theaters—than the desire to see Burroughs’ vision of Mars (sorry, Barsoom) appear in a game. The Carter stories are classic high-adventure mixed with early takes on a lot of beloved sci-fi concepts. Leaping across the red sands, fighting Green Martians, riding the eight-legged thoats: It’s easy to imagine all of these translating naturally to an action-heavy game. You don’t even have to get particularly inventive with the monster designs, since Burroughs already designed bizarre creatures like the Kaldanes (from 1921’s Chessmen Of Mars), heads on spider legs that can attach to other beings and take control of their bodies. Instant horror, no wild re-invention required!

Double-dipping on Burroughs, we’ll also stump for Lord Greystoke himself—Sony’s Spider-Man games having already proven that there’s a real market for web/vine-swinging as a method of digital traversal. Most of the previous adaptations of Tarzan for gaming have been based off of the 1999 Disney film (including, obviously, 2003’s Disney Extreme Skating Adventure.) But a more rigorous, and brutal, Tarzan game could be fascinating, juxtaposing, as it almost certainly would, the dangers of jungle and city alike. (Easy to imagine, for example, a skill tree that allows players to choose between embracing their more urban, or more arboreal, aspects.) Meanwhile, there have been plenty of darker Tarzan films (1984’s Greystoke, notably) that show there’s fertile soil for storytelling in the ostensibly basic tale of a man growing up amongst the beasts.

We’ve mostly steered clear of fairy tales in this list, if only because dark twists on classic kids’ stories hew dangerously close to the “Piglet smashes your head with a big ol’ hammer” line. But the story of Rapunzel has lots of elements we could see working their way into an action game—most notably, of course, the hair, which could serve (with apologies to Platinum Games’ Bayonetta) as lasso, weapon, costume, and more. Honestly, the biggest danger with this project wouldn’t be avoiding witches, but lawyers: Disney has already staked out a lot of territory, via Tangled and its various follow-ups, in the “Rapunzel is a badass” column; making something distinct enough to avoid the Mouse’s wrath would be the biggest obstacle for a developer to tackle.

We’re not going to lie: This is the single most difficult-to-adapt idea on this list—if for no other reason than that Fletcher Hanks’ most famous character, his bizarre spin on superheroes, is functionally invincible. (It’s all of the issues with making a Superman game where your hero can be meaningfully hurt, but with a much more caustic sense of justice attached.) And yet, Hanks’ vision of the world—in which villains execute horrifying schemes, only to have even more horrifying punishments meted out to them by a nigh-omnipotent “wizard”—is as compelling for us now as it has been for the many fans who’ve stumbled on his work over the last century. (Including, we learned while researching this piece, a few tabletop game designers, who’ve written stories in which Stardust features—usually as a danger or threat). Maybe we’d go the same way, here, dropping players into the boots of one of Stardust’s many (short-lived) enemies, living out a horror game before facing their inevitable, and horrifying, just desserts once The Super Wizard finally catches up to them.

Old English poetry’s most reliable blockbuster has only ever been adapted for gaming twice—in 2007, as a poorly regarded follow-up to Robert Zemeckis’ CGI indulgence, and in 1998, when it served as the basis for text-based online role-playing game Grendel’s Cave. Our hypothetical developer might try to split the difference, incorporating, yes, big dramatic battles with Grendel and other mythological beasts, but also a heavy dose of the brutal verse of the original work to stop things from getting too, well, God Of War. Part of the fascination of Beowulf, to modern audiences, is the way its morality reflects its own culture, and only haphazardly lines up with our own; seeing a studio embrace those elements to create a brutal, violent warrior who fights first and foremost for his own glory could give an interesting spin to a familiar template.