6 Films That Got Away With Blatantly Ripping Off Video Games

Kylo wears an outfit suspiciously similar to the one worn by another character from a Star Wars video game: Darth Revan from the Knights Of The Old Republic series. As with Kylo, Revan's identity is revealed in a plot twist -- he's actually the player.

LucasArts

Kylo started out as a Jedi apprentice before turning over to the Dark Side, but he still feels conflicted about it. The same goes for Revan, whose final Dark/Light affiliation depends on how much of a dick the player chooses to be in the game. Even Kylo's Starkiller Base, which drains energy out of a star in order to function, is reminiscent of Revan's Star Forge, which works the same way. Shame on you for thinking they were just ripping off the Death Star.

LucasArts

See? Pretty original stuff ... unless you've played the Arkham series of video games, in which case watching that video probably made your thumbs twitch reflexively. We don't only mean that both involve Batman punching the shit out of faceless henchmen -- it's a specific style that only shows up one other place. Both Snyder's Batman and Arkham Batman love slamming enemies' faces on the floor:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Taking on multiple dudes at the same time in a sort of rhythmic dance that bounces from one opponent to the next in a circle, shattering faces at every stop:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

And occasionally grabbing heavy objects with your grappling hook and using them to smash dudes:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Hell, someone put the game's HUD over the scene and it fits perfectly. There's even a moment when Batman renders the thugs' guns useless with some sort of gizmo -- just like the disruptor gadget from the games. The fighting styles are also very similar and much more brutal than what we're accustomed to, making the blink-and-you'll-miss-'em fight scenes of the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight movies look like they're full of BIFFs and POWs in stylized word balloons.

Ironically, the one thing Snyder didn't copy from the Arkham series is the slo-mo -- which the developers say they copied from Snyder's 300 in the first place. It's good to see that creative thievery enjoys a proud Batman tradition of being a two-way street.

Alfonso Cuaron is the acclaimed, Academy-Award-winning director behind films like Gravity, Children Of Men, and The Good Harry Potter Movie. According to Cuaron, the last video game he played was Space Invaders -- which might be a ruse to prevent us from discovering how much he's borrowed from games in his career. For starters:

Universal Pictures, Valve Corporation

Yes, we know Children Of Men is based on a book from 1990 and Half-Life 2 came out in 2004. However, it's entirely possible that Cuaron noticed both stories are set in dystopic near-futures wherein everyone is infertile and decided to borrow some of the game's look and feel. From Half Life's introspective train ride ...

Universal Pictures, Valve Corporation

... to the desolate but militarized train stations where dickish soldiers push people around ...

Universal Pictures, Valve Corporation

...to the eerily abandoned children's playgrounds.

Universal Pictures, Valve Corporation

Even though the movie isn't in first-person perspective like the game, the camera is constantly showing us the point of view of the main character in this chaotic world. Also, they both end on a massive insurrection against the totalitarian government. There's even a moment in the movie's long, climactic firefight in which the camera gets splattered with blood, like in a first-person shooter. All that's missing is one of the soldiers stopping to teabag a dead body while yelling something racist.

Universal Pictures

Speaking of shooters, when Call Of Duty: Ghosts came out in 2013, many compared it to Cuaron's Gravity (from earlier in the same year) because both feature scenes in which a space station blows up and the astronauts are left drifting in space. What everyone missed was that Call Of Duty did this years before Cuaron -- in 2009's Modern Warfare 2, there's a short but strikingly similar scene where the same freaking thing happens:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Activision

Cuaron even adopted a first-person perspective for the corresponding shots in Gravity. It looks like the closer Cuaron's movies get to video games, the more successful they are, so let's hope the producers of the upcoming Tetris trilogy are reading this.

Ek Tha Tiger is a movie about an Indian spy who dresses, shoots, jumps, and fights just like Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series, in places that coincidentally look just like the various settings of those games (as in, everywhere but India). Even the franchise's characteristic ledge-jumping is represented in the movie's trailer:

Yash Raj Films

Sony Interactive Entertainment

And of course, it wouldn't be not-Uncharted without ridiculous-looking pipe-climbing:

Yash Raj Films

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Meanwhile, only a month after Watch Dogs was released to the underwhelment of gamers everywhere, Bollywood happened to crank out the first Indian super soldier spy hacker movie: 18.11 -- A Code Of Secrecy.

Yash Raj Films, Ubisoft

To be fair, the trailer for this no-budget extravaganza suggests the story has no relation whatsoever to Watch Dog's plot, and the music is completely different (because the music was in fact stolen from Halo). But the most bizarre Indian quasi-adaptation yet is Super Hero Shehanshah, which looks like what happens when you try to play Assassin's Creed at a Renaissance Faire.

Yash Raj Films, Ubisoft

Whereas most of the action in Assassin's Creed takes place in a distant past, this version takes place entirely in modern times. Why would a top-level assassin dress like a Dungeons & Dragons character? Well, there are many convenient reasons, such as hiding in museums ...

Yash Raj Films

... stealthily leaping on horses in front of everyone ...

Yash Raj Films

... snd looking awesome during your live concerts.

Yash Raj Films

Whom should you call in case your video game's assets get stolen by a TV show? Certainly not Marvel's Agents Of SHIELD, which apparently took concept art from Mass Effect 3 in order to create a hi-tech facility shown in the first-season episode "The Bridge."

Marvel Television, BioWare

In response, BioWare, Mass Effect's creators, joked on Twitter that they were waiting for their agents of SHIELD badges. One staff member indicated that he'd settle for a copy of this familiar-looking rap album, featuring The Jacka and DuBBle OO standing in front of one of Mass Effect's futuristic cityscapes.

Space Age Entertainment, BioWare

Some claimed it was ironic for BioWare to complain about having their art stolen when they occasionally use free stock photos in their games, because the internet doesn't know what the words "free stock photos" mean. No, real irony is Fox News doing a segment on immigration ...

Fox News, Take-Two Interactive

... using a logo that was clearly ripped off from BioShock Infinite, a game set in a floating city populated by racist douchebags who hate immigrants. It's impossible to miss -- the villains even use talking points and propaganda which obviously satirizes Tea-Party-style rhetoric. Like this poster:

Take-Two Interactive

Because the Universe never stops being hilarious, a Tea Party group with almost 200,000 members shared that image on Facebook before finding out it was from a video game that was highly critical of their ideology and deleted it.

But oblivious lunatics aren't the only ones ripping off the BioShock franchise ...

BioShock is set in an underwater city and not a train, but the plot has a lot in common with Snowpiercer. Both involve a mad genius creating a techno-horror wonderland as a self-styled utopia, only for the oppressed lower classes to rise up and trash everything. These geniuses broadcast black-and-white propaganda about how awesome they are, and they love slapping their logo anywhere they can.

CJ E&M Film Division, Take-Two Interactive

Snowpiercer's main character has to go from carriage to carriage, bypassing increasingly difficult obstacles until he can confront the final "boss" of the film. At some point in both the movie and the game, the characters find themselves in classrooms (or "educational facilities" in BioShock), whose disturbingly colorful aesthetics clash with the worlds' predominant grayness.

CJ E&M Film Division, Take-Two Interactive

At this point in the movie, a seemingly innocent cart is pushed inside the room, only for someone to pull a big gun out of it, which is a cool idea ...

CJ E&M Film Division

CJ E&M Film Division

... which was even cooler when the game did it.

Bethedsa Game Studios

And speaking of cute child stuff, in both Snowpiercer and BioShock, innocent children are a valuable resource for the leaders, because they're used for creepy activities adults cannot perform -- running the train's engine and harvesting a substance from sea slugs, respectively.

CJ E&M Film Division, Bethedsa Game Studios

In the game, that substance is abused by the upper class, leaving them insane and deformed, with an entire level dealing with a section of the city populated by socialites who sit around doing tons of drugs and wearing freaky masks. Snowpiercer has a similar section of the train populated by costumed ravers rolling their faces off.

CJ E&M Film Division, Bethedsa Game Studios

But perhaps the biggest similarity is that both Bioshock and Snowpiercer end with a plot twist in which the main character finds out he had been manipulated by his mentor to carry out an assassination on the utopia's creator ... a scheme the creator knew about and accepted in both cases. But, you know, lots of movies end like that, we're sure.

CJ E&M Film Division, Bethedsa Game Studios

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For more ways Hollywood has always been unoriginal, check out 7 Classic Movies You Didn't Know Were Rip-Offs and 17 Famous Movies That Ripped Off From Lesser-Known Films.

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