10 Actors Who Reprised Iconic Roles For Video Games
The name's Connery...
While age often brings wisdom and self-confidence, it also severely limits things like a heavy night’s drinking or doing extreme sports. Actors know this better than anyone, and if they’re lucky enough to have a long career, they also get to see themselves ageing onscreen. Hairlines recede, bellies grow larger and the leading action stars can find themselves playing the grandparents of an upcoming star in the reboot, thirty years later.
So while it would be nice to have a new instalment in the Bond series starring Sean Connery or Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry again, realistically, that’s just not going to happen. Thanks to the glorious rise of video games though, a solution has been found; an actor can return to one of their famous roles for a new entry regardless of age, and all they’ll need to do is sip tea in a recording booth and get paid a lot of money.
This allows gamers to experience the world of the movie – often decades after it came out – while getting to play as the original characters. The games themselves can be something of a mixed bag, with some being worthy follow-ups, whilst others lean on the name alone to sell copies.
Here’s a list of games that brought back actors to beloved characters, for better or (occasionally) worse.
10. Arnold Schwarzenegger - Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines
Arnold made a big deal of the fact the tie-in game for Terminator 3 was the first time he’d agreed to add his voice to a game, claiming that past attempts to make games for his movies always looked terrible to him. In his mind, the T3 tie-in was the first to get it right.
Big words, but sadly the end product was pretty awful. The game is a badly designed first-person shooter with dull graphics and a total lack of impact combat-wise, its shoddy controls not helping matters one bit. Occasionally a clunky fight scene will break out where The Terminator will fight another machine, and these graceless battles are even less fun to control than the main game itself.
The game adds and expands upon the story of T3, but only diehard Terminator fans will be able to get any enjoyment from it. A second game based on the film called The Redemption was released the next year, and while not a classic it was a huge improvement on this sloppy cash-in.