Retro Video Game Movies Worth Watching in 2025: The Honest Guide

Sarah Hargreaves — Culture & Features Editor, RetroInHand

Last updated: May 2026

There’s a particular kind of dread that every retro gaming fan knows. It happens in the moment someone at a family gathering says “oh, I saw they made a film of that game you used to love” — and you smile politely while quietly preparing yourself for disappointment. Because for a very long time, the history of retro video game movies was essentially a history of disappointment. Studios didn’t understand games. Directors didn’t care. Producers thought the IP was the whole job, that slapping a familiar title on a poster was enough to carry a film over the line. It very rarely was.

But here’s the thing: we’re in 2025, and some of those films look very different now than they did on release. Some have aged into genuine cult objects — weird, specific, almost anthropologically fascinating as records of how Hollywood imagined gaming culture. Some are actually, quietly, quite good. And a few are absolutely as terrible as you remember, but terrible in ways that are now actively entertaining. As someone who grew up with these films, who queued for Mortal Kombat at the UCI in Milton Keynes in 1995 with my cousin James and came out absolutely buzzing, I feel weirdly qualified to sort through the wreckage. This is the honest guide to which retro video game movies are actually worth your time in 2025 — and which ones you can safely leave in the past where they belong.

I should be clear about what I mean by “retro” here. I’m focusing on films adapted from games that were themselves products of the 8-bit, 16-bit, and early 32-bit era — roughly 1985 to 1999. These are the games that defined childhoods across the UK and beyond, the games people are now spending serious money to revisit on original hardware. The adaptations that came from that cultural moment, and what Hollywood did (or didn’t) understand about it. Let’s go through them properly.

Why Retro Game Movies Were Almost Always Terrible: A Brief Cultural Autopsy

Before we get to the films themselves, it’s worth understanding why the track record is so grim. It’s not simply that Hollywood was incompetent, though sometimes it was. The deeper problem was a fundamental category error about what video games actually are.

The executives who greenlit these films in the early 1990s largely saw games as delivery mechanisms for IP — characters and worlds that could be extracted and dropped into a conventional cinematic framework. What they missed, almost universally, was that the appeal of most classic games is procedural. You don’t love Street Fighter II because of Ryu’s backstory. You love it because of the muscle memory, the quarter-circle forward motion, the moment a Hadouken connects. That’s completely unfilmable. So adaptors were left with thin characters, minimal narrative, and visual aesthetics that were often literally impossible to recreate on 1990s film budgets.

The gaming press of the time was largely enthusiast-focused and didn’t have the critical vocabulary to explain why the films felt wrong. Players knew they felt wrong. But nobody could quite articulate that the problem was ontological — that these stories lived in the act of playing them, and that removing the player removed the point. Compare this to something like a comic book adaptation, where the source material is already a visual, passive, narrative form. Games were categorically different, and Hollywood took about twenty years to seriously grapple with that.

What we’re left with, then, is a fascinating set of documents from a cultural moment — films that tell us as much about 1990s Hollywood and its assumptions about gaming culture as they do about the games themselves. Approached that way, even the disasters become interesting. Approached as straight entertainment, some of them are still surprisingly watchable. Let me take you through the ones that actually matter.

Super Mario Bros. (1993): The Disaster That’s Become a Masterpiece

What It Is and What It Was Supposed to Be

Super Mario Bros., released in May 1993, is the granddaddy of the whole genre. The first major Hollywood adaptation of a video game property, directed by the husband-and-wife team of Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, and starring Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi. It cost approximately $48 million to make — a substantial budget for the time — and was a box office catastrophe. Critics were savage. Hoskins later called it one of the worst films he’d ever made. Leguizamo admitted they spent much of the shoot intoxicated just to get through it. The production was legendarily chaotic, with the directors being fired partway through and then rehired. By any conventional measure, it was a disaster.

Here’s what I think in 2025: it’s one of the most fascinating science fiction films of its decade, and it absolutely deserves your attention — just not for the reasons anyone involved intended.

How It Handles the Source Material

The film takes the absolute bare minimum from the games — Mario, Luigi, Princess Daisy (an odd substitution for Peach), Koopa, Goombas, Bob-ombs — and then builds an entirely original dystopian science fiction world around them. The Mushroom Kingdom is reimagined as a parallel dimension called Dinohattan, a decayed cyberpunk city that looks like it was designed by someone who had been shown Blade Runner once and told to make it funnier. Dennis Hopper plays King Koopa as a slick corporate tyrant with a flattop haircut. The Goombas are enormous de-evolved dinosaur creatures in tiny leather jackets. None of this has anything to do with the games. Almost none of it.

And yet — there’s something here. The film has a visual imagination that’s genuinely striking. Dinohattan has a coherent internal logic. The production design, for all its weirdness, is committed. This wasn’t a cheap film that looked cheap. It was an expensive film that looked demented. There’s a meaningful difference.

What fans who approach this as a Mario adaptation will hate: everything. The colour palette is wrong, the tone is wrong, the characters bear no meaningful resemblance to their game counterparts, and the whole enterprise suggests that no one involved actually played Super Mario Bros. with anything approaching enjoyment. What fans who approach it as a strange artefact of early-90s Hollywood will find: an unexpectedly rich cult film experience.

Is It Actually Worth Watching in 2025?

Yes, unambiguously. Not as a faithful adaptation and not as a straightforwardly “good” film, but as a genuine cult object. There are fan communities devoted to this film — dedicated documentaries have been made about its production, academic essays written about its place in gaming culture. In the years since its failure, it’s been reappraised as an oddly sincere piece of work, one that was trying to do something genuinely different and simply executed it badly. The directors’ cut — assembled from footage that was never meant for public release — was released online in 2021 and adds considerable context.

Watch it with friends. Watch it loud. Let yourself enjoy the sheer audacity of a film that took the world’s most cheerful platformer and turned it into a dystopian horror-adjacent science fiction film starring Dennis Hopper in a flattop. Bob Hoskins is actually quite good in it, which nobody ever says but which is true. And the soundtrack, by Alan Silvestri, is legitimately excellent.

Verdict: 7/10 as a cult experience. 2/10 as a Mario film. A must-watch.

Street Fighter (1994): Camp Perfection That Knows Exactly What It Is

What It Is

Released in December 1994, Street Fighter was directed by Steven de Souza — the writer of Die Hard — and starred Jean-Claude Van Damme as Colonel William F. Guile and Raul Julia as M. Bison. Van Damme was cast primarily for his international bankability and is, objectively, completely wrong for Guile in every conceivable way. Raul Julia was terminally ill during filming and was there because his children loved the game and he wanted to do something they’d enjoy. That context alone makes the film emotionally complicated in ways it has absolutely no right to be.

Does It Work as an Adaptation?

Sort of. Unlike Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter at least makes a genuine effort to include the actual cast of characters — Ryu and Ken are here (relegated to supporting roles as con artists, which is a choice), Chun-Li gets a significant storyline, Blanka gets a genuinely bizarre origin story, and nearly every major character from Street Fighter II appears at some point. The film’s structural problem is that it’s trying to serve a massive ensemble simultaneously while also being an action film with a conventional protagonist, and those two goals are in constant tension throughout.

What it gets right: the sheer exuberant silliness of the Street Fighter universe translated surprisingly well to live action when the film commits to it. The finale, in which all the characters finally use their signature moves in a massive brawl, is genuinely satisfying if you know the games. And M. Bison’s world domination speeches are absolutely, perfectly calibrated for the character — grandiose, self-amused, slightly theatrical. Raul Julia understood exactly what film he was in, turned everything up to eleven, and delivered what might be the greatest performance in the history of the genre.

The Raul Julia Question

I cannot write about Street Fighter without spending a moment on this. Raul Julia was a classically trained actor who had appeared in The Addams Family, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and on Broadway. He was dying of stomach cancer during the shoot. And he plays M. Bison with such committed, joyful, completely unironic relish that it functions as a masterclass in what it means to take a silly thing seriously. His delivery of “For me, it was Tuesday” — in response to Chun-Li’s impassioned account of the day Bison destroyed her village — is one of the most perfectly landed villainous lines in cinema history. He died two months after the film’s release.

There’s something genuinely moving about watching Street Fighter now, knowing that context. It’s a film a man made for his children, made with everything he had, in the time he had left. That doesn’t make it a masterpiece. But it makes it something.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

Absolutely yes. Street Fighter is one of the rare early game adaptations that has a clear, correct way to watch it: as cheerful, self-aware action camp that is much better at being entertaining than it has any right to be. The fighting game genre, with its roster of colourful characters and absolute minimum of narrative logic, actually translates reasonably well to this kind of ensemble action comedy — better than most people give it credit for. If you’ve spent any time with the fighting game libraries of the 16-bit era, watching Street Fighter deliver a two-hour love letter to that world, however imperfect, hits differently.

Verdict: 7/10. Genuinely entertaining. Raul Julia alone is worth the watch.

Mortal Kombat (1995): The Best of the Lot, and It’s Not Close

What It Is

Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat, released in August 1995, remains — twenty-nine years later — the gold standard of retro video game adaptations. I know that sounds like a low bar. It isn’t, quite. Anderson understood something that every other director of the era missed: you have to earn the fan service. You have to build a world that functions on its own terms, populate it with characters who have internal motivation, and then deliver the moments that players are there to see. Mortal Kombat does all three.

The plot is, by design, extremely simple. A tournament is held in an otherworldly realm. Earth’s warriors must win. If they lose ten consecutive tournaments, the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung gains the right to conquer the Earth. Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, and Johnny Cage represent humanity. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And Anderson understood that this simplicity was a feature, not a bug — that the Mortal Kombat games don’t have deep lore, they have a premise that justifies a series of spectacular fights. His job was to make those fights spectacular. He did.

How It Handles the Source Material

Mortal Kombat is genuinely faithful to its source in the ways that matter. The characters look right, sound right, and fight in ways that echo their in-game movesets. Scorpion’s “Get over here!” is there. Sub-Zero’s ice attacks are there. Kano is broadly recognisable. Shang Tsung is played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa with tremendous snaky menace. The tournament structure maps cleanly onto the game’s ladder format. And the film has the good sense to be rated 15 — nowhere near as violent as the games, obviously, but tonally correct in a way that the sanitised, PG-ified Super Mario Bros. never managed.

The film also benefits enormously from its soundtrack, which is iconic. The opening theme, that thunderous industrial electronic blast with the “Mortal Kombat!” chant, became genuinely culturally significant. It’s one of the most recognisable pieces of music from 1990s gaming culture, which is a remarkable achievement for a film score.

What Fans Will Love and What They’ll Hate

Fans will love almost everything about Mortal Kombat. The film takes its audience seriously, delivers the moments they came for, and doesn’t condescend. Fans who know the games will notice the care taken with character specifics — the way Johnny Cage’s shadow kick is visualised, the visual design of the Outworld environments, the treatment of Goro as a practical effects achievement rather than a CGI shortcut.

What they’ll hate: the absence of fatalities, which the film wisely sidesteps, and the occasionally wooden performances from the leads. Robin Shou as Liu Kang is committed but limited. Linden Ashby as Johnny Cage is doing something more interesting — a slightly knowing Hollywood action hero who’s aware of his own ridiculousness — but it doesn’t always land. Bridgette Wilson as Sonya Blade gets underserved by a script that repeatedly prioritises the male characters. These are real flaws.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

Yes, strongly. Mortal Kombat is the closest the 1990s came to a genuinely good video game film. It’s not a great film in absolute terms, but it’s a solid, well-paced, visually inventive action film that respects its source material and delivers exactly what it promises. I rewatched it earlier this year and was genuinely surprised by how well it holds up. The pacing is brisk, the world-building is economical and effective, and the final act delivers real spectacle. It’s the template that later adaptations — including the 2021 reboot — tried to follow, with mixed results.

Verdict: 8/10. The best retro game film. Watch it before the sequel.

Double Dragon (1994): The One That’s Fun for Completely Wrong Reasons

What It Is

Double Dragon, released in November 1994, is set in a post-earthquake Los Angeles in 2007 — a dystopian future, naturally — and stars Scott Wolf and Mark Dacascos as brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee. Robert Patrick plays the villain. It is, by any conventional measure, an absolutely dreadful film. The production values are poor even by the standards of its budget. The script has the internal logic of a fever dream. The action choreography suggests that nobody involved had met a martial artist before principal photography began.

And yet — it’s a specific kind of dreadful that’s genuinely enjoyable if you’re in the right frame of mind. Robert Patrick, who had played the T-1000 in Terminator 2 three years earlier, commits absolutely to the role of a cartoonishly evil crime lord who wants a medallion that gives him immense power. He’s having a wonderful time. The film has an almost endearing earnestness about its own badness — it knows it’s cheap and silly and proceeds anyway with the confidence of a film that has absolutely no idea it’s cheap and silly.

How It Handles the Source Material

The Double Dragon games — the Technōs Japan brawlers from 1987 onwards — don’t have much source material to handle. Two brothers hit people. A gang kidnaps someone. More hitting. Double Dragon the film takes this extremely thin premise and surrounds it with an enormous amount of additional business involving amulets, gang warfare, post-apocalyptic city gangs, and a plot that I genuinely cannot summarise without losing the thread. It’s less an adaptation and more a film that happens to contain two protagonists called Billy and Jimmy Lee.

The original Double Dragon arcade game was one of the first games many of us played — including on PAL hardware that, as those of us who’ve spent time learning about the compromises of PAL gaming will know, often ran slower than the NTSC originals. Even the compromised version was brilliant. The film version has none of that pure, immediate appeal.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

Only with company and snacks. Double Dragon is firmly in the “so bad it’s entertaining” category — which is a legitimate category, but which requires the right conditions. It’s not interesting in the way Super Mario Bros. is interesting. It doesn’t have the genuine quality of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. What it has is a specific texture of early-1990s cheap action filmmaking that’s become its own nostalgic pleasure, like finding a terrible straight-to-VHS action film from that era in a charity shop. Worth watching at least once, ideally with friends who can appreciate its particular flavour of failure.

Verdict: 4/10 as a film. 7/10 as a social experience.

Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) and Why Earnest Badness Isn’t Charming

What It Is

I’m including this one because it’s a useful lesson in why not all bad video game films are entertaining. The Legend of Chun-Li, released in 2009 and directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, attempts to do something the 1994 film didn’t — put Chun-Li at the centre of the story and take the Street Fighter mythology seriously as dramatic material. It stars Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li and Chris Klein as an Interpol agent who provides the film’s most memorably atrocious performance.

The problem with The Legend of Chun-Li isn’t that it’s bad in an interesting way. It’s bad in a boring way. It takes a character with genuine dramatic potential — Chun-Li’s vendetta against Bison for killing her father is one of the more straightforwardly compelling motivations in fighting game lore — and buries it under a tonally inconsistent, visually flat, narratively incoherent mess. Chris Klein’s performance as Nash deserves its own paragraph, because it’s one of those genuinely impressive achievements in being wrong for a role in every possible dimension simultaneously.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

No. The Legend of Chun-Li is the kind of bad that doesn’t reward you for watching it. It’s not fascinating or weird or camp. It’s just flatly incompetent. There’s a version of this film that could have been genuinely good — Chun-Li’s story is there, the bones exist — but this isn’t it. Save your time for the 1994 original, which at least knows what it is.

Verdict: 2/10. Skip it entirely.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) and the Law of Diminishing Returns

What It Is

Every successful game film spawns a sequel. Every successful game film sequel is worse than the original. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, released in November 1997, is the platonic ideal of this phenomenon. The budget was higher, the special effects were more ambitious, the cast was partially reshot (most of the original cast didn’t return), and the result is a film that manages to be worse in almost every measurable way than the 1995 original.

The script tries to introduce an enormous number of new characters from Mortal Kombat 3 — Motaro, Sheeva, Sindel, Jade, Rain — while simultaneously advancing a plot that requires Shao Kahn to invade Earth, the rules of the tournament to be thrown out, and the heroes to acquire new powers through a series of increasingly incoherent mystical visions. The CGI, which was cutting-edge for 1997, looks absolutely terrible now. The fight choreography is worse than the first film. Brian Thompson as Shao Kahn is an unfortunate replacement for Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s Shang Tsung.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

Only as a cautionary tale. Annihilation is interesting specifically as a document of what happens when studios strip out the qualities that made the first film work — its restraint, its clear structure, its earned fan service — and replace them with more of everything except the things that mattered. More characters, more CGI, more plot, less coherence, less personality. Watch it after the first film if you’re doing a retrospective. Otherwise, no.

Verdict: 3/10. Educational about how sequels go wrong.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012): The One That Properly Understood Games

What It Is

I want to be careful here because Wreck-It Ralph isn’t an adaptation of a specific retro game — it’s an original film set in a world of video games. But it belongs in this conversation because it’s genuinely the most culturally intelligent thing Hollywood has ever made about gaming, and particularly about the kind of retro gaming culture that RetroInHand readers live and breathe.

Released in November 2012, directed by Rich Moore, Wreck-It Ralph posits a world in which arcade game characters exist between their playing sessions — living in their game cabinets, socialising through a kind of transit hub at the power strip. Ralph is the villain of his game (Fix-It Felix Jr., a fictional but convincingly designed Donkey Kong-era platformer) and wants to be a hero. The film follows his journey through multiple game worlds, including a first-person shooter called Hero’s Duty and a kart racing game called Sugar Rush.

How It Handles Gaming Culture

Brilliantly and specifically. Wreck-It Ralph is packed with genuine gaming references that function on multiple levels simultaneously — recognisable enough that children enjoy the energy, specific enough that adults who know the culture get an additional layer of pleasure. Q*bert is in it, homeless and displaced by an obsolete cabinet. Zangief from Street Fighter attends a villain support group. The Konami code appears. Fix-It Felix Jr. is designed with such care that it feels like a game that might actually have existed in 1982.

What the film understands, crucially, is that games have rules, and that those rules have emotional weight. The horror of a game glitching, the finality of a character going Turbo (leaving their own game and destabilising it), the social hierarchy of different game genres — these aren’t just decoration, they’re thematic architecture. The film uses gaming logic to explore questions about identity, purpose, and the stories we’re assigned versus the stories we choose. That’s a genuine cultural achievement.

What Fans Will Love and Hate

Fans of retro gaming will love the first act, set in Fix-It Felix Jr. and the Game Central Station hub, almost unreservedly. The Sugar Rush section — the majority of the film — is less beloved by gaming purists because it feels less rooted in specific gaming culture and more in a generic candy-coloured fantasy world. The sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), abandoned the gaming premise almost entirely in favour of internet culture satire, which felt like a betrayal of what made the original special.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

Yes, emphatically. Wreck-It Ralph is a genuinely great film — not a great-for-a-game-film film, but a great film, full stop. It’s funny, it’s emotionally generous, it has things to say, and it says them through gaming culture in ways that feel true rather than cynical. It’s the film that the genre had been building towards without knowing it. The fact that it’s animated shouldn’t put you off if you’re approaching it as an adult — the animation is gorgeous and the writing is sharp throughout.

Verdict: 9/10. The best film about gaming culture ever made.

The Wizard (1989): Gaming’s Greatest Advert Disguised as a Film

What It Is

The Wizard isn’t an adaptation of a game — it’s a film about games, made in 1989, starring Fred Savage and Luke Edwards as brothers who travel across America so that the younger one can compete in a video game championship. It’s famous for two reasons: it’s the film in which Super Mario Bros. 3 was unveiled to American audiences before the game’s release, and it is, essentially, a feature-length Nintendo advertisement.

This is known. The production had the full co-operation of Nintendo of America. The film features extensive gameplay footage, characters who discuss game mechanics in the kind of loving detail that no real film script would include unless it was contractually obligated to, and a climax that hinges on a child’s extraordinary skill at SMB3 levels that the audience had never seen before. It’s product placement elevated to an art form, and in 1989, it worked.

Why It Still Works in 2025

The Wizard works now for completely different reasons than it worked in 1989. In 1989, the excitement was the games — seeing Super Mario Bros. 3 before release was genuinely thrilling, a kind of preview culture that the internet has made obsolete. In 2025, the games are the nostalgia. Watching The Wizard now is watching a time capsule of late-1980s gaming culture in its full specificity: the Power Glove, the tournament culture, the American west coast road trip frame narrative that somehow made sense as a setting for a film about Nintendo.

“I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.” This line, delivered with complete sincerity by the villain of the piece, has become one of gaming culture’s most beloved accidental memes. The Power Glove was, in reality, one of Nintendo’s most notorious peripheral failures — a motion-control concept that was years ahead of the technology needed to make it work, marketed aggressively and widely regarded as nearly unplayable. The experience of handling a piece of gaming hardware you’d always wanted to try and finding it deeply underwhelming is something every retro gamer knows intimately. The Wizard captured it by accident, in one line.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

Yes, with caveats. The Wizard is a slow film by modern standards, and its emotional beats are extremely broad. But as a document of late-1980s American gaming culture and as a genuine piece of Nintendo history, it’s invaluable. If you have any affection for the NES era — and if you’re reading RetroInHand, you almost certainly do — The Wizard will give you something real. It’s not a good film in the conventional sense. It’s a remarkable piece of cultural evidence.

Verdict: 6/10 as a film. 9/10 as a historical document.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): The Franchise That Earned Its Happy Ending

What It Is

I know, I know — Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) isn’t strictly a “retro” film in the same sense as the others here. But Sonic himself is absolutely a retro gaming icon, the Mega Drive’s defining character and one of the most important mascots in gaming history. And the story of the Sonic film is so extraordinary, so genuinely unusual in the history of adaptations, that it belongs in this discussion.

The film had a catastrophic first trailer in 2019, in which Sonic was revealed with a redesigned appearance — realistic eyes, human teeth, a more anatomically human body — that caused an immediate and furious reaction from fans and non-fans alike. The studio, Paramount, took the extraordinary step of pulling the film back, delaying release, and redesigning Sonic from scratch to match his classic appearance. It cost millions and months. And then the film came out and was… genuinely quite good?

How It Handles the Source Material

The Sonic film is smart about which aspects of the source material it actually adapts. It doesn’t try to recreate specific game plots — Sonic’s game storylines, particularly from the later 3D era, are notoriously convoluted and would be difficult to adapt faithfully. Instead, it takes the core character — fast, cocky, loyal, slightly lonely — and drops him into a fish-out-of-water road movie structure alongside James Marsden’s sheriff. Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik is doing something very specific: a performance that makes Eggman genuinely threatening while also genuinely funny, which is exactly what the character demands.

Importantly, the film is set in the real world but doesn’t apologise for its gaming references. The rings are there, properly designed and functional. Sonic’s speed is visualised with evident affection. The Green Hills sequence is earned. And the ending setups for the sequel respect game lore in ways that pleased fans who knew what they were looking at.

There’s something to be said here about the long shadow of SEGA’s mascot and what he meant to a generation of British kids. The PAL Mega Drive Mini is partly successful because Sonic still carries such enormous emotional weight — he’s not just a character, he’s a whole childhood argument about which console was better, a war fought in every playground in the country in 1992. A film that gets Sonic right matters to people in ways that go beyond simply enjoying a good blockbuster.

Is It Worth Watching in 2025?

Yes, and so is Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022). Both films are significantly better than the source material’s troubled cinematic history had any right to produce. They’re enjoyable family films that treat Sonic with genuine affection and deliver fan service that’s earned rather than cynical. The sequel adds Tails and Knuckles, and handles both well. The Knuckles spin-off series on Paramount+ (2024) is more variable in quality but has its moments. As franchise adaptations go, this is one of the genuine success stories.

Verdict: 7/10 for both films. Exceeded all reasonable expectations.

The Ones That Don’t Make the Cut: Brief Verdicts

For completeness, here’s where I stand on the rest of the retro game film canon:

• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) — Angelina Jolie is perfectly cast, the film around her is not. There’s a decent action film here trying to escape from a muddled script. Worth watching once for Jolie alone. 5/10.
• Mortal Kombat (2021) — The reboot that tried to have the fatalities the 1995 film couldn’t. Has a catastrophically misguided invented protagonist in Cole Young, but the action sequences are genuinely impressive and Sub-Zero is excellent. 6/10.
• Pokémon: The First Movie (1998) — Not strictly a video game film but inseparable from the Game Boy cultural moment. Deeply, earnestly emotional in the way only Pokémon can be. Still works. 7/10.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) — Visually extraordinary, a genuine technical achievement in realising the Pokémon world, and Ryan Reynolds is charming. The plot is a mess. 6/10.
• Wing Commander (1999) — Based on the PC space combat game, this is genuinely irredeemable. A film that manages to make space battles boring. Skip without hesitation. 2/10.
• Max Payne (2008) — The Max Payne games are noirs with real atmosphere. The film removes the atmosphere and keeps only the bullet-time aesthetic. Disappointing rather than interesting. 3/10.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) — Technically beyond our “retro” cut-off but based on a franchise that started in 1989. Jake Gyllenhaal is trying his best. The film is forgettable blockbuster product with some decent action. 5/10.

The Cultural Context: Why These Films Matter Beyond Their Quality

What They Tell Us About Gaming’s Place in Culture

Reading through this list with some distance, what strikes me most is how clearly these films track the evolving cultural status of gaming. The Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter films of 1993-1994 were made by an industry that viewed games as a juvenile property — something to be made safe and broadly accessible, stripped of what made it specific, turned into something that people who didn’t play games could also enjoy. The implicit assumption was that the gaming audience alone couldn’t sustain a major film release.

By 1995, Mortal Kombat treated the gaming audience as its primary audience. By 2012, Wreck-It Ralph assumed that gaming was so culturally central that it could carry the emotional architecture of a Disney film. By 2019, when Paramount pulled back the Sonic film and spent millions redesigning a character because fans objected, the balance of power had shifted entirely — gaming audiences had become a force that studios actively feared disappointing.

This is a remarkable cultural arc. And for those of us who remember being told that games were a childish waste of time, who remember the PAL gaming childhood of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the second-rate ports, the delayed releases, the shops that decided what you got to play — there’s something genuinely satisfying about watching an industry eventually come to understand that this culture was worth taking seriously.

The British Retro Gaming Experience and Its Absence from These Films

One thing that strikes me, as a British viewer revisiting these films, is how completely American they all are. The Super Mario Bros. film was shot in North Carolina. Street Fighter was shot in Thailand and Australia. Mortal Kombat was shot in Thailand. Double Dragon was set in a post-earthquake Los Angeles. Even the Sonic film, with its Montana setting, is a fundamentally American vision of what these games mean.

The British gaming experience — the PAL compromises, the Woolworths Christmas queues, the SEGA vs. Nintendo playground wars that played out slightly differently here than in the States, the specific cultural weight of the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad before the consoles arrived — has never really been reflected in mainstream film. The games themselves were mostly universal (with the PAL compromises aside), but the experience of growing up with them in Britain was specific. The closest we got was the British production design of the Virtual Reality gaming sequences in mid-1990s films like Hackers or Johnny Mnemonic, which captured the cultural anxiety about gaming without capturing the actual joy of it.

That’s a film someone should make. Not an adaptation. A film about what it was like to grow up gaming in Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s. About the specific texture of that experience. I’d watch it.

A Personal Memory: Milton Keynes, 1995, and Why Mortal Kombat Still Matters

I mentioned at the start that I saw Mortal Kombat at the UCI in Milton Keynes with my cousin James in 1995. I want to come back to that, because I think it explains why these films matter beyond their individual quality ratings.

James and I were both deeply into gaming. We’d spent hundreds of hours on Street Fighter II on his SNES — him always Ryu, me always Chun-Li, partly to wind him up. We’d played the Mega Drive port of Mortal Kombat with the blood code entered (ABACABB, burned into my memory forever), thrilling at the violence in the way that only eleven-year-olds can. We’d had the moral panic coverage explained to us by adults who didn’t understand what we were doing, and we’d ignored it entirely. Mortal Kombat was ours. It was part of our language.

Going to see the film felt genuinely significant. Not because we thought it would be a masterpiece. But because something that was ours — something that existed in our bedrooms, on our televisions, in that specific space of two people playing together — was being acknowledged by the wider culture. It was on a cinema screen. Strangers were there who also knew what “Finish Him!” meant. The theme music played and the whole cinema responded. That moment of collective recognition, of a subculture being seen, was real.

The film, as I’ve said, is actually pretty good. But even if it hadn’t been, that moment would have mattered. I think that’s true of all these films, even the terrible ones. They were the moments when gaming culture was acknowledged by the wider world, however imperfectly. For kids who loved games and were sometimes told those games didn’t count as a real interest, that acknowledgement meant something.

We’re long past needing that acknowledgement now. Gaming is the dominant entertainment medium on the planet. The anxieties about adaptation have been replaced — as The Last of Us on HBO has demonstrated — with genuine excitement about what games can become in other media. But the retro game films of the 1990s were the early, imperfect moments of that recognition. And some of them, revisited now, are more than just cultural artefacts. They’re actually worth watching.

The Definitive Ranking: Retro Video Game Movies Worth Watching in 2025

If you want the quick version — though I’d encourage you to read the full assessments above — here’s where every film stands:

1. Wreck-It Ralph (2012) — 9/10. A genuinely great film. Watch it.
2. Mortal Kombat (1995) — 8/10. The best straightforward adaptation. Watch it.
3. Street Fighter (1994) — 7/10. Camp perfection. Watch it for Raul Julia.
4. Super Mario Bros. (1993) — 7/10 as cult experience. Watch it with friends.
5. Sonic the Hedgehog (2020 & 2022) — 7/10. Better than expected. Watch both.
6. Pokémon: The First Movie (1998) — 7/10. Genuinely emotional. Worth revisiting.
7. The Wizard (1989) — 6/10. Essential historical document. Watch it once.
8. Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) — 6/10. Visually brilliant, narratively messy. Watchable.
9. Mortal Kombat (2021) — 6/10. Better than it should be. Watch after the 1995 original.
10. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) — 5/10. Jolie only. One and done.
11. Prince of Persia (2010) — 5/10. Fine blockbuster. Forgettable. Skip if short on time.
12. Double Dragon (1994) — 4/10. Group watch only.
13. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) — 3/10. Educational. Otherwise skip.
14. Max Payne (2008) — 3/10. Skip.
15. Wing Commander (1999) — 2/10. Avoid entirely.
16. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) — 2/10. Avoid entirely.

Final Verdict: What 2025 Tells Us About These Films

The best way to watch retro video game movies in 2025 is with generosity and context — not uncritical generosity, but the kind that tries to understand what each film was attempting and whether it succeeded on its own terms. Some of them were attempting very little and still failed. But some of them — Mortal Kombat (1995), Street Fighter, even the catastrophically weird Super Mario Bros. — were doing something real with limited tools and limited cultural understanding, and they deserve credit for that.

The other thing 2025 gives us is perspective on how far adaptations have come. The Last of Us on HBO is operating at a level of sophistication — in its understanding of why the game matters, in its translation of the game’s emotional logic into television — that would have been literally unimaginable to the people making Street Fighter in 1994. Arcane took League of Legends — a game with essentially no single-player narrative — and made one of the most critically acclaimed animated series of the decade. These achievements didn’t happen in a vacuum. They were built on the strange, imperfect, sometimes wonderful foundations that retro game films laid.

So: watch Wreck-It Ralph with whoever’s nearby. Rewatch Mortal Kombat on a Friday night. Put Super Mario Bros. on at a gathering and watch people who’ve never seen it before encounter it for the first time. Appreciate Raul Julia in Street Fighter for the gift that it is. If you’ve been meaning to dig back into the hardware that inspired all of this — whether that’s tracking down PAL cartridges, thinking about the current value of your Game Boy collection, or working out whether premium retro hardware is worth importing in 2025 — then pair it with revisiting these films. Context makes everything better.

The retro game movie is a flawed, frequently embarrassing, occasionally brilliant genre that tried to understand something it mostly didn’t, at a moment in cultural history when gaming hadn’t yet won the argument about its own significance. In 2025, gaming has clearly won that argument. Going back to watch the early attempts, knowing the outcome, is its own kind of pleasure. Some of them deserved better. Some of them deserved exactly what they got. All of them tell us something real about where we’ve been.