Last updated: May 2026
🛒 Where to Buy
- → Analogue PocketBest for: accuracy-obsessed retro collectors
- → Steam Deck OLEDBest for: portable gaming enthusiasts
- → Miyoo Mini PlusBest for: budget-conscious casual players
- → Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion PackBest for: NES SNES N64 access
- → Evercade VSBest for: living room arcade nostalgia
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The Post-HBO Moment: Why Retro Gaming TV Matters Now
I remember exactly when The Last of Us HBO premiere aired. My cousin James rang me the next morning asking if I’d watched it yet, and when I said I hadn’t, he went unusually quiet. Not because it was bad—because he couldn’t decide if it was a betrayal or a triumph. That’s the thing about gaming adaptations: they sit right at the intersection of fan anxiety and cultural legitimacy. And after HBO proved you could actually make one work, something shifted.
But here’s what I’ve discovered whilst reviewing what’s actually available on UK streaming right now: The Last of Us wasn’t the beginning of something. It was the wake-up call. Behind it, quietly building an audience, are a handful of genuinely excellent retro gaming adaptations that arrived on services like Netflix, Prime Video, and even BBC iPlayer. Some of them predate The Last of Us. Some of them flew under the radar entirely. And most of them do something HBO’s prestige drama never quite manages—they actually seem to *like* their source material.
That matters. Because unlike The Last of Us, which treats gaming as raw material for a prestige drama, the best retro gaming adaptations on UK streaming understand something fundamental: these games weren’t just interactive stories. They were cultural moments. They shaped childhoods. They defined how millions of people think about play, difficulty, storytelling, and community. A good adaptation doesn’t ignore that. It leans into it.
Castlevania: Nocturne (Netflix) – What Happens When Source Material Meets Serious Television
The Show and What It Does
Castlevania: Nocturne is technically a spin-off rather than a direct adaptation of a single retro game, but it’s fundamentally *about* retro gaming culture in ways that matter. It launched on Netflix in September 2023 and returned for a second season in January 2025, and it’s genuinely one of the most confident pieces of gaming adaptation I’ve seen on any streaming service. The show follows Richter Belmont, a whip-wielding vampire hunter, through a gothic 1780s Eastern Europe where he’s trying to break free from the legacy of his famous family line.
What’s remarkable is that the show doesn’t just reference the games—it understands the visual language they created. The animation style deliberately echoes the sprite work of the original Castlevania series on NES and SNES. The combat choreography captures the rhythm-based difficulty of the games themselves. When Richter fights, you see the same locked animations, the same commitment to each strike, that made Castlevania’s combat feel so weighty on 8-bit and 16-bit hardware. That’s not accident. That’s reverence translated into medium.
The Source Material Question
The original Castlevania games—particularly the NES trilogy and Super Castlevania IV on SNES—were essentially gothic action platformers with minimal story. The narrative framework was simple: Belmonts fight Dracula repeatedly across centuries because that’s what Belmonts do. There’s a reason the series spawned dozens of sequels across multiple decades. The gameplay was the story.
What Nocturne does brilliantly is take that premise seriously as mythology. It treats the repeated cycle of vampire hunting like it *means* something—psychologically, spiritually, culturally. There’s actual trauma in this show. Richter isn’t just a action hero; he’s someone burdened by the weight of a dynasty of violence. That’s not a betrayal of the source material. It’s an evolution of it. The games had a visual identity and a thematic core (gothic, difficult, solitary) and the show simply asks: what if we took that seriously as character study?
What Fans Will Love and Hate
Fans of the games themselves—particularly the 2D classics—will absolutely love the visual fidelity here. The animation team clearly spent time studying those sprite sheets. The backgrounds feel lifted from a 16-bit era that never quite existed. It’s got the same aesthetic care that something like the Hollow Knight series brings to its source material.
What some fans might resent is the *darkness* of it all. The original Castlevania games were hard, yes, but they had a kind of arcade energy. Nocturne is properly bleak. It’s focused on suffering and the burden of legacy. If you’re a fan specifically because you loved the tight platforming and the monster-slaying catharsis, you might find the show’s slower, more psychological pace frustrating. It’s not the game. It’s commentary on the game, told through the medium of prestige television.
Sonic the Hedgehog Films (Various Platforms) – Why the Adaptation Finally Understood the Character
From Disaster to Genuine Entertainment
I need to address something that still feels slightly unbelievable: the Sonic the Hedgehog films are genuinely good adaptations of a video game character. Full stop. This should not have happened. The first film arrived in 2020 on a wave of cynicism so thick you could cut it with a Master Sword. The redesign controversy alone (which led to a complete character overhaul after fan backlash) meant this thing arrived feeling like a salvage operation rather than a proper production.
But somehow—and I say this with genuine surprise every time I think about it—they work. The films are available on various UK streaming services depending on licensing (Prime Video typically has them), and they’re actually worth watching if you have any affection for retro Sega culture. Ben Schwartz voices Sonic with an energy that actually captures what made the character work: he’s impatient, he’s kind of annoying, but he’s fundamentally good-hearted. Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik is absolutely unhinged in the best possible way.
The Animation vs. Game Canon Question
Here’s where it gets interesting from an adaptation perspective. The films don’t try to translate the games’ plot directly. Sonic games—particularly the early Mega Drive entries—didn’t have intricate narratives. They had *vibes*. You’re a fast hedgehog who collects rings and runs through loop-de-loops. That’s it. That’s the game. The story was window dressing.
What the films do is ask: what does it mean to *be* Sonic as a character? Not as a collection of mechanics, but as a personality. The games gave us a character design (rebellious, confident, a bit cocky) and a visual style. The films take that and build a real story around it. Sonic’s isolation and his need for connection. His relationship with humans. The way he processes trauma and emotional vulnerability under a layer of quips and bravado. That’s not in the games, because games didn’t have space for it. But it’s consistent with the character as established.
Cultural Context and Why This Matters
Sonic the Hedgehog games were absolutely massive in 1990s Britain. For a generation of kids, the Mega Drive was *the* console. Sonic was cooler than Mario because he was faster, because he had attitude, because he seemed to belong to a slightly different cultural moment—less family-friendly Nintendo wholesomeness, more MTV energy. The films tap into that nostalgia brilliantly without being purely nostalgic.
Unlike retro gaming movies that just weaponise childhood memories, the Sonic films actually understand that kids who grew up with those games are adults now. They have different needs from a story. They want character development alongside spectacle. They want Sonic to *matter* beyond being a vehicle for action set pieces. The films deliver that.
The Witcher (Netflix) – How a Retro Gaming Adaptation Works When It Stops Being About the Games
Is The Witcher Really a Gaming Adaptation?
This is going to be controversial, but I’m including The Witcher because I think it represents something important about how retro gaming adaptations function on modern streaming services. The Witcher began as a series of short stories by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski in the 1980s and 1990s. It became a *phenomenon* because of the video games—specifically CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), which fundamentally transformed how the world understood the property.
When Netflix adapted The Witcher starting in 2019, they adapted it from Sapkowski’s original books rather than the games. That’s technically correct but also entirely misleading, because the cultural reason The Witcher exists as a global property *is* the video games. Most people watching The Witcher on Netflix have played Witcher 3. That game exists in their cultural memory as *the* definitive version of this story.
Adaptation as Negotiation
Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting: the Netflix show doesn’t fail because it ignores the games. It has problems for other reasons entirely (pacing, casting choices, narrative structure). But what’s fascinating is watching it negotiate with the weight of gaming canon. When the show introduces Geralt, we’re not meeting him for the first time. We’re meeting him as he exists in millions of players’ memories from a 100-hour interactive experience.
That creates a specific kind of adaptation challenge that prestige television doesn’t usually face. You’re competing with an interactive memory. The Witcher 3 didn’t just tell its story; it let you *experience* that story at your own pace, making choices that mattered to you personally. The Netflix show is asking you to let go of that agency and accept someone else’s interpretation. That’s an uphill battle.
Arcane (Netflix) – What Happens When a Game Gets Adaptation Wrong in All the Right Ways
League of Legends as Excuse Rather Than Source
Arcane premiered on Netflix in November 2021, and I remember watching it with absolutely no expectations because I’ve played League of Legends precisely twice in my life, both times involuntarily at university. I had no attachment to the source material. And that, I think, is exactly why I connected with it so profoundly.
Arcane is ostensibly based on League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game released by Riot Games in 2009. But here’s the beautiful truth: Arcane barely references the game at all. It takes the *setting*—a fictional world with magic, technology, social inequality, and rival city-states—and builds an entirely original story within it. The characters are from the game, yes, but the narrative isn’t. It’s character-driven drama set in a world that happens to have game-specific lore attached to it.
Why This Works as Adaptation Theory
This is actually the model more gaming adaptations should follow, I think. League of Legends doesn’t have a story. It has characters and a world. The game is competitive and largely narrative-empty by design. That’s not a flaw—that’s the point of a MOBA. But it means the story is all there for the taking. Arcane recognises this and builds something *from* the game rather than *of* the game.
The result is television that works for people who’ve never touched League of Legends and rewards people who have by including character and reference details. Unlike The Last of Us, which essentially asks non-players and players to watch the same show, Arcane creates layers of meaning. If you’re a League player, you recognise champions and lore. If you’re not, you just get a really strong story about class conflict, found family, and the cost of revolution.
Animation as Medium and Meaning
Part of why Arcane succeeds is that it understands animation isn’t just a delivery mechanism—it’s a statement about the material. League of Legends is a video game. Video games are interactive. Animation is a medium that emphasises control, precision, and the constructed nature of every image. By adapting a game into animation rather than live action, Arcane acknowledges that it’s making something *different*, not just translating between media.
Compared to something like The Last of Us, which uses live action to argue that the gaming story is “real” enough for prestige television, Arcane argues something different: the best stories don’t need to look realistic to feel true. That’s actually more respectful to the source material—more honest about what games *are*.
Exploding Kittens (Netflix) – When Retro Gaming Adaptation Means Game-Inspired Comedy
From Card Game to Chaotic Television
Exploding Kittens, which premiered on Netflix in July 2024, technically adapts a card game rather than a video game, but it’s worth including here because it represents a particular strand of retro gaming culture on streaming—the adaptation that treats its source material as a *tone* rather than a narrative.
Exploding Kittens the card game is brilliantly simple: shuffle a deck, draw cards, try not to draw the exploding kitten card. It’s absurdist, it’s got beautiful art by The Oatmeal, and it’s fundamentally about the chaos of chance and friendship. The Netflix show takes that energy—not the mechanics, but the *vibe*—and builds an animated comedy around it.
When Adaptation Means Spirit Rather Than Story
The show follows a group of misfits discovering they have superpowers related to the card game’s mechanics. It’s deliberately silly, deliberately meta, and it never pretends to be adapting plot points from a game that doesn’t have plot points. Instead, it captures the aesthetic and the emotional rhythm of the game: chaos, humour, weird art, characters who shouldn’t work together but do.
This is actually a model that works really well for retro gaming properties that don’t have complex narratives to begin with. The original Super Mario Bros wasn’t narrative-driven. Neither was Pac-Man. Neither was Tetris. But those games have *character*, they have visual style, they have a kind of energy. An adaptation that captures that energy rather than inventing story beats is actually respecting the source material more than something that tries to force narrative where none exists.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Netflix) – When Game Adaptation Is Actually Advertisement
The Cynical Reading
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is available on Netflix and it’s technically an adaptation of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, though “adaptation” might be generous. It’s actually a prequel story set in the same universe, which means it’s less an adaptation of the game and more an expansion of the game’s worldbuilding into animation. That’s a crucial distinction, and it matters for how we evaluate it.
The show is absolutely a marketing vehicle. Netflix and CD Projekt made it to rehabilitate the Cyberpunk brand after the catastrophic launch of the 2077 game itself. The cynical reading is that this is what happens when a tech company uses streaming services as an extension of corporate communication strategy rather than creating art.
But Also, It’s Actually Pretty Good
And yet. Even with all that cynicism intact, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a genuinely compelling piece of animation. It’s got character, emotional depth, and a visual style that’s actually distinct. The story follows Lucy and David, two characters caught in Night City’s brutal class hierarchy, and the show uses that personal story to examine what the Cyberpunk universe *is*—a world where corporate power is absolute, where technology is a tool of oppression, where personal connection is the only thing that matters.
That’s actually thematically consistent with the game, even if the show isn’t directly adapting game plot. The game puts you in Night City and asks you to navigate its systems of power. The show asks what it *feels* like to be a powerless person in that city. That’s valid adaptation work, even if it’s also serving as marketing.
Sonic Prime (Netflix) – Animation, Multiverse Logic, and What Retro Gaming Looks Like in 2024
The Show’s Premise and Visual Language
Sonic Prime aired on Netflix across 2022 and 2023 (with the full series currently available for UK viewers) and it’s absolutely a show about what retro gaming *is* in contemporary culture. The show follows Sonic being pulled into the Shatterverse, a collection of parallel universes where different versions of the character exist. It’s multiverse fiction, which feels very 2024, but it’s also deeply engaged with the history of Sonic as a franchise.
Because here’s the thing about Sonic: the character has been redesigned, reimagined, and rebooted more times than probably any gaming character except Mario. There’s the original 1991 sprite version. There’s the 3D Dreamcast Sonic. There’s Sonic Adventure. There’s the weirdly realistic movie version. There’s the anime aesthetic. Each version tells you something about what Sonic meant at that cultural moment. Sonic Prime recognises this and builds a story around it.
How the Show Handles Retro Canon
What I genuinely respect about Sonic Prime is that it treats this fragmented history not as a problem but as a feature. The show doesn’t try to establish a canonical “real” Sonic. Instead, it suggests that all versions of Sonic are *real*, they’re just real in different universes with different rules. That’s actually a smart way to adapt a franchise that’s been fundamentally reinvented multiple times.
Each universe has its own visual aesthetic too. One universe has a 2D sprite-based animation style that’s deliberately retro. Another is fully 3D. Another has a kind of watercolour aesthetic. By switching between these styles throughout the series, the show is essentially saying: this is what it means to be Sonic in 2024. You’re a character who contains multitudes. You’re not defined by any single version.
Generational Resonance
There’s something genuinely moving about that approach if you grew up with Sonic across multiple platforms and iterations. You can watch Sonic Prime and see your own experience reflected—the confusion of Sonic’s constant reinvention, yes, but also the sense that it all *mattered*. That 2D Sonic was a real experience, and so was Sonic Adventure, and so was whatever Sonic thing you connected with. The show validates that without needing to pick winners and losers.
Why These Adaptations Matter (And Why Most Others Fail)
The Adaptation Paradox
There’s a fundamental tension in gaming adaptation that I think about a lot. Games are interactive. Television is passive. That’s not just a technical difference—it’s a fundamental difference in how meaning is created. In a game, you make choices. That agency shapes your emotional investment. In television, you watch choices being made for you. It’s a different kind of storytelling entirely.
The adaptations that work—Castlevania, Sonic Prime, Arcane, to some extent—are the ones that understand this isn’t a problem to solve but a feature to lean into. They don’t try to make television *more like* video games. They ask what stories become possible when you remove interactivity and focus entirely on character, aesthetic, and emotional arc.
Why The Last of Us Is the Exception, Not the Rule
The Last of Us HBO series gets so much attention because it’s a game that was already essentially a television story wearing a video game skin. The game’s narrative structure is linear. Your choices don’t matter. You’re watching Joel and Ellie’s story unfold whether you want agency or not. That meant the adaptation could work by simply transposing the story from one medium to another with minimal change.
But that’s rare. Most games—particularly retro games—aren’t structured like television stories. They’re structured like systems, like experiences, like challenges to overcome. Adapting them requires actual creative work. It requires understanding what the game *is* beyond its surface-level plot.
UK Streaming and Gaming Adaptation
What’s interesting is that UK streaming services have been more willing to take risks with gaming adaptation than traditional broadcast television ever was. The BBC and ITV were extraordinarily cautious about this stuff for decades. But Netflix, Prime Video, and even the newer streaming platforms seem to understand that gaming is now culturally significant enough to warrant serious adaptation attention.
That said, there’s still a divide. Most of the best gaming adaptations on UK streaming are American-funded productions (Netflix, HBO Max). British streaming services have been slower to invest in this space. That’s partly a budget issue (proper adaptation is expensive) and partly a cultural one. British television has been slower to take gaming seriously as source material. That’s changing, but slowly.
What’s Missing From UK Streaming: The Adaptations We Actually Need
Why We Still Don’t Have Proper Metroid, Mega Man, or Kirby Shows
If I’m honest, the gap in UK streaming gaming adaptations is enormous. We have Sonic. We have fragmented pieces of other franchises. But we don’t have a genuinely great adaptation of properties that practically beg for television treatment. Where’s the Metroid series? Where’s the Mega Man series? Where’s the Kirby adaptation?
Part of this is licensing complexity. Nintendo is incredibly protective of its properties and famously cautious about adaptation. But there’s also a creative gap. Most streaming services haven’t figured out how to tell these stories yet. They’re still thinking about adaptation as direct translation rather than creative reinterpretation.
British Creators and Gaming Adaptation
What I’d genuinely love to see is a British creator taking on a gaming property. Someone with the sensibility of something like Fleabag or Taskmaster approaching a retro game’s universe. British television has such a strong tradition of comedy, character-based drama, and weird genre play. Gaming properties could benefit from that perspective. But the funding and institutional support just isn’t there yet.
The Verdict: What’s Actually Worth Watching Right Now
If you’ve got time to burn on UK streaming and you want quality gaming-adjacent television, here’s what I’d actually recommend:
Castlevania: Nocturne if you want serious, visually stunning drama that respects its source material’s aesthetic whilst building something entirely new from it. It’s gothic, it’s violent, it’s genuinely beautiful. Best for gothic horror fans and people who loved the original NES games.
Arcane if you want something that feels like it stands on its own whilst having depth for players of the original game. It’s genuinely superb television, adaptation questions aside. Best for basically everyone, honestly.
Sonic Prime if you want something clever about how franchises evolve and what happens when a character gets reimagined across multiple platforms and generations. It’s engaging, it’s colourful, and it’s surprisingly thoughtful. Best for people who grew up with multiple versions of Sonic.
The Sonic Films if you want blockbuster entertainment that actually captures the character’s energy without pretending to be something it’s not. They’re fun. They work. Best for anyone who has nostalgia for 1990s Sega culture or just wants a decent video game movie.
What I’d skip: overthinking the adaptation question. These shows aren’t trying to capture the exact experience of playing the games—they can’t, because that’s not how television works. What they’re doing is taking the aesthetic, the character, the emotional core of these properties and building something that exists in a different medium. That’s not betrayal. That’s translation.
And that’s actually harder than people think. The fact that we have multiple genuine successes on UK streaming right now is genuinely remarkable. Five years ago, we didn’t have any. The fact that adaptations have gone from “impossible to make work” to “occasionally actually excellent” represents a fundamental shift in how the culture perceives gaming as source material worthy of serious creative attention. That matters, regardless of whether you’re watching for nostalgia or genuine artistic merit.