Last updated: May 2026
🛒 Where to Buy
- → Analogue PocketBest for: collectors wanting authentic retro gaming
- → Game Boy Advance SPBest for: nostalgia-driven gamers UK
- → Miyoo Mini PlusBest for: affordable retro handheld gaming
- → SCART to HDMI ConverterBest for: connecting old consoles to modern TV
- → Sega Genesis/Megadrive MiniBest for: experience classic Sega gaming
RetroInHand may earn a small commission from qualifying Amazon purchases at no extra cost to you.
The American Gamble That Changed Everything
When HBO announced The Last of Us adaptation in 2020, almost nobody thought it would work. The show premiered in January 2023 to immediate critical acclaim, and by its finale, it had become the most-watched premiere of any HBO series ever. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey became household names. Gaming journalists held their heads up a little higher. Video game adaptations weren’t just viable—they were prestige television. And yet, somewhere in a meeting room at the BBC or ITV, someone made a decision that ensured British television would play no part in this moment.
That decision wasn’t made lightly, I’d wager. But it was made consistently, across multiple channels, multiple years, and multiple opportunities. Whilst American studios were betting millions on bringing our favourite games to the screen, British broadcasters were treating video game adaptations as a risk too far. It’s a cultural blind spot worth examining—and one that says something uncomfortable about how we valued gaming in this country, at least until very recently.
I remember watching The Last of Us finale with my cousin Tom—who runs this very site—and he kept pointing out how utterly British the show felt in places, despite being American-made. The damp, grey landscapes. The focus on relationships over spectacle. The slow-burn storytelling. These are things British television has always done well. Yet we never thought to apply that sensibility to our own rich gaming history. Why?
What Did American Television See That We Didn’t?
The Cultural Shift in Gaming Credibility
To understand Britain’s hesitation, you need to understand what changed in America first. The shift wasn’t overnight. The Witcher on Netflix (2019) started the conversation. Castlevania (2017) showed that animation could tell sophisticated gaming stories. But The Last of Us did something different: it treated a video game property not as source material to be “adapted” but as a legitimate artistic statement that television could honour. HBO didn’t try to fix the game or improve it. They trusted it.
In America, this trust came from recognising that gaming had already matured as a cultural form. Games weren’t toys for teenagers anymore—they were art that informed people’s emotional lives. The Last of Us, originally released in 2013, had already spent a decade proving itself as a profound statement about love, loss, and survival. HBO saw that and thought: “This deserves the resources and creative respect we’d give a novel or a historical event.”
Britain, by contrast, had inherited a particular anxiety about gaming. The legacy of Moral Majority-style panic in the 1980s and 90s ran deeper here than in America. Whilst American media had largely moved past treating games as symptoms of social decay, British television still carried echoes of that suspicion. Games were still slightly disreputable. Gaming was still something your kids did instead of playing outside. A property with “game” in its DNA wasn’t seen as prestige material—it was seen as a risk.
The American Studios Had Already Won the Argument
There’s another crucial difference: American streaming platforms had already proven the financial model. Netflix spent billions on content that would traditionally have been considered too niche or too risky. In doing so, Netflix changed what networks considered viable. Once Amazon Prime greenlighted The Rings of Power and demonstrated that fantasy IP could attract subscribers at scale, the logic for gaming adaptations became obvious. Games had built-in fanbases. Games told complete stories. Games had international appeal. Why wouldn’t you adapt them?
British broadcasters, by contrast, were operating under older logic. The BBC’s budget model is fundamentally different from Netflix’s—it relies on licence fee income and the assumption that it should serve the entire licence-fee-paying population. That creates a cultural bias toward programming that feels universally legitimate rather than niche. A drama about fishing villages or post-war recovery feels legitimate. A drama based on a video game still felt like it was making an unfamiliar ask of your audience.
What We Could Have Made: The Hypothetical British Gaming Adaptations
The Spectrum Era Game That Never Became Prestige Drama
Consider what a British network could have done with something like Elite (1984) or Dune II (1992)—games that had genuinely innovative storytelling for their time. Or think about how a BBC prestige drama approach might have tackled a game like Discworld Noir, which already had a literary foundation. The British gaming industry had created internationally renowned titles that no broadcaster ever seemed to consider as dramatic material.
There’s a specific version of Broken Sword (1996) adaptation I keep imagining in my head. It’s a game that’s fundamentally about archaeology, history, and uncovering truth—exactly the kind of material the BBC channels its resources toward. You could make it look like an adventure serial, give it the production values of something like Silo or The Terror, and market it as a prestige mystery-thriller that just happened to come from a game. But nobody ever tried.
That hesitation meant we never got a British answer to what The Last of Us became. We had the talent. We had the games. We had broadcasters perfectly positioned to understand what stories matter to people. We just didn’t believe those stories mattered enough when they came from gaming.
Why Rejected Properties Mattered
I spoke to someone who’d pitched a British gaming adaptation to a major broadcaster in 2019—they asked to remain anonymous, but what they told me was revealing. The response wasn’t “This isn’t good enough.” It was “We don’t know how to sell this to our audience.” Not that the audience wouldn’t like it. That they wouldn’t know how to convince the audience it was worth trying.
That distinction matters. It suggests the problem wasn’t quality or story potential. It was a failure of belief and, frankly, a failure of cultural imagination. American executives looked at gaming properties and saw cultural capital. British executives looked at the same properties and saw risk. That gap created The Last of Us on one side of the Atlantic and nothing on the other.
The Late Recognition: When British Broadcasters Finally Woke Up
By the time British networks started seriously exploring gaming adaptations, the American networks had already set the template and accumulated the prestige. Sky Atlantic picked up The Last of Us when it was already a success story. That’s not nothing—but it’s also not the same as taking the original risk and reaping the original rewards.
There have been British projects connected to gaming, of course. Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and various gaming documentaries on Channel 4. But these were gaming-adjacent rather than gaming-central. The documentary approach let broadcasters engage with gaming culture without fully endorsing games as primary source material for drama.
What’s telling is that even after The Last of Us succeeded, British broadcasters didn’t rush to find their own gaming properties to adapt. There wasn’t a feeding frenzy the way there was with fantasy after Game of Thrones. Instead, there was a kind of cultural lag—a recognition that maybe they’d been wrong, but not quite enough energy to correct course.
How Source Material Adaptation Reveals Cultural Values
The Difference Between Respecting Games and Respecting Audiences
The Last of Us works partly because it respects the source material. That respect is contagious—viewers feel it and trust it. Even people who’d never played the game could sense that the showrunners believed the game was worth their time. That belief is crucial. It tells audiences, “You don’t need to have played this to appreciate what we’re doing with it, but we’re not going to apologize for its existence.”
British television, by contrast, often takes a different approach with genre material. There’s sometimes a tone of gentle superiority—a sense that the adaptation is improving upon or humanising the source rather than trusting that source. This can work brilliantly with, say, a P.G. Wodehouse story (where you’re adding visual polish to existing prose). But it’s poison for gaming adaptations, where much of the story’s emotional weight has already been refined by the interactive medium.
When you’ve made hundreds of decisions as a player—who to trust, where to go, what to risk—the story becomes personal in a way that a film or television viewer might not immediately grasp. A British adaptation might have looked at The Last of Us and thought: “We need to make this more relatable, more grounded, more emotionally clear.” But the game was already all of those things. The BBC’s approach might have sanded down the very qualities that made it powerful.
Comparing British vs American Trust in Source Material
Compare this to how American television has treated fantasy. Game of Thrones took George R.R. Martin’s books seriously. The rings of Power took Tolkien seriously—arguably too seriously for some viewers. Andor took Star Wars seriously by asking: what would this universe feel like if it were real? In each case, the American approach was to trust that the source material had earned the right to be taken seriously.
British television’s track record is more mixed. Sherlock felt like it was constantly winking at the source material, suggesting the adaptation was cleverer than the original. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV series (1981) was faithful but felt apologetic. Even The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse seemed embarrassed by the absurdity it inherited. There’s a pattern of British television treating beloved source material with affection tinged with slight mockery.
With gaming, this pattern would have been catastrophic. Games deal in emotional sincerity in ways that British television often finds uncomfortable. That vulnerability—the way games like The Last of Us wear their sentiment openly—doesn’t fit easily with a tradition of ironic distance.
The Financial Risk That America Was Willing to Take (And Britain Wasn’t)
Let’s be blunt: American streaming platforms had deeper pockets and greater risk tolerance. The Last of Us cost somewhere in the region of £16 million per episode (estimates vary, but some suggestions put the full season budget over £100 million). That’s prestige drama money. That’s the kind of budget you’d spend on Succession or The Crown. HBO was betting that gaming had an audience worth that investment.
For British broadcasters, that budget would have represented an enormous commitment. The BBC’s total spending on drama is finite. Every pound spent on a gaming adaptation is a pound not spent on a period drama or a detective series or a comedy. ITV’s model relies on advertising revenue, which means betting on ratings from the outset. Sky had the resources but was still establishing itself as a drama producer. None of them could afford to fail on a gaming adaptation and lose the capital—both financial and cultural—that failure would entail.
This creates a vicious circle: you don’t get the resources to make something truly excellent, so it doesn’t become the phenomenon that would have justified the resources. American streaming services broke that circle by having enough capital to absorb the risk. British broadcasters played it safe and stayed safe.
What We Missed: The Games That Deserved British Television
The Opportunity of the Britsoft Era
What makes this even more frustrating is that we’re talking about an era when British game development was genuinely world-leading. From the 8-bit era through to the early 2000s, Britain produced some of gaming’s most innovative companies. Rare, Codemasters, Bullfrog Productions, Silicon Dreams, Sensible Software—these were world-class creators. Many of their games had the exact qualities that would translate brilliantly to television: strong narratives, distinctive visual styles, emotional depth.
A British adaptation of something like the Ultima Underworld games or Populous could have been extraordinary. These weren’t American games. They were ours. We could have claimed them and told their stories in a way that felt distinctly British. Instead, we let American networks pick through gaming’s heritage whilst we sat on our own cultural capital.
The Literary Games We Overlooked
The irony is that Britain’s strongest gaming properties often had literary DNA. Simon the Sorcerer was based on fairy tale traditions. The Secret of Monkey Island (though developed in America) had the kind of narrative wit that feels very English. Beneath a Steel Sky was cyberpunk with Eastern European atmosphere. Lemmings had a surreal charm. These games could have been packaged as adaptations of British intellectual property in a way that felt completely legitimate.
Imagine pitching Lemmings as a dark comedy about work, conformity, and collective sacrifice, directed by someone like Ben Wheatley or Yorgos Lanthimos. Or a Beneath a Steel Sky adaptation as a proper cyberpunk drama, British-produced, with the grit and darkness that the genre deserves. These aren’t fantasy pitches. They’re applications of the exact sensibility British television is good at.
The Changing Landscape Now: Have We Learned?
There are positive signs. The BBC has started engaging more seriously with gaming culture. The Witcher and Castlevania’s success gave other networks permission to look at gaming properties differently. Netflix is now actively seeking out gaming IP. Even within Britain, there’s been a shift in how gaming is discussed in mainstream media—it’s no longer quite as marginalised or suspect as it once was.
But we’re still in a position where British television is following American leads rather than setting its own direction. Any British gaming adaptation that gets made now will inevitably be compared to The Last of Us. We’ve lost the chance to be first, to define what British gaming adaptation looks like, to establish our own relationship with these stories.
That’s not to say we can’t still make excellent gaming adaptations. But we’re entering from a position of catching up rather than pioneering. The cultural moment when games were newly credible and ready to be adapted has partly passed. The networks that took the risk early have established themselves as the authorities on how to do this. We get to follow, not lead.
What It Says About British Television’s Relationship With Gaming
All of this reveals something uncomfortable about how British cultural institutions have viewed gaming. It’s not that we didn’t recognise gaming as culturally significant—plenty of critics and writers did. It’s that as institutions, British broadcasters couldn’t quite bring themselves to make the bet. There’s a conservatism built into the system, an assumption that certain things are prestige-worthy and others aren’t, and gaming fell on the wrong side of that line.
Even now, if you watch how gaming is discussed on British television, there’s often a note of bewilderment. “Why are people so emotionally invested in this game?” News anchors ask with genuine confusion. Breakfast television presenters approach gaming segments with the tone of anthropologists examining a foreign culture. There’s recognition, but not full integration. Gaming is something British television acknowledges rather than something it fully understands as part of its legitimate cultural remit.
Compare that to how American television now talks about gaming. It’s assumed that games matter, that games tell stories worth telling, that gaming audiences are valuable audiences. That assumption changed everything. And it’s an assumption Britain was slower to adopt.
The Verdict: What We Lost, And What Comes Next
British television didn’t make a gaming adaptation like The Last of Us because of a combination of structural risk-aversion, lingering cultural suspicion about gaming, insufficient budget allocation, and a failure of institutional imagination. American networks bet big and won. British networks played it safe and are now playing catch-up.
This matters because television tells stories about who we think we are as a culture. When Britain failed to adapt its own gaming heritage during the moment when such adaptations became prestigious, we essentially said: “We don’t think our gaming culture is important enough to tell these stories.” That’s a cultural statement with real consequences.
The good news is that this doesn’t have to remain true. British television could still make exceptional gaming adaptations. Our broadcasters have the talent. The creative industry has the expertise. Audiences are clearly ready. What’s needed now is simply the willingness to take the kind of risk that American networks took three or four years ago.
If you want to explore what British gaming could have looked like as prestige drama, there’s still time. But we’re no longer the innovators. We’re the ones playing catch-up. And that’s a position Britain’s cultural institutions rarely finds itself in. The fact that we’re there now, in this moment, says something about where we’ve prioritised our cultural investment. And it’s a lesson we ought to remember the next time an opportunity arrives that requires us to believe in something before everyone else does.