Back when I was a lad, you couldn't move for Licensed games.   Batman, Robocop, The Untouchables, Cobra, er... Howard the Duck.  And it wasn't just films that were converted into videogames.  There was a heavier tendency for comics & cartoons to be translated into pixels too.  Thundercats, Nemesis the Warlock, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, er....SuperTed: The Search for Spot.   Back then, if your game didn't have the license to back it up, then it was nothing. (unless it was a coin-op or something extraordinary like what Hewson used to pump out)

Of course most of these licensed games were shit.  But they did try to do something that you don't see nowadays - attempt to recreate scenes from the actual movie, using 128k of RAM.    Christ, there was a bit in The Untouchables - the videogame where you controlled a pram, in that shoot-out scene from the film that originally had a pram bit in it!

But I look at the game charts today, and all I see is a Spiderman game.  Which (as good as its rumoured to be) is not even bothered about faithfully recreating those big screen moments on the small screen.  Where have all the licensed games gone?  In an age where superhero movies are everywhere, where all the superhero videogames?    We're constantly told that the videogame market outstrips the movie business these days, so where's my Venom movie tie-in game?

Is it because videogame makers have become more confident in creating their own characters?  Now we have a Kratos, a Kassandra, and a er...Master Chief, the don't need to rely on recreating a pixelated Stallone anymore?  And maybe developers like R* prefer to just be heavily influenced by Hollywood, and not take on the responsibility of an actual license.

I'm not calling for a return to the days were every other game was based on a film or comic, because licenses back then were often used to sell turds dressed up as videogames.  But, I do find it odd that in an era of wall-to-wall superheroes leaping from the comic pages onto the big screen, they're failing to make that final jump into my console box.   Why is that?