One Of Sylvester Stallone's Best Characters Resulted In One Of The Worst Video Games Ever

Sylvester Stallone is one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood history, but the man has also been featured in an impressive number of video games. That is to say, his characters have been featured in an impressive amount of video games. Stallone famously launched his own career with 1976's "Rocky," catapulting himself into the limelight with the story of his underdog pugilist from the northern slums of Philadelphia. Within a decade, Rocky Balboa made his video game debut with 1983's "Super Action Boxing," which was itself based on 1982's "Rocky III" and designed for the ColecoVision console. After that, the Stallone video game adaptations kept coming.

One of the most interesting examples was the 1986 platform game "Cobra," which was based on the film of the same name starring Sly as an LAPD lieutenant charged with protecting the witness of a horrific crime. The movie was panned upon its release, and Stallone regrets "Cobra" to this day. But the video game fared well critically, at least compared to the movie. Things wouldn't stay that way though.

Neither "Super Action Boxing" nor "Cobra" featured any input from Stallone himself. In fact, the man only ever contributed to two video games in his career. The first was 1994's "Demolition Man," a legendarily bad video game that was based on the early-'90s Stallone hit of the same name and featured video footage of the actor shot specifically for the game. The other was 2020's "Mortal Kombat 11," in which he played John J. Rambo in downloadable content. This was, however, far from Rambo's first video game outing. One of the most popular action heroes of the '80s, Stallone's former Green Beret turned action hero had actually appeared in a number of video game adaptations outside of his now five-film run. Sadly, one of these games was so bad it managed to eclipse "Demolition Man" as the worst entry in Stallone's video game canon.

In /Film's ranking of the "Rambo" movies, 2008's "Rambo" earned the second position for reestablishing Sylvester Stallone's Vietnam vet hero as the pre-eminent badass he always was. After 1988's "Rambo III" failed to make as much at the box office as the previous installment, the franchise (which began with 1982's "First Blood") appeared to be dead. "Rambo," however reinvigorated the saga, and in the wake of its success, UK-based video game publisher Reef Entertainment decided to capitalize on the titular hero's resurgence.

As U.K. site MCV reported at the time, Reef attained the rights to the property from distributor StudioCanal, with CEO Peter Rezon telling the outlet, "With the success of the most recent 'Rambo' film, and an international appetite for action movies with 'Expendables 2' scheduled for release next summer, we felt now was a good time to do something special with this license." Evidently, Reef saw Rambo as a way to establish itself as a major player in the video game space. Unfortunately, it churned out a truly awful adaptation in the form of "Rambo: The Video Game."

Designed for Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, the game was developed by a company called Teyon and allowed players to relive scenarios from the first three "Rambo" films: "First Blood," 1985's "Rambo: First Blood Part II," and "Rambo III." The arcade-style rail shooter was originally set for a winter 2013 release but didn't materialize until early 2014. When it did debut, it proved to be worth the wait. Just kidding, it was horrible.

A "Rambo" video game seems like a layup. Sure, this was a film series that started by examining post-Vietnam War trauma in a film that had a kill count of zero. But by the time "Rambo III" arrived, it had transmogrified into an excuse for a Stallone to shoot and hit a lot of people while blowing up various objects. The kill count per movie speaks to this increase in violence too, having gone from zero in the first movie to 58 in the second and 78 in the third. All developer Teyon had to do, then, was make it fun to play a prime-era Stallone shooting thugs and blowing stuff up. Sadly, for "Rambo" fans, the company couldn't quite manage it.

There have been some truly disastrous video games (like the James Bond game that remade classic missions with Daniel Craig), but 2014's "Rambo: The Video Game" was a true blunder. By the time it arrived, there had been multiple other games based on the franchise, none of which involved Sylvester Stallone in any capacity beyond the Rambo likeness. "Rambo: The Video Game" was slightly different in that regard. While "Demolition Man" had shot footage with Sly specifically for the game, Teyon actually went to StudioCanal and acquired official audio from the movies for use in its adaptation. As such, Stallone did technically lend his voice to the game, as did Richard Crenna (who played Rambo's former commanding officer Colonel Trautman).

Sadly, the presence of these actors wasn't enough to save the game from itself. "Rambo: The Video Game" was somewhat hampered by its rail shooter mechanic, which didn't allow players to venture off a set path, but there was so much more holding it back. Players could take part in various game styles including stealth, demolition, and combat, while a cover system added an extra dynamic to the gameplay. Of course, this was a "Rambo" game, so Teyon did at least have the sense to include destructible terrain. Between missions, players could increase various attributes from weapon handling skills to endurance, as well as the capacity of the "wrath" meter (which enabled a kind of Rambo god mode, allowing the hero to regenerate health and highlighting enemies to make them easier to hit).

Sadly, all of this amounted to what GamingBolt dubbed "one of the worst licensed video games of recent memory." Indeed, the game was a critical failure, with reviewers highlighting the poor gameplay and graphics — so, basically, the whole game. The IGN review surmised that "the idea of slogging through an entirely scripted, arcade rail-shooter with a mouse or a joypad feels like an unmitigated waste of time for everybody involved." Destructoid, meanwhile, claimed the visuals felt "mostly unfinished" and the game certainly looks a bit shoddy, even considering the fact it's now more than a decade old.

There's a trend that's emerged in recent years whereby amateur game designers take a modern video game and "demake" it. That is, rather than a remake of an old game that attempts to upgrade its graphical fidelity, a "demake" will take a modern game and try to make it look like the low-poly, pixelated games of previous decades. But this nostalgia for low-fi graphics of the past could be single-handedly abolished by "Rambo: The Video Game. All it would take would be a quick look at Rambo's visage grotesquely rendered in the heart of the uncanny valley via PS3-era graphics to immediately eviscerate everyone's nostalgia for the video games of yesteryear.