Pop Culture Crossovers Are Everywhere, But They’re Costing Us The Weirder Games We Deserve

Jumping into a Fortnite match is always a surreal experience, because any round of the battle royale juggernaut might include Lando Calrissian, Spider-Man, Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock from the movie Venom, RoboCop, Ellen Ripley from the 1979 horror film Alien, the Joker, wrestler John Cena, and pop star Lady Gaga. And those are just the skins my friends and I use.

In this way, Fortnite is as close to the online world imagined in Ready Player One as we have in real life. There’s definitely something hilarious in watching Deadpool, Alien’s Xenomorph, Geralt from The Witcher games, and Will Smith as Mike Lowrey from Bad Boys dance to NSYNC together. There’s goofy, childish fun in random characters being mixed up and doing stupid things like forming a rock band or riding a cartoon train in between bouts of gunning each other down. It might be an incredibly one-note joke, but it’s one that doesn’t seem to get old.

But playing Fortnite always feels kind of gross for the same reason. It’s a mosh pit of business interests–not a celebration of characters and stories so much as the gotta-catch-em-all collecting of Intellectual Property. As corporations come to own more and more media of all sorts, we see more and more of that Ready Player One blender of nonsensical appearances of various bits of pop culture, devoid of any real soul. Fortnite is a major offender but far from the only one. You can be Nikki Minaj and shoot Paul Atreides from Dune in Call of Duty. You can beat on Bugs Bunny as Batman in MultiVersus. You can ride a Ghostbusters-inspired speeder bike in Destiny 2.

In all these cases, people and characters pop up in one game or another, but they don’t add anything for their presence. Having Fry and Leela in Fortnite doesn’t bring the spirit or creativity of Futurama into Fortnite; it just lets you purchase a few references from the show you like to see in the game you like. They’re all stripped of meaning and stamped out as if from an assembly line.

Funny, then, that a game based on Funko Pop toys, which literally exist to squeeze characters from various properties into a single, easily reproducible form that can be stamped out on an assembly line, gives the strongest sense of the uniqueness this era of IP obsession could be good for, but isn’t.

Funko Fusion is a third-person action game in which you play through a bunch of levels inspired by different IPs, not too different from something like the various Lego games licensing properties such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Incredibles. Though I’m not really a fan of Funkos generally (although I admit to owning several–but mine are the cool ones, like the wendigo from Hannibal, BT-7472 from Titanfall 2, and a voxel Xenomorph from Alien), I found myself really wanting to like the game, despite it getting frustrating to play at times.

What I find endearing about Funko Fusion, despite the fact that it too is in the business of smashing various properties together, is that Funko Fusion is weird.

Funko has seven major levels based on IP from Universal movies and TV shows, and only some of those feel normal to be in a video game, like Jurassic World, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and Masters of the Universe. But several are interesting, unexpected pulls: Edgar Wright’s ’90s action movie send-up-slash-homage, Hot Fuzz; the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy; the TV series Battlestar Galactica from 1978; and John Carpenter’s horror classic, The Thing.

There are also a bunch of secret levels and characters you can uncover, referencing all kinds of stuff. You can race against KITT, the talking car from the 1980s David Hasselhoff TV series Knight Rider; you can fight alongside Xena from Xena: Warrior Princess, Lucy Lawless’s 1990s action show that spun off from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys; you can get attacked by serial killer-possessed doll Chucky from Child’s Play and by M3GAN, the killer-robot doll from the eponymous movie. There are full levels based on Jaws, Shaun of the Dead, Jordan Peele’s Nope, and the 1999 version of The Mummy. If you find enough collectibles, you can even unlock a playable Colonel Sanders–the guy from the fried chicken fast-food restaurant.

Funko Fusion represents a smattering of strange choices for things to bring into a video game, and for the most part, it renders them in pretty expansive detail. The Mummy level is full of puzzles and traps, culminating in a boss fight with Arnold Vosloo’s fly-breathing version of the monster. There’s a whole Back to the Future scene in Hill Valley where you have to put new tires on the DeLorean.

All this to say that it’s the fact that Funko Fusion taps into IP that nobody is really tapping that intrigues me. It makes me nostalgic for another time: the 1990s, at the height of the Console Wars, during the fourth generation of gaming hardware. It was a time before corporations realized they could just jam a character from one thing into another thing, which would thus act as an ad for both, but would require little creativity.

It was the time of the tie-in video game.

If you weren’t alive or playing games during the 1990s, you might not really understand what I’m getting at. Tie-in games still exist, of course: There are those Lego games, Ubisoft put out a game adaptations of Star Wars this year and Avatar last year, and in 2023 I played games I really enjoyed based on movies I love–Aliens: Dark Descent, RoboCop: Rogue City, and Starship Troopers: Extermination. The Harry Potter people are currently trying to convince us that Quidditch is cool with a game tie-in. Movies and TV shows still get video games made about them.

But especially in the ’90s and even into the early aughts, when it was much easier to make a game based on anything that seemed like it might remotely draw interest from kids, everything had a video game. There were games based on everything from Sylvester Stallone’s Judge Dredd and Cliffhanger to Addams Family Values, Hook, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Casper, The Flintstones, Home Alone, Home Improvement–even the Robin Williams movie Toys, the Cool Spot mascot for 7-Up, and the Noid, a weird little guy they used to put in Domino’s Pizza ads. Read through the Wikipedia list of games based on movies sometime, because the old ones get pretty wild.

Yes, most of these were absolutely cynical cash-grabs, and many felt like it. But occasionally you’d get something like Enter the Matrix, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Disney’s Aladdin and The Lion King, Blade Runner–or GoldenEye. Most tie-in games were just platformers or Doom clones, coming off as low-effort and low-interest by the people who were making them. But sometimes, you could get something really exciting.

The thing is, the fact that Funko Fusion has an entire level based on the movie Nope is just cool for the execution, because the time when you could find such a wide range of movies and TV shows rendered as games has long since passed. Sure, Galactica’s Cylons or Nicholas Angel from Hot Fuzz could make their way into Fortnite, but they’d just be weird versions of the characters made to do TikTok dances. Their value begins and ends at “Hey, I recognize that.”

What I hope for Funko Fusion is that it might lead to more games like it–more projects tapping ignored licenses and actually delving into their stories, characters, and worlds, at least a little. I want more RoboCop: Rogue Citys, more Starship Troopers: Exterminations, more Aliens: The Dark Descents. I want more doofus adaptations of barely family-friendly comedies and Robin Williams movies nobody liked. I want something more than $10 skins that remind me of things I previously enjoyed.

If we’re stuck living in a world where all media is corporate IP anyway, we should at least get some weird games out of it.