Spiritual Licensee

A counterpart of Better by a Different Name in a way, and also a sort of subtrope of Spiritual Successor and Follow the Leader (but not always), in effect a Captain Ersatz of a story rather than a character. It's particularly evident with video games; most people have certain movie characters with tons of potential they dream of playing as in an amazing game, yet as most movie licensed games are terrible, there's almost no chance of that happening...

Technically no chance, anyway. This is when something has nothing to do with a certain series, but evokes almost the same feeling you'd imagine a decent license invoking with a certain franchise, making it (intentionally or not) a Spiritual Licensee.

This can also occur after a developer decides to create a Spiritual Successor to a game from a previously established franchise, but put an original spin on the game to differentiate it from its predecessor(s).

Please do not add personal examples; the main page should be for comparisons that you have seen numerous times (or ones that are really, really obvious).

Contrast Dolled-Up Installment.

Anime & Manga

 * Summer Wars is getting a reputation for being the best Digimon film ever. Having the same director and basic plot as one of the most popular actual Digimon films probably helps on that front.
 * The Big O is considered to trump Batman: Gotham Knight at being an anime adaptation of the Caped Crusader.
 * Spirited Away is quite possibly the best adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
 * Flag seems to be Beyond Good and Evil set in Afghanistan, with the United Nations Task Force standing in for the American military.
 * Voices of a Distant Star is perhaps the best and most tear-inducing adaptation of The Forever War made by a single man, with a dash of Ender's Game to boot.
 * ...But not as old as Gunbuster.
 * Code Geass could easily pass as an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune saga...with robots and spinning kicks!
 * It could also pass for a damn good Gundam series. Especially given how the premise could easily be described as what Mobile Suit Gundam would be like from Char Azanable's perspective rather than Amuro Ray's.
 * Simoun is essentially what happens when you add Les Yay-tastic action to A Canticle for Leibowitz. Better Than It Sounds.
 * Histeria! and Horrible Histories may be long gone, but really they live as a series called Axis Powers Hetalia.
 * Though one couldn't help but wonder whether the overblown National Stereotypes in G Gundam might have been foreshadowing.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory is basically an anime adaptation of Top Gun, if it took place in the future and involved Gundams. Even the openings are reminiscent of Danger Zone and late 80s-early 90s power ballads. Though it eventually bears more similarities with Metal Gear of all things, thanks to the GP-02 being a literal Metal Gear Gundam.
 * However, a better one came out later on in the form of Macross Plus.
 * Future GPX Cyber Formula essentially is a modern-day adaptation of Speed Racer (Mach Go Go Go), albeit with computer-aided race cars.
 * Fist of the North Star could be described as an anime adaptation of Mad Max, only with martial arts.
 * Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is pretty much an adaptation of Getter Robo's later arcs with a bit more silliness.
 * Golgo 13 has been described as a Japanese retelling of James Bond, which isn't helped at all by the fact that the original mangaka also made official Bond manga back in the day.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn is practically The Da Vinci Code in the Universal Century, with the Vist Foundation, Unicorn Gundam and Laplace's Box standing in for the Priory of Sion, codex and Holy Grail respectively. And as of the last episode, it can also pass for a Gundam version of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
 * Shimoneta: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn't Exist can be described as a more risque adaptation of Demolition Man, if it took place in future Japan rather than future California. All that's missing are the Taco Bells and three seashells.

Film

 * Because The Incredibles featured a family of superheroes facing off against an evil genius with a largely unjustified grudge, it is often considered a vastly superior movie adaptation of the Fantastic Four than the officially licensed movie. Cracked.com even referred to it as "more faithful to the comics than the actual Fantastic Four movie." It helps that most of the Four's powers are replicated.
 * It also was considered by some to be a Lighter and Softer adaptation of Watchmen, because of the superheroes having to register with the government and go underground.
 * And it had the best James Bond score in years.
 * Galaxy Quest is sometimes called "the best Star Trek movie ever made".
 * George Takei called it "a chillingly realistic documentary."
 * The Two Guys from Andromeda have called it the best Space Quest movie out there.
 * Interestingly, counting it as an "actual" Star Trek movie (it would be #10, having come out between Insurrection and Nemesis) would "correct" the famous Star Trek Movie Curse, which had been knocked out of whack by Nemesis being terrible and the subsequent reboot being pretty decent, even if not great.
 * With Christian Bale starring, Terminator Salvation is the closest thing to a Batman vs Terminator film we will ever see.
 * Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula is closer to Doctor Doom's origin story than the one in the actual Fantastic Four film.
 * Batman Begins as well.
 * Charade was famously called the "Best movie that Alfred Hitchcock never made".
 * The Masters of the Universe film is described on That Other Wiki as being the best Jack Kirby's Fourth World movie ever attempted. Though Word of God from the director indicates he meant to do an homage to the work of Kirby in a general sense, not the Fourth World in particular.
 * Inverted in the case of Abraxas Guardian Of The Universe, which blatantly uses plot devices like "Answer Box", "Anti-Life Equation" and something like a Boom Tube. It is not in any way a good movie, Fourth World or otherwise.
 * When Harry Met Sally... is the best Woody Allen film never made.
 * Martin & Porter's DVD & Video Guide calls A Few Good Men "the best Perry Mason movie ever made."
 * Snow Day was originally written as a film adaptation of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and it shows.
 * Aliens is often referred to as a stealth adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers—and a far superior adaptation to the later officially-licensed film. And even though it was just one suit, Aliens even had more Powered Armor than the actual Starship Troopers film franchise (at least until the third, straight-to-DVD film).
 * The Jean Claude Van Damme movie Double Impact is a better Double Dragon movie than the actual Double Dragon movie that miscasts Scott Wolf as one of the Lee Bros. It even had Bolo Yeung (the actor that Abobo was based on in the first place) playing an Abobo-like henchman who throws oil drums at his enemies.
 * Many Warhammer 40000 fans like to consider Event Horizon canonical.
 * Likewise, a few Doom fans consider it to be a better Doom movie than the one the game actually got.
 * Some combine all three.
 * Michael Clayton has been called "the best John Grisham movie ever made".
 * Zombieland could be considered a good Left 4 Dead movie. Wichita even looks a bit like Zoe. It could also be viewed as an adaptation of Dead Rising, particularly with regards to how players approach that game looking for the coolest ways to kill zombies.
 * The Dark Carnival campaign in Left 4 Dead 2 could be considered a good Zombieland game.
 * A review of Jumanji was impressed on how much it looks like Steven Spielberg directed or produced the movie.
 * Roger Ebert wrote that to watch the The Thing from Another World is to watch Alien in embryo.
 * The remake by John Carpenter is often considered the best H.P. Lovecraft film.
 * Uwe Boll's Rampage is a better adaptation of Postal (at least the first one, perhaps) than his own movie adaptation (likely of the second in the series).
 * The screenwriter for The Book of Eli is a self-proclaimed fan of Fallout 3. It's pretty much the movie of the game with no ghouls and the search for clean water replaced with The Bible.
 * It's also arguably the best Fist of the North Star movie ever made by a Western studio. Minus the exploding heads and with a Badass Denzel Washington.
 * Continuing the not-video-game-movies series, Street Kings feels a lot like Max Payne, only set on a hot night in Los Angeles rather than a cold night in New York. If they'd included Bullet Time it would be perfect, but that would run into some different issues.
 * Despite being an adaption of a comic that came out years before, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has been said to be the closest thing to a movie adaption of No More Heroes.
 * Where the Wild Things Are, in addition to its own source material, could be said to be the best adaptation of Calvin and Hobbes we're likely to ever see, given Bill Watterson's attitude toward licensing.
 * Inception is arguably the only Paprika live action film you'll ever see which also happens to have a surreal homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
 * Though calling it an adaptation makes Constantine look like a word-for-word lift of Hellblazer.
 * Inception has a lot of Shadowrun elements in it. (Working for mega-national corporations, A team member who has a checkered past that can be cleared up by the new mission, a failed past run, a botched run leading to a new job offered by the target, assembling a team based on their individual strengths, etc.)
 * As this mashup proves, calling Inception a Darker and Edgier Psychonauts reboot is surprisingly fitting.
 * The Spirit may not have captured the spirit of the comics it came from very well, but it's a much better adaptation of an entirely different superhero; namely, The Tick (animation). Just compare how often they run across rooftops while monologuing about "MY CITY!" and invoking tortured metaphors.
 * Dead Snow might as well be a Norwegian adaptation of Call of Duty's Nazi Zombies mod. All that's missing are the hellhounds and rayguns.
 * Black Swan has been compared by many, many people to Perfect Blue. Both are about an overworked, up-and-coming actress so stressed she (and the audience) are unable to tell what's real and what isn't, to disturbing effect. Black Swan's director, Darren Aronofsky, has acknowledged the similarities, and he had previously licensed Perfect Blue so that he could give it a Shout-Out in Requiem for a Dream.
 * It's also described as the closest viewers will get to a live action Princess Tutu movie.
 * Idiocracy's plot, about a society that has been dumbed down by the stupid outbreeding the smart, comes off like an unauthorized adaptation of the CM Kornbluth short story "The Marching Morons".
 * Beowulf is probably the best movie version of God of War that we're ever likely to see.
 * Treasure Planet is the closest we will ever get to a Spelljammer movie.
 * Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game, whose book has been on-and-off on development status, considers Rise of the Planet of the Apes to be "the first truly successful adaptation of my novel... to appear on the screen".
 * In the past he's made similar statements about Serenity.
 * Did you know they made a Castlevania movie? It was called Van Helsing.
 * The movie Real Steel had been called Rock'em Sock'em Robots: The Movie. It's actually an adaptation of the 1956 story and 1963 Twilight Zone episode "Steel", which in turn is said to have been the inspiration for Rock'em Sock'em Robots.
 * Ninja Assassin is pretty much the best and closest one could get to a Ninja Gaiden movie.
 * Showdown in Little Tokyo is as close one can get to a movie version of SNK's Burning Fight. What with fighting a Yakuza gang, but taking place in Little Tokyo, instead of Osaka, Japan in the arcade game.
 * Death Race (2008 version) is the closest adaption of Twisted Metal we are ever going to get.
 * The Underworld series is a better adaptation of the Old World of Darkness than the official adaptation, the TV show Kindred: The Embraced. It was so close, in fact, that White Wolf and Nancy A. Collins sued the films' producers, claiming copyright infringement.
 * With its combination of action and slapstick, the main character being a Gentleman Thief, and the overall feel of the film, some people have called Hudson Hawk a better live-action Lupin III movie than the actual live-action Lupin III movie. This may explain why it was so popular in Japan despite having flopped in the US.
 * Immortals is already said by some to be a better remake of the Clash of the Titans than the actual 2010 one. It helps that there are actual titans in the movie, but keep in mind the original 1981 classic did not have titans at all either. Though the sequel to the remake called Wrath of the Titans is fixing that problem.
 * The Nostalgia Chick said that WALL-E is a better adaptation of The Lorax than the actual film adaptation.
 * The Cabin in the Woods makes for a pretty good adaptation of (warning: major spoilers)
 * Guillermo del Toro has remarked that Prometheus is a close enough adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness that it's the reason why his own adaptation of ATMOM won't enter production—at this point, it would likely come off looking like a ripoff of Prometheus.
 * The Raid unintentionally becomes a movie adaption of the Dynamite Deka series, aka Die Hard Arcade and Dynamite Cop, by Indonesia (with a Welsh director). The movie has it all: a swat team infiltrating the building, a bad guy barking orders on the top floor, and waves upon waves of mooks on each floor. Even some movie critics said the movie feels like an adaption of arcade beat'em ups from the 90s.
 * Ray Liotta's Narc has quite a bit in common with Max Payne, moreso than the actual Max Payne film did.
 * Dredd, in addition to being much more faithful to the source material than the 90s film, also makes for a good Die Hard film.

Literature

 * Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series will be immediately familiar and fun territory to any Warhammer 40000 player.
 * The Nina Wilde series by Andy McDermott, about a semi-reluctant Adventurer Archaeologist, obviously takes more than a few cues from (and frequently references) Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. However, the number of pitched gun battles in exotic locations and rare vehicles which inevitably explode makes it far more akin to the written form of Uncharted.
 * The Hunger Games is probably the closest that we'll get to an American remake of Battle Royale. And that is all that needs to be said.
 * ...unless, of course, the success of the film adaptation is enough to convince Hollywood that it's no longer Too Soon after Columbine to pull said remake out of Development Hell.

Live Action TV

 * There are those who consider Heroes a jazzier version of the X-Men.
 * They are mistaken. In fact, Heroes is the television version of DP 7.
 * Babylon 5 has strong elements of The Lord of the Rings
 * Word of God says it's suppose to be The Silmarillion
 * Lucas Buck from American Gothic and Randall Flagg from The Stand share so many similarities that American Gothic can almost be considered a tv show starring Randall Flagg and his attempts to have a heir. Like Flagg, Buck is handsome, charismatic southerner who might or might not be the devil or a demon, who is fond of making deals and enslaving others through their vices and desires. He has understated supernatural powers, is seemingly ageless, and most of all wants a son.
 * Parker Lewis Can't Lose is called "Ferris Buellers Day Off's real adaptation" on this very wiki.
 * The earliest episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series owe a hell of a lot to Forbidden Planet.
 * Pushing Daisies could be called the TV series Tim Burton never made.
 * Choujin Sentai Jetman is what Science Ninja Team Gatchaman would've been had it been remade into a live-action series.
 * Super Robot Red Baron (and, by extension, its follow-up successor series Super Robot Mach Baron) can be pretty much considered a live-action version of Mazinger Z.
 * To the point that, in Spain, footage from Mach Baron was made into a theatrical movie and retitled "Mazinger Z, el Robot de las estrellas" (Mazinger Z, The Robot from the Stars) to benefit from Mazinger popularity. There was even a comic-book adaptation made by an Spanish artist that lasted some forty issues, and was known to a generation of spanish children as "El Mazinger Rojo" (Red Mazinger).
 * More than a few have claimed that Farscape is what Blakes Seven would have been if remade in the 21st Century. They're not far off.
 * Paul Darrow (Avon) has explicitly said in a DVD extras interview that he considered Firefly to have been the 21st century Blakes Seven.
 * Dark Angel was James Cameron's attempt to make an unofficial live-action version of Gunnm (aka Battle Angel Alita) after the official version he was scheduled to direct went into Development Hell.
 * The Borgias are just close to being an adaptation of Assassin's Creed II that one half-expects Ezio and company to show up at any time.
 * Total Recall 2070 despite its name has more to do with Blade Runner than Total Recall. The Word of God says the show is based on the original Philip K. Dick stories which were the source material for the aforementioned films.
 * There's a reason why Power Rangers RPM was dubbed Terminator: The Power Rangers Chronicles.

Stand-Up Comedy

 * The European segment of Colin Quinn Long Story Short seems to take a lot of cue from Axis Powers Hetalia.

Tabletop Games

 * If there was ever a tabletop game version of Watership Down, it would be called Bunnies and Burrows.
 * The Space Marines in Warhammer 40000 come almost prepackaged from Robert A. Heinlein.

Video Games

 * Many people consider Crysis the best Predator game ever.
 * The The Hidden: Source mod for Half-Life 2  also feels like a Predator game.
 * Shigeru Miyamoto had originally wanted to make a Popeye arcade game in the early 1980's, but Nintendo's right to the character were revoked midway through production. Miyamoto then took the idea of a scrappy hero rescuing a helpless damsel from a hulking brute and made video game history.
 * The Kunio Kun soccer league games, including Nintendo World Cup may as well be called Captain Tsubasa: The Game.
 * Several games have been cited as evoking the feeling of the Alien films. Although Aliens is notable for averting The Problem with Licensed Games on various occasions, Dead Space is probably the most recent example.
 * Speaking of Dead Space, owing to its somewhat derivative nature, and quality despite that, it has been mentioned as evocative of pretty much every notable sci-fi horror film ever.
 * In fact, Doom was originally set to be based on Alien, but the developers scrapped the idea as soon as they heard the movie producers' strict demands for such a game. The game was then reimagined as a combination between Alien and Evil Dead.
 * Metroid captured the essence of the Alien movies better than any of the licensed games did. Samus Aran ↔ Ellen Ripley. Metroids ↔ Xenomorphs. The main antagonist of the Metroid series, Ridley, is even a Shout-Out to Ridley Scott, director of the 1979 Alien film.
 * Dead Space does feel remarkably like a System Shock sequel, however.
 * The TurboGrafx-16 pinball game Alien Crush has some suspiciously H. R. Giger-like graphics.
 * Although some official Indiana Jones games have averted The Problem with Licensed Games, the Uncharted series are by far the best Indy games you will ever play.
 * Before it underwent major decay, the same was said of Tomb Raider.
 * Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure also seems remarkably influenced by the Indiana Jones films.
 * Starcraft reminds many people of, alternatively, Starship Troopers, Aliens, Warhammer 40000 and, as of Starcraft II, Firefly.
 * Similarly, Blizzard Entertainment's other big RTS franchise, Warcraft, is practically Warhammer Fantasy Battle in disguise.
 * It can also happen between games. Okami and Beyond Good and Evil have been called "the best The Legend of Zelda games of the year" at times.
 * Freelancer/Starlancer to Wing Commander/Privateer, joked by the fans of both series. All four projects being helmed by the same guy (Chris Roberts) didn't hurt. Starlancer and the Wing Commander movie also shared a number of digital effects credits.
 * Starlancer is also noteworthy for having a backstory that's basically the original Battlestar Galactica Classic thinly disguised by having Dirty Communists instead of Cylons. It's also rather better than the officially licensed BSG game for the Playstation 2 and Xbox despite being made by the same studio.
 * Also between games, it's good to see a game in the Dungeon Keeper universe again, albeit a spinoff called Overlord under a different genre.
 * Not to mention the board game Dungeon Lords.
 * And the new game Dungeons by Kalypso Media.
 * The way the Need for Speed franchise turned to a street racing theme from Underground to Undercover pretty much screamed out The Fast and the Furious.
 * And the latest Hot Pursuit version is an awesome Burnout sequel!
 * As Action Button Dot Net puts it: "...someone finally made a good Sherlock Holmes game, and it's not even a real Sherlock Holmes game. It's about some dude named Layton."
 * It's no exaggeration to say that God Hand looks like one of the best Fist of the North Star games ever made, considering that we didn't get any good ones at all until Hokuto Musou/Ken's Rage.
 * Silent Hill is to Jacob's Ladder what the first few Resident Evil games were to George Romero's work.
 * Starflight is certainly in the running for the best Star Trek game ever made, and certainly the best of the 1980s.
 * Red Dawn has a lot of Licensees that aren't.
 * Freedom Fighters. One of Spoony's favorites, this game has apparently so much of the movie Red Dawn it might be as well THE Red Dawn game.
 * World in Conflict and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 are "Red Dawn: The RTS", with the latter even getting the cheesiness down.
 * Home Front towers over them all—its plot is written by John Milius himself and is basically Red Dawn with North Koreans in place of the Russians.
 * And in turn, it's been hailed as the sequel Freedom Fighters has never gotten.
 * The STALKER games are an almost absurdly obvious example of this for classic Russian science fiction novel Roadside Picnic and its Film of the Book, Stalker.
 * Subversion: Dynamite Deka, a 3D beat-'em-up for the arcades and Sega Saturn released in Japan, was heavily inspired by the Die Hard films to the point that the game's main character, Bruno Delinger, bore more than a passing resemblance to Bruce Willis. When Sega worked on the game's international version, they tacked on the Die Hard license, renamed Bruno Delinger into John McClane, and modified the main villain into Hans Gruber.
 * Note that the sequel Dynamite Cop, the international version of Dynamite Deka 2, did not retain the Die Hard license.
 * Dynamite Cop is the best game adaption of Under Siege or Speed 2 we will ever see in our lifetime.
 * The Sunsoft game Journey to Silius for the NES was originally intended to be a game based on the first Terminator movie.
 * The unreleased NES game Sunman, also by Sunsoft, was originally intended to be a Superman-based side-scrolling action game. An early build of the game actually had the Man of Steel as the player character with John Williams' iconic theme as the first stage music, but for some reason Sunsoft lost the license and Supes got replaced with an obvious pastiche.
 * The original Mega Man was intended to be an Astro Boy game, so you could say that the Mega Man games are the best Astro Boy video games created (At least until Omega Factor is played...)
 * Neo-Human Casshern, a series about a boy who becomes an android in order to fight a big army of robots, with his robot-dog companion who can turn into vehicles. There also is an evil-protype twin-brother and a girl as protagonists/antagonists. Any resemblance Mega Man might have to this is only coincidence.
 * Mega Man eventually ended up being more of an amalgam of Astro Boy and Neo-Human Casshern.
 * Megaman has been said before to be inspired by both characters.
 * Comparisons between Casshern and Dio, could also easily be brought up with Capcom's Dante and Virgil.
 * The Monkey Island series was heavily inspired by two major sources: Disneyland's original Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides. (In not-at-all related news, the fourth POTC movie was coincidentally based on the same book.)
 * This also seems to work backwards, with the second POTC featuring a few uncanny similarities to the Monkey Island games, such as Jack using a casket as a rowboat and a voodoo priestess hiding in a swamp.
 * The whole casket thing is sort of from Moby Dick, though.
 * If one were to see the trailer for the original Pirates of the Caribbean while being unaware of the franchise, it wouldn't be a huge leap to expect it to be a straight-up Monkey Island movie, even though the influence actually went the other way.
 * Grand Theft Auto Vice City was already a perfectly good Scarface game before Scarface the World Is Yours was made. In the leap from screen to game, Scarface was basically forced to rip off itself.
 * Similarly, the Los Santos chapters Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas play out like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, while the Las Venturas section is basically Casino (for the main story strand) and Ocean's Eleven (for the optional casino heist plot).
 * And to go further back, Grand Theft Auto III looks and plays a lot like the Driver games that started on the PlayStation. Essentially, it's Driver with a criminal Villain Protagonist and on-foot controls that actually work—something that it took Reflections, the makes of Driver, four games to get right (something that is lampshaded more than once in the GTA series), by which point it was them who came off looking like Johnny-come-latelies.
 * Going in the other direction, some people consider Saints Row to be the true successor to San Andreas and the III-era GTA games, especially after Grand Theft Auto IV went in a more realistic, Darker and Edgier direction.
 * You could compare the two franchises as college students: where GTA is the serious straight-laced student with a 4.0 GPA, Saints Row is the partying, hard drinking, pot smoking, orgy attending cooler friend.
 * Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto IV was busy being the best game based on The Wire ever made.
 * It goes back even further, if you squint; the original 2D Grand Theft Auto owes a huge amount of thematic inspiration to Dirty Harry and The French Connection, and the levels set in the No Communities Were Harmed versions of New York and San Fransisco are about as close to video game adaptations of each film as the technology of the period could achieve.
 * Lost Odyssey is a pretty good Final Fantasy game, made by that series' original creator (and musician) after he left Square Enix.
 * Similarly, Blue Dragon takes heavily from Dragon Quest, even getting Akira Toriyama to do the character designs.
 * Now the next big RPG from the guy is The Last Story, and merely from the name and logo design (which is all that is known about it) the games looks like another Final Fantasy attempt.
 * Red Faction bears striking resemblance to the Martian society depicted in Total Recall.
 * Manhunt was originally meant to be an adaptation of The Warriors, but Rockstar couldn't get the license at the time. They later made an officially licensed Warriors Beat'Em Up that is incredibly close to the film and still averts The Problem with Licensed Games.
 * Some have suggested that the sequel, Manhunt 2, is a spiritual licensee of Fight Club.
 * While it's pretty unlikely that anyone would ever make a Perry Mason video game, the world will always have Ace Attorney.
 * Many people have bemoaned the fact that Act Raiser never got a real sequel which featured the combination of town-building sim and real-time action (Act Raiser II was a sequel In Name Only). But it did. It was called Dark Cloud.
 * Despite the creator's efforts to give it a more unique art style, Deadly Premonition—while So Bad It's Good—remains a closest thing we have that can be considered a Twin Peaks game.
 * Even moreso than Alan Wake, which in turn owes a bit for Stephen King's work.
 * Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is sometimes considered an impressive adaptation of the Cthulhu Mythos. The game used inspiration from the stories and even the books can be found, but you can't read them, only observe them.
 * Barring the lack of giant bugs, Section 8 (video game) is the most true adaption of the Mobile Infantry ever.
 * Dead Rising bears so many similarities to Dawn of the Dead that the game actually carries a disclaimer explicitly stating that it's not based on the movie. At one point, George Romero himself autographed someone's copy of the game without knowing much about it.
 * Aside from being a spiritual entry in the Luminous Arc series, Arc Rise Fantasia can be seen as a Spiritual Licensee to the Tales (series). The characters are in anime-design, there are skits that tend to be on the light-hearted side, costumes can be acquired (though they can only bee seen on the character's portrait) and it isn't release in Europe. Two developers who worked on the Tales (series) even worked on this game.
 * Homeworld was meant to be a Battlestar Galactica Classic game, but that didn't work out. The resulting game still had the essential story of the original BSG and the mood of the re-imagined series (despite the game predating the latter).
 * It takes a bit of time to realize that X-COM: UFO Defense is not set in 1980, and was not made by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.
 * The Halo franchise, especially Halo 3: ODST with its drop pods, is quite possibly the best adaptation of Starship Troopers outside of Aliens.
 * It also has one of the best depictions of the architecture and technical power of The Culture.
 * Okage is probably the greatest Tim Burton game no one has ever heard of.
 * Max Payne was greeted by one review with the sarcastic remark "Leather coats, Bullet Time, automatic weapons... I wonder what the first mod of it will be."
 * Hard Boiled?
 * Which - by the way - much like Scarface above, also had been forced to rip off itself as well.
 * Max Payne 3 is a good video game adaption of Man on Fire. Just look at the first trailer of the game when Max describes his situation and you will notice the similarities instantaneously.
 * Given the way the grappling hook is used, Just Cause does a better job being a Darker and Edgier version of Bionic Commando than... well... the 2009 Bionic Commando.
 * Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater had, by far, the best James Bond title song I've heard for a while.
 * Destroy All Humans! to Invader Zim, down to having the same tone, humor, and Richard Horvitz voice your Exposition Fairy.
 * Kane and Lynch has a noted similarity to the films of Michael Mann, specifically Heat and Collateral. The magazine PC Powerplay specifically noted that the game "[took] some pages out of Mann's notebook."
 * Many gamers consider Video Game/Torchlight to be a great sequel to the Diablo games. Makes sense, considering it was made by the old Diablo dev team.
 * And of course, the first Diablo game in years is coming out the same summer as Torchlight II...
 * Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.
 * Left 4 Dead is pretty much 28 Days Later: The Game, only with more gunplay.
 * There's a reason Prototype is often referred to as Venom: The Game.
 * It's also often compared to The Thing.
 * It is also notable as literally being a Spiritual Successor to an earlier game based on The Hulk made by the same studio.
 * Brothers in Arms is essentially Band of Brothers the video game.
 * Speaking of, Company of Heroes. To the point that, in Poland, it has been relased with the The Foreign Subtitle of Kompania Braci (which is exactly how Band of Brothers has been titled there as well).
 * Nie R, as mentioned in its Laconic section, might as well be called , especially once The Reveal is cruelly shown.
 * Play some classical music, and Sins of a Solar Empire could easily pass itself off as a Western adaptation of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. There's even a mod that lets you import both the Reich and the Free Planets Alliance.
 * BioShock (series) is a wonderful interactive adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, only with the Author Tract deconstructed and re-examined.
 * Based on the trailers, BioShock Infinite may be (at least partly) a Spiritual Licensee of Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day.
 * Ikari Warriors was originally planned to be a Rambo arcade game. The game's title actually comes from the Japanese version of Rambo: First Blood Part II, which was titled Rambo: Ikari no Dasshutsu.
 * People are calling Xenonauts a better X-COM game than the upcoming one in the making by 2K Games.
 * Aquaria is essentially Ecco the Dolphin with a mermaid and a little Metroidvania.
 * Neutopia is the original The Legend of Zelda had it been made for the TurboGrafx-16 instead of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
 * According to Shinji Mikami he wanted to do a Neo-Human Casshern game, but since he already did a brawler game, he decided to put more emphasis on shooting. Hence, Vanquish is the closest we will ever get to a Casshern video game adaptation.
 * The Adventures of Bayou Billy is all but a Crocodile Dundee game, having an obvious Captain Ersatz player character and a plot suspiciously like Crocodile Dundee II.
 * Call of Duty Black Ops is sometimes considered a Spiritual Prequel to The Rock, spelling out Gen. Hummel's 60's era adventures. It even borrows some of the elements of that movie, namely
 * Iron Storm is probably the closest you'll ever get to a game adaptation of Orwell's 1984 (general Just Before the End / Ruins of the Modern Age grimness, a Forever War between 20. century megaempires fueled by fanatical propaganda, etc.).
 * Phantasy Star is Star Wars made into a console RPG.
 * In Famous has exactly the same premise as Static Shock, and its hero has precisely the same superpowers.
 * Although it's now gone to full-fledged series and is far more popular than its inspiration, Ratchet and Clank was as close to a Jet Force Gemini series as we're ever going to get.
 * Berserk has had a couple of decent games to its name, but by far the best ones are Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
 * In addition, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are probably the best 3D Castlevania games made so far.
 * Viewtiful Joe makes a excellent game adaption of Last Action Hero, but with Toku themes instead. See X Meets Y for more.
 * Even though all the monsters are taken from the public domain, and Simon Belmont looks like something by Frank Frazetta, the first Castlevania 1986 is obviously a take on the Universal Monsters, especially with the fake credits at the end of the game.
 * Sacred was the best sequel for Diablo II in its day.
 * Painkiller was thought to be more a sequel to Doom II than Doom 3 turned out to be.
 * Run Saber pretty much works as a substitute for a SNES version of Strider, right down to the laser blades and the same number of stages as the arcade original.
 * Tass Times in Tonetown: This 1986 Interplay adventure PC game has much of the style and mood of the mid 80s Saturday morining cartoon Kidd Video. The game was released near the end of the cartoon's run. Like the MTV inspired cartoon, Tass Times had an overarching popular music theme (although given the limitations of a typical 1986 computer, there wasn't much of an opportunity to realise the music aspect). Tonetown (the game's setting) fits right in with the many locations that Kidd and the band visit during their adventures througout the Flip Side. Both can be described as a music-themed surreal fantasy nowhereland populated by all sorts of strange beings. And finally, both are an homage to what was so good about the 80s, and are unashamed of their 80s style.
 * The adventure game Operation Stealth by Delphine Software was so obviously an homage to James Bond that its American publisher (Interplay) was able to make minor changes to the dialogue and release the result as an actual licensed game, James Bond 007: The Stealth Affair.
 * Shogun: Total War and Shogun 2 are pretty much the closest you can get to an epic scale adaptation of every Japanese samurai movie ever. And the latest DLC Expansion, Fall of the Samurai, seems set to do the same for The Last Samurai... minus Tom Cruise.
 * Other games like Rome and 'the Medieval series can also be described as adaptations of Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven respectively.
 * A Rock Paper Shotgun review of Crusader Kings II calls it "the best Game of Thrones game you will probably ever play." There exists a Game Mod for the original Crusader Kings to that effect, and one in the works for the new game.
 * Dragon Age is also a strong contender for the above title, borrowing not only the tone, the overall setting (of sorts) and several more visible smaller changes such as the use of the title "Ser".
 * Lost Patrol from 1990 is the closest any game has come to capturing the dark view on the Vietnam War exhibited in movies such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now.
 * The Taito arcade game Rastan Saga was originally developed with the intention of nabbing the Conan the Barbarian license for it.
 * Crystalis is very close to being a Studio Ghibli video game, using much of the setting and themes, and conspicuously inserting familiar-looking objects (such as the floating castle). Most notably, the insect-infested jungle seems very familiar, and the boss is an Ohmu.
 * Mass Effect is essentially a licensed Lensman series. Or rather, Babylon5 with dialogue options.
 * Kung Fu Master is more of an adaptation of Game of Death than the Jackie Chan movie which shares its title in Japan.
 * On a review of it in this very wiki, Kid Icarus: Uprising was called the best Serious Sam game ever put onto a nintendo system.
 * Likewise, it's an awesome entry in the Sin and Punishment franchise.
 * iOS game in development Star Command is barely even trying to hide that it's essentially a Star Trek game.
 * Similarly, an indie game called Artemis tries to replicate being on the bridge of the Enterprise as closely as possible.

Western Animation

 * Futurama is probably the closest we'll get to an animated series based on Douglas Adams' work.
 * The episode, The Late Philip J. Fry is one for "The Time Machine".
 * The Lion King is very much a spiritual licensee of Hamlet.
 * Some had said it was a Disney-adaptation of Kimba the White Lion.
 * Why can't it be both?
 * Venture Brothers is this to Jonny Quest as it shares the same premise.
 * Re Boot is this to Tron, but limits the User to Player Character in Games and Deus Ex Machina, focusing on the lives of the programs instead. Also increased the premise's scope beyond a single system by factoring in the internet.
 * Time Squad is just Sherman & Peabody, if Peabody was a gay robot and Sherman was a space marine.
 * Samurai Jack has an identical premise to Frank Miller's comic from the 80's, Ronin.
 * G.I. Joe: Renegades may as well have been an animated remake of The A-Team
 * Some of Don Bluth's (The Land Before Time, The Secret of NIMH) films have been considered this to the Disney films of Golden Age of Animation.

Other

 * The MagiQuest simulated-adventure franchise, although much lower-tech and modest in scale, is currently the closest that fans of Niven & Barnes Dream Park can come to savoring the fictional mega-theme park's attractions.