‘Game Over’ Is Literally Five Bad Video Game Movies in One
A few weeks ago, I wrote about The X-Files Game from 1999 that utilized full-motion video (FMV) technology, an ultimately short-lived trend that featured games composed of short filmed clips starring actual actors. The X-Files Game isn’t amazing, but it worked for me as a goofy little peripheral bit to a thing I love. The hollow story and uninspired gameplay were worth trudging through to see which beloved characters showed up, and how the events might fit into the larger mythology of the show. A worthwhile endeavor, but even with the licensing and star power, it didn’t leave much of an impression on me.
2003’s Game Over (also known as Maximum Surge, and alternately The Worst Movie I Have Ever Seen) is a film made up of footage from a scrapped FMV game starring Baywatch’s Yasmine Bleeth, in addition to scenes from four FMV games that did get released, and about an hour of original garbage made years after said games in an attempt to string a coherent plot together. It is considerably worse than The X-Files Game, reruns of Baywatch, or pretty much anything else you can think of.
Before I get into the parts of this movie I was able to remember and/or understand, just a heads up: I found Game Over very hard to watch. Not because of the low-quality YouTube rip I found, or because it has problematic subject matter or anything like that. No, I just couldn’t fucking stay awake.
I spent the longest half hour of my life watching this demo disc of a film do a bunch of exposition about why this guy named Main Character Steve1 has to play a bunch of old Sega CD games to save the world and it was absolutely brutal. It felt like an entire day of school.
I was starting to nod off when my endlessly supportive wife, who was giving the movie a fair shake, asked a question that told me she wasn’t enjoying it either.
“What even is this, babe?”
I had no good answer.
As best as I could tell, it was a movie about three game developers that piss off the Net Police2 and also there’s a supercomputer named Drexel that is threatening to wreak havoc on the world.
I decided to turn the thing off, go to sleep, and pick it back up the next day. I was too tired to be very observant. Then I discovered that I wasn’t tired at all. I played a few rounds of Mini Motorways, did the dishes, and was up for a few hours longer.
Game Over is just so hypnotically bad that I think it triggered some survival mechanism in my brain that tried to put me into sleep mode before it got corrupted by this shit. Thank you, brain.
I finished the movie the next day. Barely. A 4:00 PM screening while drinking coffees three and four of the day carried me through the final hour. It was still atrocious, but at least I got to the part where it incorporated a bunch of other video games, so that held my interest.
I’m still not all the way sure about the plot, though. Might be my fault, might be theirs. Probably a bit of both.
What I can say with confidence is that Game Over is a handful of ‘80s movie tropes applied to footage from a handful of obscure ‘90s Full Motion Video games that was released directly to television a few years into the 21st century. It never had a chance.
Drexel the computer is basically Joshua the computer from WarGames, and Yasmine Bleeth is Jo3, a pretty lady that Main Character Steve has Weird Science’d inside of one of his computers if I’m understanding the movie correctly (again, not sure if I am.)
Eventually, we learn that Drexel is just like all of us: he’s been corrupted by video games. It started innocently, but now he craves THE HARD STUFF. I’m not kidding:
Game Over is a movie that dares ask the question: What if technology became self-aware and just… really wanted to play video games? And got super pissy when it couldn’t? In this case, so pissy that it threatens to fuck up the entire planet!
Drexel is gonna like, wreck the world, and possibly install a President of his choosing if he doesn’t get to play some killer games. It’s unclear why this movie thinks a computer could do that one day, to say nothing of choosing Gary Coleman. Nevertheless, Drexel clearly poses a serious threat to the world.
Most of the repurposed video game footage is from Maximum Surge, a game that never got released, despite starring Bleeth, and Star Trek’s Walter Koenig. Yes, Chekov himself.
Koening plays Drexel, actually. But you see, Drexel was just a guy in Maximum Surge, and Jo was just a tough lady, so the film has the task of featuring these characters throughout the whole movie, despite them shooting all their parts half a decade earlier, and not realizing it was for a movie called Game Over. This means that Game Over ends up dubbing the voice of its most recognizable star with the silly voice that Drexel the Computer gets for the whole movie.
As for Jo, well, it’s never explained why she doesn’t get to jump around into the other games once Main Character Steve does. Or maybe it was. Who cares?
We’re also told that Drexel is inhabiting the waves of generic enemies Main Character Steve mows down while he’s inside of Maximum Surge. I don’t know if Drexel gives a stat boost to these henchmen when he goes into their bodies, but everyone is freaking out about it, so I think he might.
Speaking of which, Maximum Surge is one of several light-gun games that got mixed into this stew of a movie. These were titles that had you point a gun accessory at the screen and shoot at targets (think Duck Hunt). Which makes it a little peculiar that Steve is in a full-body VR rig like he’s in The Lawnmower Man, and he just makes finger guns with what looks like a Power Glove to shoot the guys. I’m pretty sure that’s not how you played any of these games, man.
Anyway, Drexel and Main Character Steve are dueling in Maximum Surge, and Drexel’s putting the screws to Steve, and then for some reason they bump him over into a different game.
A different FMV game.
An FMV game, in fact, called Quarterback Attack starring longtime Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka!
Sometimes you’re watching some wild-ass movie and you think you’re ready for whatever comes next, and then what comes next is Mike Ditka yelling directly at the camera and then throwing a stool against the wall. You can’t even really hear the line he says, ‘cause that dang stool is so loud. They must have just had the one stool on hand that day. What a riot.
Soon enough Steve is playing starting quarterback for the Mike Ditka Red Guys and getting his ass handed to him in the process. It’s stupid, absurd, and hilarious of course, but the film does justify it and even goes so far as to tell the viewers the name of the game. Why does that matter? Because it’s the last time it happens!
From here, Steve starts getting zapped into the other games at indiscriminate times. Without explanation, he’s soon in some zombie game starring the guy who played the oversleeping marathon runner Jean-Paul in that episode of Seinfeld, doing the most over-the-top Rastafarian accent you’ve ever heard.
This game is called Corpse Killer, but I only know that because I looked it up.
I sort of figured going into this movie that it would be a borderline commercial for all of these games, similar to what 1989’s The Wizard was for Nintendo products of that era. But nope, between not even naming several of them and not properly demonstrating how they’re played, it’s merely a bunch of old footage used as filler to help Game Over reach feature length. Those fuckers.
Meanwhile, Steve just keeps on meeting new people who explain to him all new problems, by way of speaking directly into the camera, FMV-game style.
It becomes clear-ish that no matter what game this guy Steve is in, Drexel is in there too, inhabiting the villain of said game. This can get a little confusing, so just to help you follow along, so far in the movie Drexel has taken the forms of:
Drexel in Maximum Surge
Some guy named Hillman in Corpse Killer
A linebacker that excels at pressuring the QB in Quarterback Attack
If I had to compare Game Over to a couple of underrated Denzel Washington movies from the 1990s, it’s kind of like Fallen meets Virtuosity, except really, really awful and performed by a very dull cast.
There are a ton of familiar faces that show up throughout, though. In fact, I think that FMV games’ greatest contribution to culture is probably the way they consistently roped recognizable actors into performing some dodgy-ass material.
In addition to Bleeth, Chekov, and Mike Ditka, we see legendary character actors Dick Miller, Vincent Schiavelli, and I swear to god I saw this guy from Bloodsport and Revenge of the Nerds in there for a few seconds at some point.
The whole movie is incomprehensible enough throughout, but the last 15 minutes feel like they were made in 15 actual minutes. Steve ends up in the black & white first-person boxing game Prize Fighter, and Michael Buffer, the “Let’s get ready to rumble” guy, says his famous line: “Let’s get ready to rumble.”
Then Steve gets his ass kicked in the boxing game by, you guessed it, Drexel inhabiting the in-game opponent. I’m pretty sure, at least.
There is a whole samurai-brawling game featured too, called Supreme Warrior. There’s more fighting there. It’s in color and no inexplicable pop culture fixtures appear, so it’s not as exciting to me as the Prize Fighter stuff. It all just happens pretty abruptly, like a movie that keeps changing channels.
In the end, Steve wins, saves the world, and Drexel is uh, I don’t know. Gone for now? I was awake for the end, but I can’t all the way remember. So much happens in this movie, but sadly it all has the energy of a lifeless cutscene from an old clunky video game, since it was made out of lifeless cutscenes from old clunky video games.
I had to microdose Game Over, and even then it felt like a 90-minute car accident I had no business walking away from. I thought I enjoyed shitty video game movies, like Street Fighter and Doom. It turns out I wasn’t ready for the hard stuff.
As a bonus, here is the best clip I took from the movie but didn’t know where to put it. Thanks for reading!
His name isn’t Main Character Steve, but I will refer to him as such because he really doesn’t seem like he should be the main character in a movie, and I’m worried I’ll forget.
I’m obviously fuzzy on a bunch of elements from this terrible movie, but I promise you that the Net Police are in there throughout. That I’m sure of.
The name “Jo” is a clever easter egg believed to be a reference to the Jerk Off who wrote Game Over/Maximum Surge