Kotaku
The First Film License
In my last book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, I think I claimed that the first film to commercial videogame adaptation was Death Race 2000, a 1976 arcade game based (loosely) on the 1975 cult film Death Race, in which drivers in a dystopic America circa the then-future millennium score points for people killed. The arcade game was not an officially licensed adaptation, but it was an adaptation nonetheless. It was also reviled in the media as the first example of a controversial videogame.
But In our research for a new book about the Atari VCS, Nick Montfort and I discovered that Death Race is in fact not the first film adaptation in games. That honor goes to none other than Shark Jaws, by Atari.
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