The Last Of Us Has Us Wishing These 8 TV Shows Were Video Games

Over the last 14 years, whenever we hear that an AI chatbot influenced a child to commit suicide, or a reality TV star becomes President of the United States, or a global pandemic breaks out, at some point many of us think, “Man, this feels like a Black Mirror episode.” The dystopian anthology series has complicated the human experience by placing people in deadly moral quandaries with a level of creativity that would be a thrill to explore further in a video game. There have been episodes in which people are dog-like robotic killers (“Metalhead”), a museum of unethical technological experiments like a brain implant allowing a doctor to feel his patient’s pain is explored (“Black Museum), and the British Prime Minister is blackmailed into having sex with a pig on national television (“The National Anthem”). They’ve also already ventured into the dark world of video games in an episode in which two friends fall in love in a Mortal Kombat-esque VR game (“Striking Vipers”) and one in which a guy tests an augmented reality game implanted in his head where he experiences his worst nightmares (“Playtest”).

This show would make an excellent video game in which a character is banished to a purgatorial void for some moral infraction, and they can only escape by going through a series of mirrors that are portals into wild scenarios that test their willingness to live.

Espionage has been the basis of some of the greatest video game franchises ever, like Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, and Watch Dogs. The cutscene dialogue is usually rich with dramatic doublespeak and societal commentary that excites the inner conspiracy theorist in us. Few shows over the last 25 years have all that and the benefit of two dynamic leads, but The Americans does. The show is centered around two Russian spies posing as a suburban American family in the early 1980s, leaking intel back to their motherland. They and their network of spies have to intercept valuable assets in broad daylight through choreographed distractions, infiltrate a U.S. military project to steal defense communication codes, and bug the FBI office by placing a listening device in a mail robot.

Even when the series ended, there were nuances of the show that fans wanted to delve back into, which a video game could help with. Since the show is more about stealth than murder (though there’s a fair amount of that too), it could be a great two-player game in which you and a partner extract intel to send back to Mother Russia, but it presents you both with different paths you must choose from that could ultimately lead you two to hate each other. The world will never get enough of spy games.

If guns, drugs, and the occasional wrestler-turned-gangster are what you are into, Snowfall is your show. The final piece of art the late John Singleton gave us is a gripping drama about a young man named Franklin Saint (Damson Idris) who starts selling drugs to get him and his mother out of the ‘hood. That is, until it turns into an empire and he becomes a power addict who destroys everything he loves. Watching Franklin devolve into a prisoner of his power by killing one of his best friends to prevent a gang war and then killing the father of the love of his life to prevent being arrested is truly heartbreaking. There’s also enough drive-by shootings, cocaine smuggling, and sex to make this a great Grand Theft Auto-style video game in which you can either play as Franklin or one of the numerous members of his empire to see where this gangster life will lead you.

The show that took Sterling K. Brown’s badass levels up to 100 has scenes that I wanted to leap into my TV screen to participate in. Certain members of the U.S. government and private sector build a city inside of a Colorado mountain to escape an extinction-level event they knew was coming. The first season’s penultimate episode is already being hailed as the best TV episode of 2025 so far and contains a tense scene in which the President of the United States needs armed guards to make it out of the White House after he told America that the world is ending, and the government knew about it. In a video game, you could play as Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Brown) and be tasked with getting the president through a mob of angry government officials without him being shot or assaulted. Ratcheting up the stakes further, you also have to make sure you don’t lose the “nuclear football,” the briefcase device that allows the president to launch nuclear attacks. That’s just one of the exhilarating and video-game-ready scenarios from a show that has survivors being killed by mercenaries, the sky itself getting hacked to flash messages, and some of the most emotional scriptwriting of any show this year.

Yes, we’re getting Dune: Awakening game later this year, but that game won’t be focused on the strongest group of people in the Dune universe: The Bene Gesserit. The sensational HBO series Dune: Prophecy is mostly told from the perspective of this ancient sisterhood that acts as confidants and advisors to royal families while surreptitiously influencing powerful people in a way that keeps their secretive group close to power. We’ve seen them tap their fingers and peer into someone’s soul to see if they’re lying and use a powerful voice technique that can make almost anyone who hears it do what they say. The only person proven capable of withstanding the Voice is a man who was swallowed by a sandworm, operated on by thinking machines, and had devices implanted in his eyeballs that allow him to infect people with an airborne virus that burns them alive.

This would be the perfect basis for a game in which you choose your member of the Bene Gesserit, each with their unique skillset, and have to make nuanced interpersonal decisions with the intent of finding the messiah. Imagine using your voice to make the prince of the Atreides family marry the princess of the Harkonnen family simply because of their family names, and seeing it result in one of them killing the other because you didn’t spend enough time with them to know that their families have had a secret war going on for generations. This game would be like The Sims in space but with a lot more murder.

It’s a bit baffling that Amazon’s violent spin on superheroes isn’t on its third PlayStation game by now. The Boys is a fever dream of a series in which a ragtag anti-superhero militia known as the Boys works to stop the reign of the superhero consortium The Seven. The central appeal of the show is that, even while it’s focused on genetically modified super freaks who can do things no ordinary human being can do, it’s also grounded in human imperfections like jealousy, carnal temptations, and greed. It doesn’t let that humanity get in the way of over-the-top action, though. We’ve seen a protestor get his head lasered off, a man’s body ripped apart by a miniature person who crawled inside of him and then expanded, and a superhero orgy too graphic to even try to describe. With superhero video games like Marvel Rivals popping up every two seconds and making a gazillion dollars, there’s no reason a similar type of game can’t be made within The Boys universe.

This should’ve happened a long time ago. The Penguin was one of the best TV shows of 2024 and a true testament to the wealth of possibilities contained within the Batman universe. Set after the events of Matt Reeves’ The Batman film, The Penguin focuses on how people like “Oz” Cobb (Colin Farrell) and Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) try to fill the power gap in Gotham’s underworld left by the death of Carmine Falcone. The show’s titular character is the main star of the action, and we get to see how he’s as strategic as he is ruthless, willing to kill his closest partner so his enemies can’t exploit his love as a weakness. Thus far, whenever video games have let us travel through the seedy underbelly of Gotham it’s been as the Caped Crusader dishing out bone-breaking justice, but it would be just as fun to do so as the nefarious Penguin, trying to take out the crime families standing in his way as he’s determined to be somebody in this world.

When I realized the first season of Creature Commandos was done after only seven episodes that were under 30 minutes each, I was legitimately upset. You don’t want to leave a world in which a black ops team composed of non-human inmates from Belle Reve Penitentiary is assembled in an attempt to protect Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova), the rightful heir to the throne of Pokolistan. This ragtag team of misfits includes a radioactive walking skeleton, an undead Bride of Frankenstein, and a Nazi-hating killer robot, and that’s just the start. They’ve torn someone’s head off by punching through their headrest, had their limbs magically turned into balloon animals mid-fight, and had a rabid weasel tear through someone’s flesh. How could we not have fun running through the world with these agents of mayhem in a video game, violently ending more lives than we save?