CREDIT: FRONTBURNR
A grizzled detective on a quest to hunt down renegade androids... and it isn’t Blade Runner.

It's no secret that movies have always been the older-brother medium to video games. Age is just one of the factors; not only have movies been around longer, but they have also been developed as an established medium of conveying story and aesthetic.

Aping movies for their strengths was the natural path that the video game industry took to gain its own foothold as a serious medium, and some game creators have stepped forth to admit their influences with admiration. Not just Dead Rising being a loose retooling of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, here are some games that owe films serious kudos.

Dead Space — Event Horizon
Although the concept of an alien stowaway wreaking havoc on an industrial spaceship existed since 1979's Alien, Event Horizon pushed the idea further by making it more Doom-in-a-spaceship, the culprits being retooled as Eldritchian monsters from hell. Jurassic Park's Sam Neil is spacetime scientist Dr. Weir, who embarks on a rescue mission alongside a rag-tag crew of recovery specialists, to a missing spaceship found in the middle of nowhere (in space, that is). The premise sound familiar? Dead Space IS basically Event Horizon: The Video Game. Not a totally shameless rip-off of the movie, but a lot of elements nevertheless manifest themselves, be it the fantastical nature of the gory monsters, or just people going insane and killing each other in horribly nasty ways. Event Horizon itself is a pretty great horror film with some seriously creepy art direction, although it does suffer from some '90s goofiness.

Silent Hill — Jacob's Ladder
Silent Hill may have gone downhill in the eyes of its fans, but it was once considered the pinnacle of horror gaming, an evolution of Resident Evil's survival gameplay into true 3D environments. Some of its truly nightmarish hallucinations are what made Jacob's Ladder a terrifying film first. The story of a Vietnam vet facing some truly horrific experiences with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the film's nightmare sequences, of rusted and broken-down hospitals populated by ghoulish patients and monstrous orderlies, are a staple of Silent Hill series aesthetics. On an odder note, it can be argued that the Schwarzenegger vehicle Kindergarten Cop played some influence as well, at least for the first game. Internet sleuths discovered the game's school-based levels strongly resembled the classrooms from the film — likely a result of the game's Japanese developers seeking insight on the look of the average American public school.

Hideo Kojima's Games — Various Films
He truly is a strange case; a sort of reversal of the Western nerd who immerses himself in everything Japanese, Kojima is a… Westaboo, I think? The man loves everything Hollywood, and it shows. His early works — Snatcher in particular — practically brag about their being influenced by '80s sci-fi, the game's looks and plot resembling Blade Runner to a fault/lawsuit. Fans of the Metal Gear Solid series don't need any introduction on how much Hideo Kojima enjoys John Carpenter's Escape From New York, the eyepatch shared between Snake Plissken and Big Boss being the most noticeable, but hardly the only influence carried.

Grand Theft Auto — Various Films
Some say that the GTA series' penchant for ripping design and story ideas straight from the scripts of classic gangster dramas was what influenced the release of game adaptations of said films. Scarface: The World is Yours and The Godfather game sought to cash in on the craze started by a series that ripped them off. GTA III was a love letter to Goodfellas, Vice City took Scarface as its own, and San Andreas practically let you ride alongside '90s West Coast rapper Eazy-E. GTA IV's Eastern European in America plot began a radical (and deliberate) departure from these unofficial movie-to-game adaptations, in a quest for originality and lawsuit avoidance.