For years now, video games have been the biggest industry in entertainment, well beyond TV and movies. And why not? They’re fun, they’re addictive, and they can even make you more productive. But it’s only recently that Hollywood has really caught up and started looking to gaming as source material for movies and TV shows. Thus, we’ve gotten shows like The Last of Us and Fallout, and there are a lot more adaptations in the making.
But somehow, Hollywood has missed some really obvious franchises that are screaming out to be turned into TV series.
Grand Theft Auto
Obviously
Grand Theft Auto is one of the most popular video game franchises of all time, and Grand Theft Auto VI promises to be the biggest release of 2026. What better time to announce a big, splashy TV show about the criminal underbelly of Vice City, San Andreas, or wherever the producers feel like setting it? The game series has given them plenty of options.
The show could be a tightly plotted crime caper or a sprawling, chaotic serialized drama with regular 40-car traffic accidents. With this series, anything is possible.
Red Dead Redemption
Deadwood wishes
Rockstar is also behind another video game franchise perfect for adaptation: the Western series Red Dead Redemption. In particular, Red Dead Redemption 2 seems like a perfect foundation on which to build a TV miniseries about Arthur Morgan, the morally conflicted right-hand man to a notorious gang leader.
Metroid
Strong and silent
With a Mario movie already out and a Zelda film on the way, Nintendo is finally adapting its famous franchises to film. Metroid, the long-running series about taciturn space bounty hunter Samus Aran, is left on the sidelines for now, but hopefully not for long.
A TV show could follow the mostly silent Samus as she plumbs the depths of dangerous alien worlds, and would be more about tone and vibe than plot.
Highest fantasy
The Elder Scrolls games mostly take place in different parts of a vast continent called Tamriel, with the most popular game taking place in the northernmost province: Skyrim. Skyrim would be the obvious place to start if Bethesda wanted to adapt this series for the screen, and considering what a big success that Fallout (also based on a Bethesda series) has been, it may yet happen.
Like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls games are relatively light on plot and incredibly long on context, so a TV show could follow in Fallout’s footsteps and mix together the best parts of various games to tell an original-ish story.
- Buy The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim at Bethesda
BioShock
Politics under the sea
The original BioShock game is set in a ruined undersea city built in tribute to the power of objectivist capitalism. Also, there are huge armored guys running around with mutated little girls harvesting genetic material from corpses. Most of the BioShock games combine heavy ideas about society with gnarly action, which should make for an entertaining show.
Hades
Mythtacular
Hades is a fantastic game series about the children of Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, who always need to fight their way in or out of Tartarus for one reason or another. The games have a ton of well-drawn characters who play out a variety of tightly scripted dramas, so a lot of the work would already be done for whoever adapts this story for TV.
The games are basically movies already
If there’s one franchise I’m shocked didn’t get adapted years ago, it’s Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima’s long-running series about superspy Solid Snake, and his various friends, enemies, and relations. There have been attempts to make a movie version before, but one of the problems they’ve reportedly run into is trying to condense the franchise’s famously dense lore into a manageable runtime. Making Metal Gear Solid a TV show would give the story the space to spread out.
- Buy Metal Gear Solid – Master Collector Edition on Steam
Mass Effect
Space operatic
The original Mass Effect trilogy follows Commander Shepherd as he (or she, if the player chooses; obviously, a TV show would commit to one or the other) treks across the galaxy, meeting various alien species and preparing everyone for a clash with a race of ancient sentient machines called the Reapers that are preparing to harvest all organic life in the Milky Way. The sprawling space opera series would make a great multi-season TV show.
Myst
For easy watching
Myst was one of the first video games that became known for its atmosphere and story. Roughly, it’s about an attempt to rebuild a world created by an ancient civilization. Different worlds, or “Ages,” are accessed by touching various magical linking books.
That sounds a little loose, and it is, but what made the Myst games stand out was their calm, serene vibe. The player solved puzzles rather than battling monsters. A Myst TV show could be a laid-back, atmospheric drama that spends time making sense of the dense lore.
Half-Life
If we can’t get another game, maybe we can at least get a show
In Half-Life, players play as Dr. Gordon Freeman, a physicist who accidentally opens a portal to a hostile alien world, and who then has to deal with both the strange creatures and an attempt by the government to cover things up. There’s also a corporate conspiracy angle on the story, with companies like Black Mesa and Aperture Science getting too ambitious for their own good. A Half-Life TV show could bring one of gaming’s most iconic characters to life in a way that developer Valve seems uninterested in doing again.
