I’m a self-admitted board game junkie. Perhaps the Sears catalog from back in the 1980s is to blame. The photos of uber-happy families playing games together perverted my mind into thinking that everything that Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers put out was simply something I just had to have. Hell, they even made The Game of Life look like it was incredibly fun. So, now that I’m older and don’t have a parent telling me “no,” I’ve been collecting all these odd and old games. I was sorting through some of my stranger games today and spotted one I forgot I owned: Gosford Park: The Board Game. That’s right, they made a board game out of Gosford Park.

That made me wonder what the strangest movie to become a video game has been. You know, like if they’d made Little Miss Sunshine into a video game. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be a pretty fun game: get Olive to the beauty pageant on time while avoiding obstacles like Grandpa’s death, color blindness, and the realization that you have a failing career. Okay, maybe it’s not that great of idea, but still. Turning A Clockwork Orange into a game sounds strange as well, but someone has already thought about it.

Most movies that become games will at least tend to lend themselves to the genre, like action and sci-fi films, and it’s almost become a rule that Disney will make a video game out of anything, including Enchanted. But there has to be a crown jewel out there that’ll make people scratch their heads and think, “They made a video game out of that?!”

When you consider the fact that they’ve made movies out of everything from Super Mario Bros. to Doom, and even fans have gotten in on the action by making videos like Pac-Man: The Movie, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen things like Tetris: The Movie… although Hollywood already has movies devoted to Halo, BioShock, and Spy Hunter in the development mill, so don’t give up hope just yet.

Perhaps not one of the strangest, but certainly one of the most disappointing film to video game adaptations has to be 1983’s Cloak and Dagger. Although its story is fairly odd. This was actually a video game based on a movie that wouldn’t come out for another year, but the two were inextricably linked, and the near-mythical existence of the game serves only as a cruel reminder about what could have been.

Cloak & Dagger, the movie, was one of the first films to feature Henry Thomas when he was fresh off of his success as Elliot in 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It also has the dubious distinction of being one of my favorite films…probably because I was 13 years old when it came out, and it had to do with spies and video games. It was also set in Texas, where I grew up, and maybe I was feeling a little home-state pride when you could tell certain scenes were shot in San Antonio.

Anyhow, Cloak & Dagger was one of three movies to come out in the early 80s that featured video games as central to the plot, the other two being Tron and The Last Starfighter. However, rather than being set in a fantasy world, Cloak and Dagger took place in our own world. Young Davey (Henry Thomas) is obsessed with a series of video games featuring Jack Flack as “Agent X.” He also has an imaginary friend version of Jack who looks a lot like his father, played by Dabney Coleman. Yes, Dabney Coleman.

Through a series of events that could only happen in a movie, Davey comes into the possession of an Atari 5200 Cloak & Dagger video game cartridge that has the secret plans for one of the government’s stealth fighters hidden on it. In one of the dumbest ever “let’s hide the secret plans” gimmicks, you have to reach a certain high score to see the plans. Anyhow, to my 13 year-old self, this movie was awesome, and I won’t spoil too much here in case you are heading to Netflix right now to rent it.

So, what’s the problem? Well, Atari was developing a game called Agent X, and Universal Pictures was doing Cloak & Dagger as a movie, which was to feature Donkey Kong as the cartridge in the game. They decided to work together, and Atari set about rebranding the game as Cloak & Dagger and getting the Atari 5200 version ready for release… but it never came out. Instead the arcade version of the game (which is what’s pictured in the film as the Atari 5200 version) had a very limited release in 1983, and the 5200 version got canceled due to the video game crash of 1983, Thanks again, E.T. I never even saw the game in the arcades I used to frequent, although my friend claims he played it at the Phoenix airport in 1984.

So imagine my disappointment when I found out the game I’d been dying to play once I saw the movie didn’t even exist. Not only that, but they faked in screens from the arcade version, so it wouldn’t have looked that good anyhow. Plus, the Jack Flack / Agent X character in the game doesn’t even look or dress like Dabney Coleman did when he was playing the character, so what were they trying to prove? Universal probably wishes they had stuck with Donkey Kong.

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, io9, Cinematical, Film School Rejects and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. Please ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments. Game on.