Is the Cancelled Breaking Bad Game a Missed Opportunity, or a Bullet We All Dodged?

Breaking Bad is one of the most acclaimed shows in modern television, a morally complex and darkly hilarious take on the crime thriller that remains a beloved property over a decade after it concluded on AMC. Spin-offs like Better Call Saul and epilogues like El Camino kept the series alive in later years, helping turn the series into one of the most effective creations of the larger prestige TV universe of shows.

Given how the gaming industry of the era when Breaking Bad launched was still full of movie and TV adaptations, it’s a little surprising it didn’t follow the same trend that led to the PS2 take on The Shield or The Sopranos. In fact, it turns out that one of the companies behind Horizon Call of the Mountain was working on one of multiple Breaking Bad game adaptations for a while — and it’s a good thing we didn’t get it.

We Almost Got Multiple Breaking Bad Video Games

As reported by Men’s Journal, developer Firesprite Studio worked with Vince Gilligan and Sony Interactive Entertainment, trying to adapt Breaking Bad into a VR video game in 2017. This builds on previous reports from that year that Gilligan was working with Sony on a VR game. In that year, Gilligan was among several successful TV showrunners brought in by the company to play with their VR tech and brainstorm ideas for collaborations. Sony Interactive Entertainment executive Andrew House noted at the time that Gilligan was the most intrigued by the idea. While a Gilligan-led video game was in development for a few years, the developer in question wasn’t known until recently.

It turns out that the VR game wasn’t even the only example of the show almost being brought into gaming. During an appearance on the podcast Inside the Gilliverse, Gilligan mentioned that a GTA-style game and a mobile title had also been considered and that Better Call Saul screenwriter Jean Carroll had put in a lot of work writing stories for all the games. Despite that effort, the game was seemingly canceled after a year in development. Gilligan would note in later interviews that “making a video game is damn hard. It takes years and millions of dollars, especially when you’re trying to break new ground with VR. It never came to fruition, though, which is a shame.”

Why A Breaking Bad Video Game Wouldn’t Work

There are certain elements of the Breaking Bad universe that would make perfect sense as a game. The most inventive episodes of the show, especially Walter’s scheming and the various shoot-outs, would seem perfect for an action-packed video game. They’re almost already tailor-made to be adapted into missions for a video game. Even just a game set in that world, similar to The Godfather‘s efforts to slip the player character into an established crime drama, could theoretically be a lot of fun. However, that might be exactly why a Breaking Bad video game is a bad idea.

A central aspect of Breaking Bad is the way it explores the moral rot and the larger ramifications of Walter White’s decision to become a criminal. The show is very much a deliberate slow-burn, with much of the tension cooking over the course of several lengthy episodes of character drama before exploding in deeply memorable but fairly quick bursts of violence and spectacle. It’s one of the things that makes the show work so well as a TV series, using the extended run-time of episodes and the scope of a larger recurring cast to create a full world. Those beats would feel glacial if adapted to gaming, requiring wholesale changes to the presentation and story.

A true adaptation of Breaking Bad would have a hard time maintaining pacing amidst the slower moments of the narrative. The alternative would be a medley of all the show’s biggest moments without any of the emotional build-up that made those moments so effective in the first place. The moral arc of the show also seems naturally opposed to the impulses of gaming. Walter’s biggest and boldest acts often come with the steepest of prices, undercutting any sense of accomplishment that players might have otherwise felt from pulling off a train heist or taking down a rival kingpin. It’s something that other game adaptations of crime mass media have struggled with. The game tie-ins to movies with clear arcs about the moral cost of corruption, like Scarface and The Godfather, instead got a pure catharsis without the growth. This isn’t to say a game couldn’t have the same level of emotional complexity as the show, just that just straight adapting it to a game would lose some of the effect of the original narrative thanks to its very specific design as a TV show.

Alternatively, turning the game into a more character-driven experience amid a more grounded approach to being a crime lord — similar to Mafia 3 — could have also been an interesting fit for the Breaking Bad franchise. However, it would have been hard to slip into the established framework of the show’s timeline and character connections. The further the potential game gets from Breaking Bad, the more it just feels limiting to force the tie-in upon the idea. Breaking Bad is also a series that works in part due to the way Gilligan and the filmmakers behind that show used their technical skills to the best of their advantage, using the medium of television in inventive and effective ways. Trying to force that into the world of gaming when it’s not necessarily a natural fit would be a disservice to both the established show and the potential game. It’s interesting that we almost got a Breaking Bad video game, but it’s probably for the best that we didn’t.