The Boys Should Have Gotten The Videogames

The Boys Should Have Gotten the Video Games

These superheroes may not be very heroic, but they’d make for a great game.

We all agree that Karl Urban (who plays Billy Butcher in the hit TV show The Boys, and about a dozen other pop culture icons) should star in a massive crossover game where he plays every character. Urban is one of the few actors to be a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe, the Star Trek universe, and the world of multiple videogames, appearing in movie adaptations of DOOM and Mortal Kombat II.

So, Urban is a big deal in the world or modern fiction, and that’s one of the many reasons a game based on The Boys could have been such a big hit. Other than an appearance from Homelander (the show’s evil Superman stand-in) in some Mortal Kombat 1 DLC, and a recent VR title where Homelander and Butcher play supporting roles with sound-a-like actors, there’s been no other official games based on the show to date.   

But it’s not too late. The Amazon Prime series may be ending today, but the intellectual property still has plenty of juice in it. Here’s a few ways we’d like to see it brought to games.

A GTA-style Open-world Action Comedy

There are a lot of parallels between The Boys and the Grand Theft Auto series. Both were born in the wake of Quintin Tarantino’s normalization of sociopathic anti-heroes starring in mainstream stories. Where GTA Tarantino-ified videogames, the original The Boys comic did the same for the Justice League, with an unflinching look at exactly how perverted, violent, and evil people might become in a world superheroes. GTA and The Boys also allowed people to play out their fantasies of being truly awful, nearly unstoppable people, while also laughing at the awfulness of the world through parodies of pop culture and politics.

A huge, open world game set in The Boys’ universe could become even more popular than the show. That said, it would take a while to make by modern AAA standards. Let’s hope to see it before Karl Urban stars in The Boys Episode VII: The Voight Awakens as a geriatric Butcher in 2046.

A Classic-2D Beat ‘Em Up

Not much about The Boys feels retro, though its meta-commentary on its own genre and wanton displays of edginess both give it a certain early 2000’s feel. It’s also a massive ensemble story, featuring a variety of characters with a huge array of superpowers. That all adds up to the perfect foundation for a multi-player beat ‘em up in the style of the recently released Marvel: Cosmic Invasion. It’s also the exact kind of game that Voight Industries (the company that created the superheroes and all their in-universe tie-in toys, movies, and even videogames) would peddle in-universe. Sell this real-life game like it comes from the world of the show, and you have a built-in window to bring people into the terrible, wonderful world of the series. 

An Asymmetrical Horror game

One of the first scenes in The Boys features the tragic, disgusting death of someone who could have been a main character. It tells you right away that this is a show where anyone can die at any time, and that the horrors of living with super humans is a constant source of anxiety for everyone. In that way, The Boys isn’t all that different from a lot of ongoing horror movie of TV franchises, where people have had to adjust to daily life when zombies, Freddy Kruger, or Michael Myers are just out there, ready to use their inhuman abilities to hurt us in ways that we have no easy protections against.

That the exactly challenge that the modern asymmetrical horror genre pits players against… unless they’re the one playing as “the stalker”, where they get to be the one with the inhuman ability to murder en masse. The upcoming Halloween game does a particularly impressive job with implanting those kinds of powers, giving Michael Myers the ability to turn invisible and phase through walls, essentially making him a mix between The Invisible Man and Kitty Pryde from the X-Men. 

While it would be tough to get the character ability balance right, making a similar game where four or more of the Boys, with their limited power set, need to take on members of The Seven (the show’s equivalent of The Justice League). Many of the show’s best scenes, including the premise of its series finale, are about everyday people teaming up against a singular, unstoppable enemy. That same conflict that could make for the perfect “just one more round” competitive horror game.