The series finale of You better call Saul brought the Breaking Bad universe to an end, at least for now. While Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has acknowledged that there could be more spin-offs, his current focus is on moving beyond the anti-hero trend he helped create. While Breaking BadTV’s future may be on hold indefinitely, there is an opportunity to continue in another medium.
In the run up to You better call Saul‘s finale, what Gilligan was talking about? Breaking Bad‘s video game potential on the In the Gilliversum podcasting. But one Breaking Bad game has hit the market, the discontinued mobile game Breaking Bad: Criminal Elements. It’s not because of a lack of trying. When discussing the efforts to Breaking Bad game, admitted that non-gamer Gilligan pitched what would be the perfect one Breaking Bad game: a Grand Theft Auto clone.
Despite not being “much of a video game player,” Gilligan is aware of Grand Theft Auto. Given the obvious similarities between the two franchises, Gilligan thought a Breaking Bad module for a GTA game made perfect sense. Gilligan even went so far as to investigate who owned it GTA. Gilligan didn’t say if there were any negotiations with Rockstar Games about collaborating on such a project, but he did elaborate on other attempts at one.
One of those attempts was a Breaking Bad “VR Experience” for Sony’s PlayStation VR. While he didn’t specifically mention other platforms, Gilligan did say that “energy, effort and talent” was spent writing original storylines for Breaking Bad games that never came to fruition. One of the biggest stumbling blocks a Breaking Bad What the game has dealt with is the fact that Gilligan doesn’t see it as a simple cash-in project.
Gilligan’s video game knowledge goes beyond GTA‘s popularity. He is aware of gaming’s most infamous failure, ET for the Atari 2600, which bombed so horribly that unsold and returned copies were buried in a landfill in the New Mexico desert. That kind of grim fate wouldn’t be out of place in the Breaking Bad universe, as the show was filled with doomed characters and their dark deaths. With that extreme example of a licensed game flaw in mind, Gilligan is understandably protective of the Breaking Bad license, saying it had to be a high-quality game that paid attention to the finer details of the show.
All of which makes Gilligan’s intuition that Rockstar Games would be the right people to create a… Breaking Bad game on site. Their equally meticulous approach makes every game they produce an event in itself, partly because it takes so long for their games to develop. Gilligan’s high standards Breaking Bad and its spin-offs are similar to the ones Rockstar Games uses to produce GTA VI. A Rockstar Breaking Bad project would certainly do the license justice. The company produced two high-quality expansions as DLC for: GTA IV, The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tonythat fit the module approach that Gilligan proposed so many years ago.
Unfortunately, the dream scenario of a Rockstar developed Breaking Bad game will likely remain just that. Breaking Bad has many of the properties that make GTA great games, from sympathetic but deeply flawed criminal protagonists to colorful supporting characters. It even has its own in-universe fast food chain, Los Pollos Hermanos, which reflects the GTA tradition of satirical restaurants like Cluckin’ Bell. Even Breaking BadIts smaller scale wouldn’t be an issue, given the novelty of the New Mexico environment after so many years of playing games in the recreational areas of New York and Los Angeles.
It would be a dream come true for Saul Goodman’s missions and interacting with Mike Ehrmantraut Breaking Bad both fans and gamers. Whether anyone other than Rockstar could produce such a game is another question. Similar franchises also have a checkered gaming history, with The Sopranos: Road to Respectbased on Breaking Bad‘s prestigious TV predecessor, The Sopranos be a particularly bad example.
Despite that, an open world crime game set in the Breaking Bad universe is a possibility that is too tempting to give up completely. Given that Scarface had a well-received video game adaptation decades after its theater release, it’s possible Gilligan would revisit it Breaking Bad in a video game that finally meets its high standards.
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