People really like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Phrases like the best show on television, or the best show ever, have been applied to both of them and they’re both credited as products from the mind of Vince Gilligan. The creator of the two shows has seen them both become pop culture icons, but despite their popularity, he hasn’t done as much with the licenses as someone might expect. For example, neither show ever got a major video game. While Breaking Bad got a mobile game at one point, the most that Better Call Saul has received is a DS-style fan game.
Unfortunately, we never got that full giant world experience that many fans would have liked to have gotten. The worst part though might be that Gilligan wanted one. In a recent episode of the podcast, Inside The Gilliverse, he revealed that he was at one point pitching a Grand Theft Auto style Breaking Bad game. The pitch itself doesn’t sound like it was too in-depth, besides a “We should do that” and some call outs to a couple of other video game attempts, but the Grand Theft Auto idea is obviously the most intriguing one. (H/t Comicbook.com)
“I’m not much of a video game player, but how can you not know Grand Theft Auto. I remember saying to the guys that are off running Apple now, who said yes originally to Breaking Bad, ‘Who owns Grand Theft Auto? Can’t you have a module, can there be a Breaking Bad [game]? Still makes sense to me! That never came to fruition. There have been quite a few attempts at video games, some of them kind of sort of made it to market. We tried to do a VR experience with the Sony PlayStation VR headset. We did a mobile game that lasted for a little while.”
Gilligan would go on to say that three or four stories were written for Breaking Bad video game adaptations, but obviously, only the mobile game ever came to fruition. Some Google searching reveals that Gilligan has talked about the PlayStation VR Breaking Bad game before, but it doesn’t appear that the game was ever actually released anywhere so it must have never made it out of the development stages.
A GTA style game of Breaking Bad would have definitely been interesting, especially if they had put it in the hands of Rockstar Games themselves, but considering the history of licensed tie in games not being particularly good it’s possible we dodged a bullet. It would have been cool to see someone try one though.