Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has revealed that he once raised the idea of a Grand Theft Auto-style video game adaptation of his hit series.
As reported by Dualshockers, Gilligan said during the latest episode of the Inside the Gilliverse podcast that several ideas for Breaking Bad video games have come and gone over the years, also including a PlayStation VR experience.
“I’m not much of a video game player but how can you not know Grand Theft Auto?” he said. “I remember saying to the two gentleman who said yes originally to Breaking Bad, I said ‘who owns Grand Theft Auto, can’t you have like a module, can there be like a Breaking Bad [adaptation]?’
“It still makes sense to me,” Gilligan continued. “That never came to fruition. There have been quite a few attempts at video games. Some of them kinda 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.”
That game was called Breaking Bad: Criminal Elements, a story-driven base builder where players rise up the ranks of their own drug empire, but it was shut down just a year after it was released in September 2020.
Gilligan went on to explain that he and the other people behind Breaking Bad didn’t want to release a bad game that was only attractive for being associated with the series, joking that they didn’t want to produce something similar to the infamous E.T. Atari game.
A Breaking Bad game adaptation is therefore unlikely to see the light of day. “We just don’t have enough bandwidth usually to make it work,” Gilligan said. “I wouldn’t hold your breath on a video game.”
Breaking Bad ended almost a decade ago in 2013 and IGN said it was almost perfect in our 9/10 review, while the prequel series Better Call Saul will end next week on August 15.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
