Why is there not a Jack Reacher game? It has been firmly established that the top-heavy, world-weary hero of Lee Child’s bone-crunching bestsellers (26 novels and counting) would be the perfect video game avatar. As an ex-military policeman, Reacher combines razor-sharp investigative savvy and comprehensive weapons training with the sort of down-and-dirty brawling skills required to break up bar fights among demob-happy jarheads in far-flung postings.
Reacher has very little baggage – either emotional or actual, preferring to criss-cross the USA with little more than a travel toothbrush – yet trouble seems to follow him around. He is constantly butting heads with gangs of hoods, lowlifes and/or mercenaries yet triumphs through sheer force of will. Parachute him into any GTA and Reacher would do just fine.
He has already bounced from page to screen, from those two Tom Cruise movies (first, good; second, awful) to the recently launched Prime Video series starring the imposing Alan Ritchson, a rugged JCB digger made flesh. Real Reacher-heads will also be aware of the officially Child-sanctioned album Just the Clothes on my Back by Naked Blue, which explores Reacher’s self-reliant worldview via bluesy rock. This is clearly a guy with cross-media potential. So why no game?
To make a generalisation almost as enormous as our hero’s biceps it probably boils down to economics. The majority of Child’s millions of book fans likely do not identify as gamers. Burning through the pages of their annual Reacher is their closest equivalent to a multi-hour Xbox binge. They get that intense, compelling rush of violence and sweet, sweet justice without worrying about the correct QTE input to spartan-kick some aggro punk in the solar plexus.