'Altered Beast' and 'Streets of Rage' to Be Adapted for Film and TV

Two Sega games that could, if you’re feeling very charitable, be called cult classics, might soon be coming to a movie theater or television near you. A production company has obtained the rights to adapted the titles Altered Beast and Streets of Rage for film and television. Huh.

Sega’s production company, Stories International, is partnering with Fear the Walking Dead’s production company Circle of Confusion, reports Variety. It’s unclear what, exactly, these adaptations are going to be or when (if ever) they’ll actually hit screens.

In case you’ve somehow forgotten the plots of these decades-old games, here’s a quick refresher. Altered Beast follows a centurion from Ancient Greece who has been resurrected by Zeus and given the power to transform into various animals including a werewolf, a werebear, and a weredragon. It originally came out for arcades in 1988.

“Altered Beast” is a relic of the arcade heyday that just doesn’t hold up today,” writes IGN in a 2009 review following a port.

Streets of Rage is a beat ‘em up side-scroller about ex-cops with attitude who need to brawl their way through alleyways to take down an evil crime boss. It came out in 1991.

“These are some of the most well-loved Sega games, and we are thrilled to be working with Stories to adapt them into major film and television franchises,” Circle of Confusion partner Lawrence Mattis said in an extremely presumptive statement.

“I remember when we were scraping the bottom of the barrel with the Battleship movie back when,” a redditor on /r/gaming wrote in response to the news. “But apparently there’s more under the barrel.”