The neo-western drama series Yellowstone (2018–2024) might be heading somewhere it has never been before. Namely, onto a controller.
This potential leap is part of Paramount Studios’ plotting a bigger move into video games, with the work of the series creator, Taylor Sheridan, sitting squarely in the middle of those plans.
The studio has been quietly figuring out which of its biggest TV and film brands could survive the jump, and Yellowstone appears to be leading the pack. Tulsa King (2022-Present) and Lioness (2023-Present) are in the conversation too, along with the rest of the Sheridan-shaped shows orbiting them.
A calculated approach to prestige play
Shawn Kittelsen, who oversees creative and production over at Paramount Games Studio, the recently launched in-house unit Paramount created to adapt its major franchises, outlined the studio’s plans in a recent Polygon interview.
While Yellowstone and its Sheridan-adjacent shows lead the pack among the company’s TV properties in terms of priority, he made clear that a game adaptation of the comic book miniseries Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin (2020-2022) is the first project formally greenlit, only the opening shot in a much larger slate.
Priority means something different from progress, though. None of the Sheridan shows has crossed into active development, and no specific game has been formally announced.
In an interview with The Game Business, Kittelsen highlighted that, unlike past Paramount gaming efforts, “the biggest difference [this time] is we have a crew of people who are seasoned games professionals” focused on sustained, long-term investments rather than short-term pursuits.
Grand Theft Auto vs. ranch politics
What kind of games Sheridan’s adaptations would ultimately take is anyone’s guess. The shows live in a world of ranch politics and crime drama, an odd brief for an interactive medium. Some of the early ideas reportedly under discussion include choice-driven narrative games as well as sprawling open-world crime titles in the lineage of older Mafia or Grand Theft Auto (1997) entries.
All in all, it looks like Paramount seems to know the easy road here, the one littered with rushed, cheap licensed games that wreck the brands they came from. The studio is reportedly treading slowly on that score, and there doesn’t seem to be an appetite for the quick cash-in route, thankfully for fans.
The strategy reads less like a flood of small titles and more like a slow buildout, with the goal being to put Paramount games on the same shelf as its prestige TV.
Sheridan continues to expand his own workload in the gaming space, meanwhile. He is currently writing a Call of Duty film for Paramount, a live-action adaptation of one of the world’s biggest video game franchises (which debuted in 2003), slated for theaters in the summer of 2028.
Sources: Paramount, Game Business, Variety, Polygon