We’re getting a new video game based on Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 2025, and it may be the most authentic, perfectly pitched movie-to-game adaptation I’ve ever seen. Terminator 2: No Fate is a 2D side-scrolling action game that looks like it was conceived in 1991 for the arcade tech of the time, with the intent of expertly adapting the film’s most memorable set pieces.
Developer Bitmap Bureau is going beyond what was in the film (as arcade and console video game adaptations of movies did at the time) by adding in deleted and unfilmed scenes, like the Future War where John Connor battles Skynet’s army. Terminator 2: No Fate will also give players pixelated versions of the T-800 and Sarah Connor in levels that look heavily inspired by games like Konami’s Super Contra, Capcom’s Final Fight, and Namco’s Rolling Thunder. There’s also what appears to be some influence from Data East’s RoboCop and Sly Spy, with levels in which young John Connor and the T-800 try to outrun the T-1000 on motorcycles.
Bitmap Bureau and publisher Reef Entertainment promise original scenarios and multiple endings in their new adaptation of T2. In the reveal trailer for Terminator 2: No Fate, we see Sarah Connor fighting in what appears to be a Nicaragua-set level and, later, fail to escape from the psychiatric hospital after being skewered by the T-1000. In one of the game’s screenshots, Sarah is presented with the choice to either assassinate Miles Dyson in his living room or spare his life.
In a making-of video about the new Terminator game, design director on Terminator 2: No Fate Mike Tucker says that the studio’s surprisingly good looking new project is “the Terminator 2 game [we] should’ve had back in our youth.” Having played Terminator 2: Judgment Day in its light-gun form at the arcade and in clunky 2D side-scrolling form on Sega Genesis, I tend to agree.
Terminator 2: No Fate will be released on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X on Sept. 5.
There’s another intriguing Terminator game coming later this year: Terminator: Survivors, the survival game from Nacon Milan. We could learn more about that game during Nacon Connect 2025, which streams on March 6.