My long-suffering son Noah has had his interests shaped by my own over the full 18 years of his life (as is the duty of all fathers, in my opinion), including toys, video games, cartoons, and movies.

Pacific Rim is one of my favourite films, and I made sure Noah watched it as soon as I had the DVD. It may not have been entirely suitable for him back in 2014 (he was six), but he appreciated the spectacle of massive mechs beating the seven shades out of equally huge Kaiju, and has shared my unhealthy fixation with robots ever since.

It's surprising, then, that he only recently realised that Pacific Rim had its own video game adaptation, courtesy of Japanese developer Yuke's. I recently lent my Xbox 360 console to Noah (who has just started working on one of our sister sites, Steam Hype), and he quickly homed in on Pacific Rim, which was released on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network in October 2013.

I won't argue that it's the greatest movie tie-in of all time, but seeing my son's enthusiastic reaction made me recall a thematically similar movie from my youth called Robot Jox – and it also made me angry that it never got its own video game.

If you've never had the pleasure, Robot Jox is a 1990 action movie directed by Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Fortress, Space Truckers) and written by sci-fi author Joe Haldeman (The Hemingway Hoax), based on a story by Gordon. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where open war has been outlawed, what remains of humanity now settles international conflict via one-on-one robot battles.

Inspired by the success of robot toys like Transformers, Gordon told Horrorfan magazine in 1989 that "while there have been animated cartoons based on these giant robots, no one has ever attempted a live-action feature about them. It struck me that it was a natural fantasy for the big screen–and a terrific opportunity to take advantage of the special effects that are available today."

Speaking later on in 2015 to the Bristol Bad Film Club, Gordon went into a little more detail. "I am a big fan of the Transformer toys as well as Macross and other anime featuring giant robots. I kept waiting for a live-action Japanese movie to be made featuring this amazing concept, but it never happened. So I decided to make one myself."

The 'special effects' alluded to by Gordon didn't include CGI, as back in 1990 this technology was still in its infancy; Robot Jox's mechs were instead given movement via stop-frame animation via the talents of movie-making legend David W. Allen, whose credits include The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Young Sherlock Holmes, Willow, *batteries not included and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. This gives the movie a totally different vibe from the slick computer-generated flicks of the 2000s and beyond.

The director clashed with the screenwriter Haldeman, who wanted to create a 'hard' sci-fi movie aimed at an adult audience. "I envisioned the audience to be 10 year-old boys and Joe was writing for an adult audience. My hope has always been that both ages can enjoy the film," he said many years after its release. The bankruptcy of the production company Empire International Pictures resulted in the movie missing its 1989 release date, and by the time it made it to cinemas at the close of 1990 (via a new deal with distributor Triumph Films) it had lost much of its commercial momentum and eventually returned just $1,272,977 against a production cost of between $6.5 and 10 million.

I didn't see Robot Jox in the cinema as a child; I'm not sure it even got one in the United Kingdom. Like many other kids at the time, I caught up with the film on VHS. My dad owned a small chain of video rental stores, and I therefore had easy access to pretty much any film whose cover took my fancy – and it goes without saying that Robot Jox, with its hulking mech emerging from flames, instantly caught my attention.

Starring Gary Graham, Anne-Marie Johnson, Paul Koslo, Robert Sampson and Danny Kamekona, Robot Jox is one of those movies where technical shortcomings are hidden in plain sight; the walls of the sets wobble when people run past them, and in one fight sequence, in which hero Achilles (the late Graham) grapples with rival and love interest Athena (Johnson), Johnson's stunt double is quite clearly male.

However, the mechs (co-designed by Ron Cobb of Star Wars, Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future and The Abyss fame) look utterly fantastic, and Allen's stop-frame animation is simply wonderful, even in 2026. The robots have a real sense of weight and size.

It almost goes without saying that the battle sequences are the main reason to watch Robot Jox, and they do not disappoint. Nor does the film's unexpectedly upbeat ending, which (according to a now-dead citation on Wikipedia, so this might not be true) inspired Hideo Kojima when he was making Death Stranding.

On paper, this movie is the perfect subject matter for a video game – I'm just not sure a game made using 1990s gaming hardware would have done the movie justice... although, having said that, titles like Cybernator / Assault Suits Valken do a brilliant job of communicating the considerable heft of bipedal battle bots, so who knows? I'm pretty sure that its box office failure meant that there were no discussions about commissioning any kind of tie-in at the time (it got a novelisation by Robert Thurston, though!), but looking at Yuke's Pacific Rim game from 2013, I can instantly imagine what kind of experience developers could create using modern 3D technology.

Sadly, while Robot Jox has become a cult classic in recent times and has benefited from more than one Blu-ray remaster, I'm not sure it has the kind of recognition it needs to be worthy of a modern-day interactive adaptation – so, for the time being, I'll have to make do with what I can picture in my head, which is pretty freakin' awesome, if I do say so myself.