John Wick Is Switching Genres In Upcoming Game Prequel

Published Sep 27, 2026, 2:00 AM EDT

Nicholas Becher is a gaming journalist with an MFA in Creative Writing from FAU. With extensive experience playing video games, he covers all forms of gaming content at Screen Rant, from breaking news to the latest fan theories. Most-played games range from Clair Obscur to Civ to Elden Ring to Halo 2 and beyond. 

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John Wick has spent four movies building one of modern action cinema’s most distinctive worlds, following Keanu Reeves' legendary assassin as he is dragged back into the violent underworld he once escaped. Before the first film begins, John had already abandoned that life to be with his wife, Helen, whose death leaves him grieving and ultimately sets the events of the franchise in motion. What follows gradually reveals more about the High Table, the Continental, and the complicated rules governing its sprawling network of killers.

Yet for everything the franchise has revealed, much of John Wick's own history remains surprisingly unexplored. His reputation clearly stretches back decades, with former allies and enemies constantly referencing the impossible jobs, bloody conflicts, and relationships that made him the infamous Baba Yaga. The path that took him from a feared assassin to a man willing to leave everything behind for Helen has largely been left to the imagination.

Now, however, the franchise is preparing to explore a chapter of John Wick's story audiences have never seen firsthand in what promises to be a definitive experience and bold shift in direction for the franchise.

John Wick Prequel Is A Necessary Return To Form

John Wick has always seemed perfectly suited to an action game, which is why Saber Interactive's upcoming untitled game feels like a necessary return to form after the divisive John Wick Hex. The 2019 game took an unexpectedly cerebral approach to the franchise, translating Wick's fighting style into a timeline-based tactical strategy experience. It was an inventive interpretation of the character, earning a 74 Metascore, but it also meant players rarely experienced Wick's action in the immediate and visceral way fans would expect from the movies.

Saber's untitled prequel appears designed to finally deliver exactly that experience. Developed alongside Lionsgate and franchise director Chad Stahelski, the game will feature a hard-hitting gun-fu combat system, cinematic camerawork, driving sequences, and environments specifically designed to make players feel as though they are controlling Wick inside one of his movies.

That makes the change from Hex significant and well overdue. Instead of asking players to think like John Wick from a distance, Saber wants them to fight like John Wick directly, embracing the fast-paced brutal choreography and gunplay that turned the franchise into an action phenomenon. Hex found an interesting way to reinterpret the formula, but this feels much closer to the John Wick game audiences have probably imagined from the beginning.

Saber's John Wick Game Takes Place Before The Impossible Task

The most intriguing part of Saber Interactive's Untitled John Wick Game may ultimately be its place in the timeline. Saber has confirmed that its original story takes place years before the Impossible Task, meaning players will meet John while he is still an active assassin rather than the retired man introduced at the beginning of the movies.

That period remains one of the biggest gaps in John Wick canon. The original movie establishes that John wanted to abandon his profession so he could build a life with Helen, only for Viggo Tarasov to demand an apparently impossible assignment before allowing him to walk away. John somehow completed it, cementing the terrifying reputation that follows him throughout the series, but the films have never fully shown the years that transformed him into the Baba Yaga in the first place.

Going even further back gives Saber considerably more room to fill in those blanks. The studio says the game will expand the franchise's lore with both familiar characters and entirely new ones, creating an opportunity to explore John's earlier relationships, previous missions, connections to the Continental and High Table, and the circumstances that eventually left him desperate to escape the assassin world.

Crucially, this does not necessarily mean the game will depict the Impossible Task itself. Setting the story years beforehand instead makes it a chance to establish the John Wick who would eventually take it on. That could provide missing context for why retirement and his future with Helen ultimately became important enough for John to attempt something everyone around him considered impossible.

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