Minority Report: Everybody Runs is a 2002 Beat 'em Up game by Treyarch (later known for their work on Call of Duty: Black Ops), based on the Steven Spielberg Minority Report. It was released on the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox.
The protagonist has the same name as that of the film, John Anderton. However, Treyarch couldn't get the rights to Tom Cruise's likeness, and so he looks nothing like his namesake from the film, being older and white-haired. That's only the first of the substantial differences between the way the character acted in the film, and how he ends up acting in this game.
The game tells a similar story to the movie, about an officer of the future crimes division (Pre-Crime) being predicted to murder a seemingly innocent man, forcing him to go on the run while trying to discover why he was predicted to do such a crime against a person he doesn't know, leading to him discovering a larger conspiracy at play involving the manipulation of the system used to predict crimes.
This videogame provides examples of:
- Combos: Three-button combos are an important part of the combat system. You start off with a few, and can buy more of them on the black market.
- Destination Defenestration: The game allowed the player to throw enemies through plate glass windows. It was such a fun highlight of an otherwise
lousy game that Nintendo Power named it best Guilty Pleasure of 2002. - Friendly Fireproof: Averted. Precrime officers will often end up shooting fellow officers in the back as they are trying to shoot Anderton.
- Grapple Move: You can do that to the police officers you fight.
- Menu Time Lockout: Played straight. Moreover, pause screen lets you access the black market and purchase helpful things from armor and weapons to combos. This can be done at any time, including in the middle of a fight.
- Mook Chivalry: Averted, as all kinds of enemies will attempt to surround Anderton from all sides and attack altogether.
- Selective Condemnation: Your character is trying to prove himself innocent of the "future-murder" of someone that the precogs foresaw him killing. Most of the gameplay is your guy trying to escape the police. While you often can simply run past them all (finishing whole levels in less than a minute if you do), the game design encourages you to violently beat the shit out of them, smashing them through tables/chairs, throwing them off of skyscrapers, throwing them into huge vats of luminous green shit in a robot factory, etc. If you fight everyone in your way like the game expects you to, you'll have hundreds of murders of police over the course of the game. Even so, you are welcomed back onto the force after it turns out that you didn't kill that one guy: trying to avoid most combat (and sometimes, that is impossible, as you are locked into areas that cannot be escaped until you defeat everyone) makes no difference to the ending.
- Also, even before you were wanted, you can be the most horrifically brutal cop the world has ever seen. In the first mission, for instance, you are trying to arrest a guy who runs a catering company. It's possible to achieve this through beating dozens of his employees to death with your bare hands, continue to sadistically beat them and break all the furniture in the board room with their heads after they have gone limp and stopped resisting, force their faces onto lit stoves, and throw them out of skyscraper windows to their deaths. You don't even arrest them. You may or may not do all of that, but your superiors don't care, and compliment you for fine police work either way.
- Wrongful Accusation Insurance: One of the most common jokes made about the game is that Anderton brutally kills a few hundred cops over the course of the game while trying to prove himself innocent of a single murder. It's obviously Gameplay and Story Segregation as the story treats it like he's taking out all his opponents non-lethally (even if that involves throwing them through plate glass windows or tossing them off hundred-story buildings), but he's still resisting arrest and beating up hundreds of cops.
- You Get Knocked Down, You Get Back Up Again: Averted when it comes to the enemies, as they remain vulnerable while they are on the ground (and can be grabbed and thrown out of the windows), or while getting back up. If you don't want to defenestrate your opponents and thus almost certainly commit murders in the process of clearing oneself of murder, then the easiest way to win battles is to run towards a group of enemies, activate slide to knock all of them down, and then slide into them again and again as they are trying to get back up, stunning them in a loop until they are finally out cold.
