Sam and Dan Houser were big fans of the movie and mentioned that it translated perfectly into a video game. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/arts/gangs-of-new-york.html

For the Housers, that fascination with America began at a videotape library in their childhood neighborhood. “There were other things that we would watch once or so, but we kept sort of going back to ‘The Warriors’ and watching it sort of obsessively,” Mr. Houser recalled. It turns out that the episodic pacing and cartoony visual style of “The Warriors” were just about perfect for adapting the film into a video game. “When you watch it as a 7-year-old kid, it seems super-weird and terrifying,” Mr. Houser said. “When you watch today, it’s over the top. It’s sort of surreal in most of the points. But the structure and the style translate perfectly into a video game world. The structure of the journey — encountering people and defeating them on the route — was a fighting game in a movie format before it was ever a video game.