Take a look on the shelves: you’ll find Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Playboy, and even material based on the yuppie’s favorite TV show: “Friends.” And don’t forget those long-standing franchises, either. Obviously this industry is bogged down with creative stagnation and the marketing bug has bitten it: hard.
You can expect comments like this about the movie industry, even the book industry, but the video game industry, the land of Mario and Sonic, the zombies of Resident Evil and the almost-legendary Solid Snake? Surely a market driven by such colorful characters in an interactive virtual environment is a breeding ground for radical advances in creativity.
Unfortunately, the answer is a big fat “no.”
Licensed games are nothing new. Ever since the days of the Atari 2600, when E.T. graced gamers’ homes, the video game industry has tied in popular movies and comic books. The sad fact of reality is that gaming, just like mainstream movies and music and even literature, is a profit-driven field. The developers may view themselves as artists, but they have a hard time paying the rent without distributors, and distributors are in business for one reason and one reason alone: to make money. They will tap into what people are buying, what people want, and what the hype is all about. Ever wonder why there are at least 3,349 Star Wars games? Okay, maybe not that many, but close enough. The answer is simple. Star Wars is popular, and people buy popular stuff. The same logic applies to never ending franchises. Capcom’s Mega Man is a popular franchise. People buy Mega Man titles because those titles have always been quality gaming experiences.
But there was a point in time when more original characters, stories, and settings dominated the field. In fact, a game sporting the title of a movie or the name of a comic book character was an early warning that said game would have a quality located at the high end of mediocrity—if you were lucky. More often than not licensed games were nothing more than interactive advertisements; development was rushed and play-testing all but ignored to ensure a game hit the shelves almost simultaneously with the movie it was based on or to take advantage of a sudden surge of popularity in an entertainment trend.
Am I the only one that remembers the mid- to late-nineties comic-book craze? I’m not sure what brought it on, but all of a sudden reading comic books was cool. No longer was the comic shop a place to find pasty, pimple-faced losers spending their allowance, but a place that everyone at school went to hang out. Jocks read comics. Grown-ups read comics. You could buy packs of comics at Wal-Mart for five dollars.
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