Gaming Pitfalls - Part 1: The Big License dilemma

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 08 May 2007 14:00

Opinion and Analysis

Big licensing tie-ins might be great for the bottom line, but is this no-brainer attitude to game development destroying the art of video-gaming?

Ahhhhh Pitfall, when it arrived on the Atari 2600 Video Game System I was a bright eyed gaming youngster, salivating for what could be considered video gaming’s first ever blockbuster.  An exciting, original non-movie-tie-in game of jungle jumping and adventure, Activision was just starting up, but it knew what it was doing in this emerging mass entertainment world, now I look at their latest “blockbuster” Spiderman 3 on my waiting-to-review pile and ever so slightly, sigh.

So the next Hollywood blockbuster is about to hit cinemas around the country, and by edict of current marketing, we need to have an associated video game.  Designed to saturate our senses with film imagery and merchandising to empty our wallets.  In fact the movie portion of this blitz can become secondary, so long as we buy the soundtrack, plush toy, books and of course video game, the studio is sure to recoup the vast amounts of cash needed to fund the sequel.

You cannot blame the studio bean-counters for squeezing as much as possible from the public, and for fans of a well made film, I imagine that there is never enough to consume.  But let’s look at aspect of this culture, the tie-in video-game. 

With but a few exceptions, it is generally the case that the movie video game is crap.  The pitfalls are many and the game can fall into some or all of them.  The biggest trapdoor is the generic nature of these games, no matter the style of movie, we will end up with a third person action game requiring us to jump over perilous chasms or collect bright tokens whilst belting bad guys.

Granted that said movies are often cut from the same cloth, providing no progression of mankind culture beyond improvements in special effects, as such I should not expect more from the video game.  And it is true that there have been moments where the game has outshone its big screen progenitor – I am sure there has been… errrm, wait a minute, I am sure I can come up with an example.  Damn all I can think of are those Uwe Bolle movies made about video games, Resident Evil etcetera.  I guess they don’t count.

The issue remains however: Whilst “Hollywood” seems to have bottomless pockets to create the most mindless pap for the cinema, the equivalent game studios do not, even the big ones.  When it comes to “resources” the game industry is still poor, crying out for more folks to fill, amongst others, programming, 3D modelling, animation and writing positions.  Games are resource hungry beasts, requiring huge amounts of construction and testing, meaning that even a single project can drain head-count at an alarming rate.