Lets be honest – licensed games have been pretty horrible for the vast majority of the video game industry. Games using high profile characters like Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Rocky and Bullwinkle (awesome old cartoon – look it up), Harry Potter, and the LOST show, are just some examples of games that traditionally take a license that has generated millions of dollars and yet they fail to impress gamers.
In my opinion, the main cause of this is the failure of development studios to embrace the characters and environments of the license. Instead, studios often try to simply drape the license onto a pre-existing genres or games, rather than put in the effort to make an original game.
There are a couple of examples of great licensed games that have gone beyond the original source and led to critically acclaimed games – or at least awesome games, even if they weren’t that well known.
The most obvious examples are Batman: Arkham Asylum, and its sequel Batman: Arkham City (which was released the day before this paper). Both of these games take the entire comic history of the character and the vulnerabilities of a real human. This is also the reason why most superhero games like Green Lantern and Superman fail, because the gamer cannot escape into the game world because it will never be real enough. Superman is an invincible alien from another planet with amazing super powers, but you get beaten up in the game by a group of thugs on the ground. Green Lantern is a regular guy, but he has a power ring allowing him to create ‘constructs’ of ANYTHING he can possibly imagine. In the game, however, all you can do is shoot energy blasts, create a giant hammer, and use a sword.
I won’t even spend much time on Rocky and Bullwinkle because most people won’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Lets just say they took a funny cartoon about a moose, a flying squirrel, and a mountie, and turned it into a boring party game while slapping some clips of the cartoon into the loading screens.
Harry Potter is both an example of good and bad licensed games, as they have gone through an arc from acceptable, to good, to horrible. The first couple games were limited more by technology than by design, but they used the books as inspiration more than the movies (something I am always in favour of). As each movie and its accompanying game came out, the graphics, environment, and general storyline improved. Personally I think Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the best of the games (and also the last one I played), mainly because the developers created one giant world encompassing the entire school and grounds of Hogwarts. Instead of the game transporting you to the necessary areas for the story, the game was instead a completely open world, allowing you to wander the entire school at your leisure before heading over to the next objective area. The more recent games have basically turned the Harry Potter series into a first person shooter, focusing entirely on blasting faceless enemies while sacrificing the entire storyline.
In all the cases I’ve mentioned the common thing that makes a good licensed game is the ability to believe in the character’s abilities and actually be absorbed into the game world. Until more producers learn from the Arkham Batman games and actually embrace the character license, we are going to see a lot more licensed games that we would rather never existed. Here’s hoping that doesn’t happen, but in the mean time, keep on gaming.
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