May 30, 2003
Why do movie based games always suck?
Simple. Money.
This shouldn't be a surprise. I used to write video game ads for a living. One of our clients was a company with a richly deserved reputation for putting out awful games based on licenses purchased from television and movies. During a meeting about a particularly awful licensed game, I remember one of the marketing people saying, "That show's so hot right now, we could put out any piece of crap and people would buy it." The client's company then put out several pieces of crap based on the license, and as predicted, people bought them. It's worked out for Enter the Matrix, too: Gamers bought a record 1 million copies in its first week on the shelves.
Not sure if everyone gets it, but for me at the bottom of this article was ad ad to buy Lord of the Rings for Xbox, on slate, which is owned by M$, below an article that says that it is actually the only good movie licensed game. That is good internet advertising.
Comments
There are some rare exceptions. The Lord Of the Rings The Two Towers game was cool, Most Anime based games are good, and the Godzilla game on Gamecube rules. But most games are as crappy as Total Recall for NES
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com | June 1, 2003 10:48 AM
The only problem in your story is that Enter The Matrix is a great game. But I understand what you mean. Plenty of games in the early 90ies based upon Comics/tv-series/movies where pretty crap.
It was probably cause you couldn't "bring" the movie to the game. The feeling, cinematography and music.
Maybe if there was a full length movie base upon pixels and with 8-bit sound it would be easy to do it.
Posted by: Mattias | June 2, 2003 06:59 AM
I didn't like it, to much repetative motion and background scenery, typical elements of a bad license game, results of a hurried development. Much like some of the Star Wars games that were carried along on there license, i.e. Shadows of the Empire, and even Rogue Squadron 2 for some part, great graphics but hella hard and a bit repetatvie. But I will grant you that may not have given the Matrix game enough time to really grow on me.
Posted by: Anthony Ianniciello | June 2, 2003 09:31 AM