172 - Licensed Games

Developer diaries about creating Neverending Nightmares.
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matt
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172 - Licensed Games

Post by matt »

After talking about how I worked on "The Incredibles" game, some youtube commenters interested in hearing more stories about what it's like developing licensed games with tight schedules. In this video, I talk more about what it was like and why a lot of licensed games don't live up to their potential.

-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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RightClickSaveAs
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Re: 172 - Licensed Games

Post by RightClickSaveAs »

It's cool to see a nice community of Youtube comments on your videos, I always just watch them through the forums here so I wasn't aware of the Youtube comments until you mentioned them.

Aside from Telltale and the two big Batman games, I also have a hard time thinking of licensed games that are really good. Now that I started watching Game of Thrones, as the last person in the world to do so, I'm with you and am excited to see what Talltale will do with it.

Yeah, Telltale's Walking Dead had Hershel's farm and Glenn in the first episode, but moved on from that right away. Lilly was supposedly going to be one of the characters from Woodbury, but there ended up being some conflict because Kirkman wanted to explore her character more in the books (the novels, there are so many spinoffs of the Walking Dead at this point that it's getting confusing), so they retconned her character in the game and it's now officially a totally different Lilly.

The Wolf Among Us apparently takes place a long time before the comics, so they had a lot of freedom to work with there too. I tried the first comic and I have to say I like the game characters better. Comics aren't really my thing though.

Oh and this is an older video, but it has the Telltale CEO talking with Bloomberg about their licensing decisions a little bit: Telltale CEO Dan Connors - We Think the Industry Ignores the Story
ranger_lennier
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Re: 172 - Licensed Games

Post by ranger_lennier »

Some older games that I liked are Goldeneye for the N64 and Duck Tales and Chip 'n Dale for the NES.

Some other ideas are Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Planescape Torment (a D&D game).

I bet a lot of people don't even know they're licensed, but The Witcher games are based on a Polish book series.

It does seem like these games tend not to be tied down too closely to a story from another medium, and weren't rushed out the door to meet a date regardless of how much work the games needed.

I like to think that one reason bad licensed games aren't doing as well is that kids and parents are becoming savvier at judging games now that the Internet's made it so easy to get information about them.
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matt
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Re: 172 - Licensed Games

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Those are good examples! Duck Tales was sitting in that very cabinet. I didn't look down far enough. I have Chip N' Dale somewhere too.

I think GoldenEye is the most interesting example because it IS closely tied to the story of the movie, and they managed to make a good game out of it. As you pointed out, it wasn't rushed out the door - the game was released 2 years after the movie! Otherwise, as you said, they just use the IP and have free reign to make a compelling game.

Perhaps kids and parents are savvier, but I part of it is kids are happy playing Spongebob on the web/iPad/iPhone (Heavy Iron also made a bunch of Spongebob games that I didn't work on directly) rather than buying $60 games they'll probably get bored of quickly anyway. Plus, there are some really good games that appeal to kids (like Minecraft and Roblox) that seem to take up their time.

That is one of the main reasons THQ died because they specialized in making licensed games rather than good games. They tried to transition to creating new IPs, but they failed. Now Nordic games not only bought Darksiders, Red Faction, MX vs ATV, and more also bought the rights to the THQ name... I'm not sure why they'd want to use it though... Koch got Volition & Saints Row, Metro, and now Homefront, so it seems like Koch has the best of THQ...
-Matt Gilgenbach
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Re: 172 - Licensed Games

Post by RightClickSaveAs »

ranger_lennier wrote: I bet a lot of people don't even know they're licensed, but The Witcher games are based on a Polish book series.
I forgot about The Witcher. That's a great example of a licensed title, and it's so faithful to the source material as well. The books are great, I don't read much fantasy but I love them (the ones that have been translated to English, anyway. I've heard people say the translations aren't great, but I love them either way).
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matt
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Re: 172 - Licensed Games

Post by matt »

I'm sure they had no time pressure to ship the Witcher game alongside the next book release. :) There is an interesting story about how the founder of People Can Fly (and current developer of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter) almost made a Witcher game over on eurogamer. I guess it's a hot IP in Poland! :)
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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