The Series: Sequels

Videogame sequels are ubiquitous in our day and age.  Honestly, their ubiquity is almost as old as I am.  In my initial video game collection, gained entirely from my aunt in one large chunk, I had Super Mario Bros. 3, GI Joe 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II and 2 different Batman games. Three of those admittedly are parts of multimedia franchises.  The Batman games weren’t related to each other at all, and both GI Joe and TMNT were sequels made by different companies than the originals, with a much higher level of quality.  Higher quality is the key there; sometimes a sequel can far outshine the original, but today they're seen by some as artless cash ins, attempts to remake the same game over and over.  So today I ask, why do we have so many sequels, and is this really a bad thing?

Super Mario, to me and I’m sure many other people in the 80s and 90s, and maybe even today, was the video game character.  He was the franchise.  And when I started playing video games, he already had three games out, with a fourth out quickly after.  In the case of Mario, Mega Man and Sonic though, it could be said that companies were trying to take the games and make a multibillion dollar crossmedia franchise.  Sonic and Mario both had multiple cartoons, and Mario even had a live action movie it was so popular.  There are other advantages to sequels as well though.  An audience for the first game is already there, and if they’re loyal, eager for more game to play.  It lets programmers take the lessons they learned making the first game, and do a second one better.  It lets level designers be a bit more creative, since they have an audience that might forgive them for a few odd ideas.  It also might give artists a break, Mega Man didn’t really change in appearance for his first five games, though there were plenty of robot masters and backgrounds to draw.

As technology started to advance though, and more and more videogames flooded the market, standards became higher.  Super Mario may have been a trend setter in this regard, Super Mario Bros. 2 was a completely different game than the first one, and 3 really upped the ante with better graphics, new power ups and a map screen that let you see the world and levels to come.  Super Mario Bros. 4, released as Super Mario World in North America leveraged the power of the Super Nintendo, and while it didn’t add anything to three that was revolutionary, the revised look combined with all the little things 16 bits could do made the game seem amazing.

Thus games became more spread out.  There was only one other “true” Mario game on the Super Nintendo, which featured you playing as Yoshi.  Instead, many spin offs were made, including Mario Kart, which was good enough it became a series on its own.  The Nintendo 64 had only one real Mario game, and the spin offs dominated, bringing us such great games as Mario Party and Mario Tennis.  For a while there, franchises really died down.  Final Fantasy got to absurd numbers, and none of them really died, but a lot like Metroid sort of relapsed.  This is in part due to 3D, some games like Mario adapted brilliantly, others like Mega Man were good, but lost a lot of core fans, and others like Sonic just couldn’t seem to get it right.  Also, 3D graphics are a lot more expensive and time consuming then 2D graphics, which meant that games took longer to develop, and needed to make more money in order to be profitable.

3D sure as hell sold games though.  It’s funny, going back to early Nintendo 64 games, the graphics are terrible, to the point where they can be some times hard to play.  The first time I went back to play Ocarina of Time after I’d played Game Cube games, I couldn’t believe how poor the graphics were in comparison to my memory of them.  “Better graphics” became an easy way to compete though, after all, you didn’t need good ideas for them, just talented artists and time to let them draw pretty things.  If Mortal Kombat proved anything, it was that a game's look could sell just fine even if quality game play wasn’t quite there.  So as hardware became capable of running better and better looking games, more and more money was spent to make them.  At the same time, these games started to get shorter, less game meant less art, which meant the time and money could be spent on making the current art assets better.

The problems with this model are many.  For one thing, you’re paying the same amount of money for “less” game.  You can argue that the game is more dense, artistically speaking, but whether or not it's more dense game play wise can often vary wildly.  Second, you hit a point where you can’t make the game any shorter, and the price to develop the game just keeps going up and up.  Since the price of videogames is already very high, you can’t raise that, and have to sell more and more copies in order to make a game profitable.  This heavily limits the risks you can take.  Which is why we have things like Call of Duty coming out every year.  Call of Duty was a popular game, CoD 4 had new and interesting mechanics, a multiplayer mode that was good enough to make it almost infinitely replayable, and word of mouth that made it sell well.  Upping the schedule to making one a year was like printing money.  Unfortunately, this means there’s more crunch on things, developers don’t have the time to think up new ideas, let alone test them to see if they work.  And implementing new things has the risk of scaring off customers, which makes the money not worth it from a business perspective.

Unfortunately, we’re hitting the point where even this is costing too much money.  Tomb Raider (2013) sold more copies than any other Tomb Raider game in history.  But it didn’t make the money back that was spent on development.  The obvious problem here, is why would anyone give a game a budget that was in excess of previous games' total income?  But if you think about it a little more, if you don’t give a game more money, how is it supposed to improve?  It’s sort of a catch 22, where we can either have safe business models (which get less safe every release) or innovative new games that may not sell even as well as the first.

The obvious exception to this problem is indie games, and while whatever points you have about them are probably right, they’re out of the scope of this article.  The ultimate question is, are video game sequels bad?  And the answer is, of course not.  It’s just easy to slap together an artless sequel to something that’s made a lot of money and rely on the fans to continue supporting it.  While I hope every Call of Duty game will result in plummeting sales, the audience that wants more of them is obviously there, just like I’m there every launch day for Zelda and Mario.  Is there really a difference?  Well, while lots of people complain about Zelda and Mario being the same game over and over again since 1985, I’ve never really seen the fans complaining.  Usually, we either are happy with what we get, or complain they’re not enough like older games.  I have seen some CoD fans starting to grate at the release schedule though, so maybe?

After all this negativity and doom and gloom speak, I think I need to write something that will make me happy, so next time on The Series, I’ll take on a game franchise that I think I’ve spent more hours in then any other, and can never remember complaining about.  Next month, Pokemon.