Holiday Jeer 2004: Wake Us When It's Over

Electronic Gaming Business, Dec 17, 2003

Some say the Boss is hyper-critical of the gaming industry because he spends much of his time chained in the bowels of PBI Media's dungeon for wayward editors. Some say he is just bitter and vindictive about the industry. "Nah," he counters, "I have almost forgotten that tragic incident involving a force feedback joystick in '97. The scars are gone, and thanks to Viagra I am back to my old horny self again." No, the Boss is especially surly this year because of sheer boredom. With publishers practicing rampant me-tooism as Wall Street judges their every move, 2003 turned out to be a truly tepid year for gaming. To top it off, the "hottest tech and media sector" is barely keeping ahead of GDP growth rates, according to November sales figures.

Sales figures for this season have been uneven, and it is anyone's guess at this point whether this year's heightened pitch and frequency of TV advertising actually moved more product. Even if the industry does enjoy increased sales this year, it won't be from blockbuster games expanding the market. Polish beat imagination this year.

Aside from Call of Duty on the PC there were to few gotta-play thrills this year. If consumers opted for three of their favorite DVDs this Christmas rather than one overpriced game, we shouldn't be surprised. Publishers should be looking at the unexciting safeness of their own designs.

One of the smartest things the Boss read recently about games industry comes from Scott Miller, one of the top executives at 3D Realms, home of Duke Nukem and Max Payne. This godfather of two of gaming's most impressive brands recently opined in his blog about some of the fundamentals of creating or extending a game franchise, and it is curious how few of this season's titles obey even Miller's more obvious dicta.

To be sure, there was a lot of polish in this year's games, all showing the industry's evolution into an entertainment medium on par with TV and film. The lush graphics and user-friendly mechanics of Prince of Persia made the game inviting to a broad audience. EA's Return of the King integrates the film experience into its game as well as we have ever seen, actually using the game to enhance our understanding of the Peter Jackson LOTR trilogy. Games like Jak II and Beyond Good and Evil have a much firmer sense of pace, the storyteller's sense that it needs to keep an audience occupied and carry it along from emotional moment to moment.

And yet for all of the new professionalism in AAA titles, none is really impressive. No title in this year's mix does what Vice City did last year by demonstrating how the industry was reaching forward and paying the audience back for all of its money and attention with genuinely unique media experiences. For all of the talk of this being the year that software would drive the industry, the games themselves are fairly tepid, workmanlike, and not memorable.

A Dja Vu Kind of Year

To say nothing of the me-too game play this year. A great deal was made about how the franchisees like Miller's own Max Payne or Ratchet and Clank were laboring to add more features, more polygons, more innovative gameplay. But when the Boss sits down to play the games of Christmas 2004, he gets a distinct sense of dja vu, that he is playing the same things he played last year. While Miller says that franchises need uniqueness to stand out, the Boss failed to see how Max 2 was substantially different from the first, or Jak II, or Return of the King, or Project Gotham Racing, or Tony Hawk Underground. Perhaps game designers and publishers are in denial about how risk averse they have become. Maybe they are seeing their sequels through Coke bottle glasses, in which small variations or changes from one game to the next appear momentous and earth shattering.

We find it hard to believe that the designers of True Crime really felt they were making much more than a mediocre clone of Vice City. It plays like a mini-quest of RockStar's original but without colorful characterization and imaginative story twists to reach out to a larger audience. In fact, the staggering lack of daring and innovation in titles this year comes off to the outside world as an industry preaching to the converted, focusing solely on its core audience rather than trying to expand the market.

Miller wisely claims that a great franchise must have an attribute, a style of play that gamers identify with it. Max Payne, for instance, has bullet time and Vice City has free roam driving, so that any games that copy these attributes always get compared to and thus reinforce the power of the original franchise. This year, the only standout attribute in any game is the ability to rewind time in Prince of Persia, a very cool trick that actually helps players get through the game. Viewtiful Joe has a visual style that is truly distinct, but the gameplay is so hard that too few gamers will enjoy it for long.

But the most disheartening part of this season is that some of the most engaging games, like Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil, and Viewtiful Joe are not finding the audiences they deserve while less inspired games like Medal of Honor: Rising Sun and True Crime sell well (although not brilliantly). The danger is that game companies will misread these results as yet more proof that the market eschews or ignores genuine innovation. Instead, the industry should be asking itself why it failed this year to fulfill last year's promise of becoming a major entertainment medium.