Taking license
Games based on movie licenses have a reputation for quality that is about equal to a screwdriver purchased at “Everything’s a Dollar!” The simple reality is that these games are created with tight deadlines and tight budgets. Creatively they are constrained by some marketing goon who will insist certain parallels be made to the movie but that they’ll also have to change the plot of the game to potentially not give away the movie so that people will still go see it. When you’re tripled shackled by time, money, and creative direction the odds of pulling a win out of the hat is pretty slim no matter how talented the team is. Oops, talent? Well, the harsh reality is that the really talented and experienced people can avoid these projects as well. I’m often amused to see people new to the game industry list the latest Superman game on their resume or that they worked on some iteration of the Shrek franchise for the Nintendo DS. When you need experience and a way to make the rent you can’t be too picky about your projects.
These games are not bad because the developers don’t care, they’re bad because they have so very little going for them in the first place. Yet these games sell because of name recognition, because the subject matter is in the public consciousness, because people understand what “Iron Man: The Game” is when they have no idea what “Boom Blox” is about. The movie acts as advertising for the game while the game acts as marketing for the movie. To use an overused buzzword, the whole release of movie, game, and merchandise creates synergy. The result is that even a game that is solidly mediocre can sell a lot of copies if the movie was popular enough.
No matter how we as gamers might feel about this though, it’s good for the market. Games are expensive to make, and new intellectual properties are always risky to produce. There is a good reason why Nintendo pushes Mario as a franchise. The funding for new ideas has to come from somewhere, but if a publisher hasn’t had a string of successes they are less likely to take a risk on a new project. Thus these typically low quality movie tie-ins can provide the future funding of games we do want to play. Not only that, but they could very well be the training grounds of the next generation of hot new creative talent. I would never go easy on these game in reviews when talking about their quality, but as a gamer who understands business I won’t bemoan their existence either.
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