TJ’s mic is a strangely muffled this week, while the group anxiously await the release of the upcoming title Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Mega Man, a series franchise was born in the month of December, a series we rarely hear about today but one that inspired many great games in the side scrolling genre. Mega Man was foundation brick in the early Nintendo consoles and a bread winner for Capcom, he was a mascot to represent a genre typically dominated by Mario.
The name Mega Man, in the 1980’s was synonymous with the word awesome. It was also synonymous with the word difficult.
A character that had so much potential you can now find him in mobile phone gaming and the virtual console in Europe.
“In the year 200X, master robot designer Dr. Thomas Light, and his assistant, Dr. Wily, worked on a project to create human-like robots with advanced intelligence.” (wikipedia) Each robot was designed to perform a specific task, Cut Man was designed to cut down trees, Guts Man is designed to pickup heavy things, Ice man for arctic exploration, etc. His assistant grew envious of Dr Light so he reprogrammed the robots to do his bidding, which was nothing but evil. Your job is to undo this evil.
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Once upon a time, Activision Blizzards CEO Bobby Kotick kicked a few franchises to the curb: Riddick and Ghostbusters. No doubt, this was a result of the Activision and Blizzard merger requiring some resources to the merged together while others were cut from the lineup. Phil Harrison, the new big suit at Atari/Infogrames has raised these little birds from the ashes with a dream to build them into 100-million dollar franchises.
While Bobby Kotick said the titles, “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises,” Phil Harrision sees it as a personal challenge to prove him wrong.
“What Bobby, perhaps unhelpfully said, was that those games were franchises which wouldn’t make $100m of revenue and generate sequels. If that’s his benchmark, then fine — and we’d love to aspire to the same benchmarks. But you know what? I would love to turn Ghostbusters into a $100m franchise, just to prove him wrong.” (1up)
In many ways, this is the difference in attitudes from a large firm compared to a smaller firm with strong goals and a vision for success. Activision Blizzard is big now, perhaps the biggest publisher in the industry, they can’t be bothered with minuscule 80-million dollar franchises. Others, like Atari, strive to take a title from nothing to something of greatness. Granted, Atari’s failed in a lot of franchises, but with their new ex-Sony executive behind the helm things could turn around and this might be the first step.
Most of the best game franchises in existance today started from nothing but a dream. Big publishers don’t have time to dream, they’re too busy making money off the fanboys of their current franchises.
This week is a strange one, as snakes are flung at horses to turn them into unicorns, and Paul keeps finding videogame soulmates from the reader feedback. This week’s Gaming Flashback is the Amiga classic Shadow of the Beast, while the Gaming History takes a look back at the Apple Pippin.
This week’s news items include:
Finally, the Question of the Week is “What games do you play in bed?” Yes, it’s been a weird week.
