XALAVIER
NELSON JR
I’m a full-time
game writer and
narrative designer,
with credits inside
and out of gaming.
A
s easy as it is to poke fun at licensed
games like the infamous Aliens: Colonial
Marines, looking at them from a different
perspective raises a fascinating question.
The process of making a licensed game
involves a maze of stakeholders, scheduling concerns,
and legal maneuvering.
Why do good creative
opportunities and good
developers release projects
that are less than the sum
of their parts?Tom Forsyth is an industry
veteran who spent years at
Valve and Oculus, among other companies. Once upon a
time, though, he was a programmer on Blade 2. “For
arcane licensing reasons,” Forsyth recalls, “we only had
permission to use Wesley Snipes’ likeness in one place—
the box cover—but Mr Snipes could not appear anywhere
in-game. Of course, Blade had to be in the game, and he
had to look as close to the Blade in the movie as possible,
but without looking too much like Mr Snipes, who played
him in the movie. No, this didn’t make any sense to
anybody else either. So the artists were driven mad
sending both concept and in-game
art to the publisher, and every even
week it would be ‘this looks too much
like Snipes’ and every odd week was
‘this doesn’t look like Blade’.”
Concerns like this one just chewed
further into a razor-thin schedule, on
top of the regular complexities of
development. Blade 2 currently holds
a 49 on Metacritic.
“It’s a strange experience working
on a project, knowing that it is not
going to turn out well, knowing on
some level that it’s not even really
intended to,” says Steve Rhoades, a
level designer for 2006 action game
The Sopranos: Road to Respect. The
studio was divided between two
masters: THQ, their publisher, and
HBO, the owner of the license. “I
remember meetings at a table with at least four or five
folks from HBO present,” Rhoades says. “A lot of
teleconferences. 7 Studios’ process was pretty document
heavy by modern standards, and I wrote every leveldesign doc for that game. My life for a few months was
revising each document based on HBO feedback, then
sending the doc to THQ, revising for their feedback,
rinsing, and repeating. I’m honestly not sure how many
folks at either HBO or THQ had veto power, but both of
their word was law from our perspective. Most of HBO’s
feedback was to remove the
stuff THQ had just asked
me to add, and the reverse
was equally true.” Rhoades
left the studio before the
game finished production,
but his experience of
working to contradictory
mandates isn’t rare.DO WE SAVE THE CHEERLEADER?
Steve Bowler was one of the lead developers on Gemini:
Heroes Reborn, a game created to tie into the upcoming
TV show’s release. “We were told on one of the
conference calls that our biggest problem on the game
art-wise was that ‘it didn’t look anything like the show’,”
Bowler said. “When we asked if we could see footage of
the show, we were told ‘no’. We couldn’t even fly out
there in a locked office with our phones confiscated. They
just said there was no way we were going to be able to see
footage beyond the couple of trailers/commercials that
were released.” The shortage of information impacted
character abilities as well. Some abilities would be
rejected for being too similar to abilities used in the show,
but the studio couldn’t offer a list for the developers to
avoid. “I had to come up with a game where we called
them back later with our laundry list of our A, B, and C
tier abilities we wanted to use, and we’d go through them
one by one and they’d tell us if we could use them or not,”
said Bowler. His team ultimately had 11 months to
produce the entirety of the game, as well as the
framework of a tie-in mobile project.
The stories go on and on, even for well-received
projects like Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle. The license
for that franchise is now trapped in a legal limbo that
keeps all of the creators involved from doing anything
further with their creations.
When you see a bad licensed game, it could be that its
development was an utter disaster. However it’s even
more likely that everyone involved wanted to release
something special, but didn’t have the time, corporate
structure, or resources to enable its creation.THE ARTISTS WERE DRIVEN MAD
SENDING BOTH CONCEPT AND
IN-GAME ART TO THE PUBLISHERLICENSING
LIMITATIONS
The limitations of the licensed game process. By Xalavier Nelson Jr
Inside Dev
MAKING GAMES IS HARD