I slump back disappointed in my chair after playing half an hour of the latest Star Trek tie in game. Disappointed, but not surprised.

Anybody who has ever played a video game adaptation of their favourite movie or show will have experienced the same thing. Every time a game based on a show or movie you love is announced, a complex concoction of unadulterated joy at the potential of being able play as your favourite characters and dread at the inevitable low quality of the release floods your mind.

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW. For those of you who didn’t read the review, I’ll summarise my opinion of the game in two words: it’s shit.

Adventure Time, like Star Trek, is a show that can attribute its success to its intriguing setting and interesting characters. It seems to me, ignorant as I am, that half the work has already been done for the video game tie-in developers.

They have the world already built, they only need to translate it. They have the characters, often with ready-made voice actors, already created, they only need to animate them.

Why then do game developers seem mostly incapable of creating decent tie-in games?

The answer? They simply don’t think it is worth the effort.

When developers create a new game, they also have to manufacture a buzz about that game. They need people to be interested. They need people to tweet about it and make memes about it. They want to develop a community. They could make the best game ever made, but if nobody knows about it then it isn’t going to be a success.

The only problem with building a community around your game is that if the game is bad, the entire internet will know about it within half an hour. Bugs will be exploited and mocked for all to see. Bad design will be highlighted. People won’t buy the game.

The developers have to strive to make their new project as good as possible to ensure that gamers stay on their side, and that when people tweet about their game, it’s mostly positive. The more positive the community is about a game, the more it will sell. It’s simple.

When developing a tie-in game, this isn’t a problem. Aliens: Colonial Marines was unfortunately always going to sell well. That’s because a vast community of Aliens fans already exists and therefore doesn’t have to be manufactured. Fans will buy the game just because it has the world ‘Aliens’ on the front.

With sales already guaranteed to an extent, the developers can and do release absolute rubbish, knowing that even if they get panned by critics, they’ll still make their money back because people will still buy the game. Colonial Marines debuted at no. 1 in the UK.

This attitude is unforgivable. I love Adventure Time and Aliens, and the developers of their respective tie-in games took that love and exploited it, delivering shoddy products knowingly.

The question is, what can be done about this?

We can’t boycott tie-in games, because there is always the possibility that they could be brilliant, like the Arkham series. Also, despite experiencing many terrible tie-in games, I still personally find myself excited at the prospect of new ones, like the upcoming South Park: The Stick of Truth.

What needs to happen is that developers and publishers of tie-in games need to gain some respect for the source material, its audience and for themselves. When creating a tie-in game, don’t ship unfinished or lazy products. Take some time out to work with the creators of the source material in order to realise an authentic experience.

Discuss what the game should be and what story it should tell, and if it doesn’t seem viable, don’t make the game! Although you’d lose a pay-check in the short-term, you’d gain a vast amount of goodwill.

Don’t simply retell the story told in the film/show. You can probably assume that most of the people who will play the game will already be acquainted with the source material, so there’s no need to just recap stories that have already been told but inter-cut them with combat sequences.

Look at the fantastic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Bioware took a universe that most people were familiar with and used it to tell an original and engrossing story with new characters and locations. It was phenomenal for both fans of the movies and newcomers alike, and is infinitely better than any of the Star Wars games that were tied directly to films.

Despite making money, tie-in games are usually failures. They take love and ring it out for cash. Some of the worst video games of the previous console generation were movie tie-ins, aside from the infectious Lego games.

With the aforementioned South Park game, and also the intriguing Mad Max and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor on the horizon, let’s leave terrible tie-ins in the past and move on. Fresh consoles, fresh start. Never again should we see an alien waddle like Mr. Burns.

 

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