I had been thinking about this from a different approach related to how much I've wasted my blog to date, along with some rabbit holes I've headed down. Been thinking about ways to approach a similar concept where I target a franchise, or a platform, or a game-type, or a company, and realized, picking one is silly. I should just pick one randomly until it has fallen beaten and bloodied.
One that did kind of pique my interest, especially from looking at the old magazines, were licenses. Stuff like Batman. There's all kinds of platforms, game-types and companies over the years. There's also the LORE factor, where in recent years people were throwing tantrums online about a Batman who's vehicle fires guns. And yet in the games for the 1989 Batman film, not only does the Batmobile have machine guns, but the gameplay of most of the Batman games themselves involves Batman platforming around stages shooting people with a gun.
It's really when the licenses of Batman shift away from generic Batman or film Batman to mostly being based on
The Animated Series (which didn't let Batman use guns or kill anyone and was even leery about letting him punch people) that you start to get to use his gadgets and the games try to do a lot more than beat-em-up tropes. (Except SEGA, who infamously made the near impossible shooter for the Genesis.) Though most of these never really figure out the gadgets until the
Arkham games did. There's also some interesting BTS stories behind some of the games.
Basically I'm strongly suggesting I may start with Batman games. Although the drawn to disasters part of me says "naw bro, try Superman first."
Similar things that have piqued my interest are like how (and I didn't intend this example to also be about comic heroes) Neversoft is best known for
Tony Hawk, but yet they equally produced
Apocalypse (the engine of which led to Tony Hawk),
Spider-Man (arguably the first good 3D comic based game) and lastly, the epic-Western,
GUN before they were subsumed completely into the Activision borg.
I also have some amusement at looking at something like
Red Dead Revolver which Angel Studios worked on for seemingly years, originally as a modern-day update of
Gun.Smoke, bounced around the schedule as Angel was making games for almost everyone at the time, was all but left for dead twice by Capcom, before Rockstar finally said "yeah, go ahead and finish that" before they subsumed them as Rockstar San Diego a few months after Capcom finally cancelled it for good...and now it's one of their largest franchises. (While
Midnight Club and
Smuggler's Run are...)
It's also fun to look at a developer like that before they got subsumed. DICE, for being known so much as the
Battlefield guys, have a similar weird list of titles they were putting out for lots of people, especially early on for Xbox. Including picking up the
Midtown Madness series to do 3 on Xbox from original developers Angel Studios who did the first two games before releasing the "third" game as the first
Midnight Club (it even has the cut city from MM2) all while working on
Red Dead since 2000, just for Neversoft to drop
GUN out of nowhere first, with "the real"
Red Dead taking another half decade to show up. (Just before a Batman game that finally put all the pieces together showed up out of nowhere.)
See I tied it all together. Even though this post continues to make absolutely zero sense if read through. And even less sense in terms of how it's responding to the topic.
