How did they create franchise tie-in games?

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Marscaleb
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How did they create franchise tie-in games?

Post by Marscaleb »

Yesterday I was looking at the original TMNT game on the NES. While there is a lot I could say about it, one thing in particular stands out to me right now. From what I read, the release of this game predates any release of Ninja Turtle media in Japan, yet as far as I can tell, this was developed in Japan.

That raises a lot of questions for me. I'm wondering how (and even why) someone at Konami managed to wrangle the rights to this franchise. I'm wondering what material they were given for development so the developers knew what they were even making. I'm wondering how unusual or common this development process was.

Did studios just buy up rights for various franchises the moment they came up, and hoped they would be successful? What if they bought something that turned to be a flop?
How did they make decisions about how to develop a game based on an IP? who had control over how true they were to the source material?
Were there ever any instances where they had to make big changes to a game to accommodate an IP? Particularly in the 80's, video games based on IP's seemed to have a lot of freedom, and made more "creative liberties" with the source material.

I don't know if anyone here has those answers, but I'd love to hear about those stories...
calima
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Re: How did they create franchise tie-in games?

Post by calima »

You'll want to read those huge "untold history of japanese video games" books. Should answer many of your questions.

Who contacts first and who pays who vary by the situation.
Pokun
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Re: How did they create franchise tie-in games?

Post by Pokun »

Konami liked Turtles for some reason, they made all the games back then and revived it yet again years later for Game Boy Advance (which is also a good game). I suppose they might have been contacted by the franchise owners first though, as there were a revival of the whole Turtles thing around that time, and Konami had a history of making good Turtles games.

On this subject, I remember David Siller from the US department of Sunsoft saying that some Sunsoft directors were buying up all kinds of licenses which is why Sunsoft made so many weird license games like Fester's Quest. He says so here.
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Marscaleb
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Re: How did they create franchise tie-in games?

Post by Marscaleb »

Pokun wrote: Thu Mar 24, 2022 10:35 am Konami liked Turtles for some reason, they made all the games back then and revived it yet again years later for Game Boy Advance (which is also a good game).
"For some reason"

I mean, I don't know what their actual sales figures were, but from what I saw when I was a kid, (that is, judging it according to how many people I knew had what games, and what games were talked about,) the first NES game was possibly more popular than Contra, and I wouldn't be surprised if the arcade game was their best-selling one at that point. The second NES game was probably more popular than Castlevania.
That all said, I don't have any actual sales figures, but don't underestimate how popular ninja-turtle-mania was back then. Having a license to make a TMNT product was a license to print money.

Which is why I'd be curious to know who contacted who, and how the whole thing worked out. It takes longer to make a video game than anything else that came out at the time, save for the movies. How popular was the show when they started work on the game?
Oziphantom
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Re: How did they create franchise tie-in games?

Post by Oziphantom »

Normally companies would have a person looking for licenses to acquire. Ocean basically lived on them, then died on them.
As they also did Top Gun, Aliens, GI Joe, Simpsons, Asterix they would have had a department. Probably at the trade shows people with the licenses would have visited the booths as well, start the ball rolling etc. The Turtles brand probably had enough people pitching to them rather than needing to find people to do it though.

Some times a brand will reach out and invite concepts to be pitched to them, other times you come up with a concept for a brand and pitch it to them.

Each license holder is different, or they worry about very odd things. In that they don't know of understand games but the will understand some other medium. So horrible polygon model don't bat an eye lid, but if "one character from the series in a game that has lots of characters"'s purple is not the dead right shade on the loading screen well that is going to be brought up endlessly even when you point out that the RGB colour space is different and has different steps to the usual analogue systems they deal with.

Or will ask to have the logo of the brand embossed on the small part of the model that appears multiple times which is impossible and a total waste of GPU power and frame rate that nobody will see but "that is as integral part of the brand".

Or their characters can't be violent, when the whole series is nothing but slapstick so one must use a Key because those are safe and non violent.

Or you can have a race and the characters do race but it must be for a trophy and not money because "their characters are not greedy".

Or you can have a character shoot up a whole room with a shotgun, but they can't say "oh my God" because the is morally objectionable and not something "their good character would allow".
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Marscaleb
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Re: How did they create franchise tie-in games?

Post by Marscaleb »

Oziphantom wrote: Thu Mar 31, 2022 11:15 pm Or their characters can't be violent, when the whole series is nothing but slapstick so one must use a Key because those are safe and non violent.
Star Trek games are not allowed to depict a death of any character from the show, even as a "failure" condition.
That's why you have characters suddenly get beamed back to the ship when they get injured.
Elite Force got around this for multiplayer by having "holomatches" where the characters are beamed out of the match and a hologram of their body is left in the field.
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Jedi QuestMaster
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Re: How did they create franchise tie-in games?

Post by Jedi QuestMaster »

Pokun wrote: Thu Mar 24, 2022 10:35 amI remember David Siller from the US department of Sunsoft saying that some Sunsoft directors were buying up all kinds of licenses which is why Sunsoft made so many weird license games like Fester's Quest. He says so here.
Sunsoft was early numerous times in acquiring licenses, but had a problem retaining them:

• Two years after Fester's Quest's release, there is an Addams Family theatrical film.
• A year after Journey to Silius (originally Terminator), Judgment Day comes out
• Mere months before Batman Returns, Sunsoft releases their own pseudo sequel to Batman

They also lost the Superman license for the NES, but got it again for the SNES/Genesis?
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