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  • This is a whistful nostalgia cherry-picking perspective.

    The NES had a metric buttload of games that sucked and were obvious lousy branding tie-ins. Mostly crappy side-scrollers with bad controls and questionable relation to the source material. Back to the Future 2+3, Blues Brothers, the 7up Spot, Yo Noid, and IIRC, California Raisins games are a few I can think of off hand.

    There was a lot of clear repurposing of game architecture constantly on the NES - Even Mario 2 was a clone and repackage of another game.

    • Adam's Family Fester's Quest deserves mention for unconnected to IP

    • I wanted to comment on this earlier but I thought people would think I’m crazy if I started talking about Blues Brothers out of nowhere.

      I think the original point stands regardless. It was just that much easier to create something new back in the day because everything was unexplored. People were happy to play a video game at all, with that game being good at all being kinda secondary. Most of them were pretty hard and you didn’t know if it was fair or not yet. I had a blast playing Blues Brothers (on cousins Amiga I think), mostly because you got to play as guys from Blues Brothers and those guys were so cool, dude. Yeah, it sucks now but that’s fine. It did something new for people then.

      The problem is we wanted this to go on forever and by now it’s very much figured out as a business which was driving it so far. Most interesting things now happen outside of what big publishers do so at a smaller scale and harder to find too. Valve/Steam is keeping half of that industry alive (or keeping it at their mercy) with their content exploration capabilities but you have to swim through a lot of junk just like before, just not overwhelming amounts.

      • I don't disagree with the sentiment overall, and of course branding tie-ins were all about the names and not about the game. There's no reason to build a game from the ground up in terms of gameplay when you're leveraging IP. MegaMan is the perfect example of this. Six(!) NES games, even one IIRC after MegaMan X for the SNES was released, that were all little more than slight upgrades to the same gameplay of the original. The game was the brand, so you do just enough to give it some variation, and you're good.

        The counterfactual for this is arcade games ported to NES, which were often much more tied to their IP. TMNT 2 is a port of an arcade game released a few weeks after the TMNT 1 NES game, and look at which of those have the same look and feel of the show. The Simpsons games - same thing. Arcade titles needed to be instantly recognizable as a way to throw money at IP. NES titles did not because once you bought the game, you've committed to the IP tie in. Disney did a better job with matching NES gameay and IP, but thats because of their own standards.

        Personally, I wouldn't call too much of that innovation or creativity, as it's cosmetic. Some, absolutely, bit not much. Very few companies went in for unlicensed cart manufacturing because of the capital needed. Wisdom Tree, the first company to work out how to get unlicenced carts to work, only made 13 games intended for a niche religious market, and their only SNES title was a reskin of Wolfenstein 3D. Sports games like RBI Baseball saw some of the best success because the requirements of NES licensing meant an approved UI bottleneck, which is where going from sports to NES had such a wide array of options possible.

      • I am here to defend Blues Brothers, which wasn't a crappy tie-in as much as a bad version of a game that made a lot of sense (and was much better) in the computers where it orginated. I played the crap out of the DOS version of Blues Brothers when it came out and absolutely loved it. I was very confused about its reputation in mainstream US-driven retro culture until I tried the Nintendo versions.

        But yeah, I mean, you guys aren't wrong, popular consoles generated tons of shovelware since day one. The entire first party structure of the NES is an attempt to mitigate how bad it got on the Atari 2600, and don't get me started on the libraries of unlocked Western microcomputers.

        I don't know that it disproves the argument in the article, though. It's true that nobody knew what the set structures were, and that was itself part of why you could jam together some absolute garbage and nobody in the process, from creators to first parties to reviewers and end users, could tell it was terrible. It led to heaps of praise put on absolute garbage, often engineered by toxic patterns and malicious marketing, but it also led to a lot of quirky creativity.

        And damn, that beeper rendition of Peter Gunn was stuck in my head for a good chunk of the 1990s.

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