It's a sunny and brisk winter morning in Seattle on January 14, 2013 as Jake Kazdal arrives at his independent game studio, 17-bit. I find a few of his employees huddled around a small TV as they start their workday with an impromptu session of Steel Battalion for the original Xbox. Another person sits at his desk designing an invite for their game's launch party at the end of the month.
To most bystanders, the lack of activity in the office might signal an uneventful day for these developers -- a work environment known for its mix of deadlines and play time, as the team slowly churns their concept into a video game. But today's an exciting day for everyone in the company: After a grueling three and a half years of development, their game, Skulls of the Shogun, is almost ready for download on Xbox Live Arcade -- one of three Microsoft-exclusive digital storefronts where people can purchase it at launch.
The fighting games I tend to gravitate towards are masters of illusion; Svengalis that pull off the most subtle sleight of hand imaginable. They're games that can convince me that I've become proficient in their most nuanced systems, even though I have neither the time nor the patience to appreciate the mechanics anywhere past a superficial level. Games like Soul Calibur, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and most recently, the ninth installment in the Mortal Kombat franchise. I can play these and immediately have fun, despite the fact that I'm generally smashing on buttons and watching as cool things happen on screen. I'm certainly not a tournament-level player in any of these games, but they damn sure make me feel like one.
It's been two years since NetherRealms rekindled the MK franchise, and now they're looking to bring that same magic to the superhero world with Injustice: Gods Among Us, which uses a similar engine as MK9, but delves into the world of DC Comics' finest heroes and villains. The combat's still brutal, and the characters all have Ed Boon's iconic heft to them. What I'm really glad to see is that the developer stuck with MK9's approach to a sprawling campaign that hops between heroes and villains alike. Playing through that lengthy story mode was one of my favorite fighting experiences for the past few years, even when the difficulty level rose to borderline-unethical levels. Despite the fact that the story was filled with over-the-top creatures, there was a earnestness present that made me actually care about what was happening in-between the bouts. For someone who finds most storytelling in games to be a bit lackluster, I appreciate that NetherRealms took the time to craft something engaging where most developers might just slap something together and call it a day.
It is something we see far more often than many of us would like: A game hits it big and the publisher responsible for it proceeds to annualize it or, at the very least, provide each subsequent release with little breathing room before yet another follow-up is released. The short-term rewards for doing so promote a temptation to exploit series in a way that can be harmful to the quality of the games in question and the series as a whole. Not only that, the interest in backing games with this sort of potential can make it more difficult for certain games to be released -- just look at the way Activision dumped games like Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters because they didn't "have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises."
Ignoring sports games, the franchises that likely come to mind first when thinking of this sort of thing include Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. The last time we went a year without a Call of Duty game was 2004, and the last year we didn't see a new Assassin's Creed game on consoles was 2008. (It's no coincidence that, in both cases, that year was the gap in between the first and second entries of the series.) Although it probably doesn't jump to the top of your list, Prince of Persia is another series to fall victim to this sort of treatment. Though not as extreme an example as CoD or AC, the Sands of Time reboot for Prince of Persia began a six-and-a-half-year stretch that saw five games released, not counting those released for handhelds or the remake of the original. No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of games for one series to see in a relatively short span of time.
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