Game IP

I want to talk a bit about IP in games, and also relay a funny story from when I went around California last year trying to work out exactly what to do with Determinance.

At that stage (September – November ’05), we finally had a game which was starting to look like what I had originally envisaged: a flying freeform multiplayer sword-fighting game. It was pretty rough back then, but it was at least starting to be what we wanted.

After we had a very positive reaction at the Independent Games Conference (GarageGames’ yearly Eugene OR-based indie meet), I knew Determinance was going to go somewhere: I just wasn’t sure where.

I travelled down to LA to have a couple of meetings with industry people. I met up with one guy, whose name I won’t divulge, and he started talking about IP: he thought we should get the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon license for Determinance.

I guess when someone brings you a flying sword-fighting game, and you think that IP is the only way to sell a game, that license makes sense. I had never even considered getting IP for Determinance: we would have to re-do so much art, shoe-horn in the license, and so on. In fact, prior to that meeting I had been IP-naive: I had always thought that if a game had license X, it had been designed from the ground up to be license X. And if a movie had game license Y, I presumed it had been written to be game-license-Y film. But of course, that’s not what happens. When someone has a serviceable game or film script, the producer will try and find an IP to match it to. A couple (and I mean literally a couple) of script or menu-graphic changes later and you have Doom The Movie or Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Game. Everyone who wants to know who the hell wrote a Doom film script without hell spawn need only know one thing: no one wrote a Doom film script.

Anyway, IP sells stuff. To the fans of a game, it’s pretty horrific to realise that the film of your favorite N64 epic wasn’t designed with loving care from day one to be a hundred-minute tribute, but to all the people who are deciding which film to watch tonight and have vaguely heard of Blast Corps (or whatever), it’s merely a reason to select one action film over another.

To get back to the point slightly, my LA contact told me that, with a viable IP, banks would be willing to lend money, publishers would come to the table, and I’d get to meet actresses. Long story short is that we want to make games in a different way, one in which bank loans are a last resort, not a goal.

My LA contact, however, had tried something pretty legendary with IP involving a huge, huge, huge game series, which I’ll call Ram Raiders here (it’s not Ram Raiders). My guy wanted to make Ram Raiders 3, but couldn’t afford the license. So he took all the CG movies from Ram Raiders 1 and 2 and spliced them together to form a movie trailer. He got some actor to do a voice-over (“This November, if you thought it was over… it’s not over”. You know, standard movie trailer stuff), and then got permission from the publishers of Ram Raiders to start taking it around Hollywood looking for potential studios. His plan was that if he got the movie signed, he’d very easily be able to get the rights to the game too.

Unfortunately, his plan back-fired when the IP holders sold the Ram Raiders game-IP to someone else. When he rang them up distraught they told him, “Hey, it’s cool, we kept the movie rights for you.” Annoying at the time I guess, but a good story.

I’ll finish off by telling you that, during that same trip, I took Determinance to show EA. I walked in through a giant corridor completely covered with The Sims posters, and sat at an EA Sports Developer’s desk. When one of their senior producers saw Determinance, he just basically looked like I’d bought a pet rat or something and I was asking him to tell me whether he liked its haircut. EA does *not* know what to do with freeform flying sword-fighting games.

Ian

Share this gibberish!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Game IP”

1. Tom:

   § May 1st, 2006 at 7:07 pm

   Do EA in fact publish anything vaguely interesting or original, ever? I mean, don’t get me wrong, Madden’s great and all (FIFA bloody well isn’t) and we’ll wait and see on NFL Head Coach or whatever it’s called, but do they publish more random stuff along with the big licences, or just lower budget generic titles?

   Also, looking forward to Ram Raiders 3 (it is the licence I’m thinking of, right?) and hoping it will be as cool as 1 and 2, but less bug-addled.

2. Ian:

   § May 2nd, 2006 at 12:09 pm

   Yeah, I think you know what the franchise is. It won’t be *any* less bug-addled (it will be more bug addled), but it will be immensly cool. The company responsible are not good at bug-free games. But they are very very good.

3. Tom:

   § May 2nd, 2006 at 1:49 pm

   Dude, I don’t care how bugtastic this new house are, it can’t be any more buggy than the first two. They were like, Arthropod Holocaust 17.

Leave a Reply