It was in the northeastern wilds of Pennsylvania, sometime around the year 1985.  We were heading to the family cabin in the woods for a summer vacation.  In addition to the things you would expect to find at a cabin in the woods — trees, streams, swarms of angry hornets — it also held one very important thing: my cousins’ old Atari 2600. While I had an Intellevision at home, there was something different about playing the Atari.  Being able to play it was one of the things I most looked forward to about our trips. Perhaps it was just the simple fact that it was something new and different to me, or maybe the fact that it had an honest-to-goodness joystick.

On this particular trip, my cousins upped the excitement by telling me they had brought a new game with them: The Empire Strikes Back.  The game was actually several years old by that point, but it was new to me. I loved Star Wars, and the idea of actually being able to play out the movies as a game absolutely blew my six-year-old mind.  As soon as I had a chance, I claimed the TV and the Atari and gave it a try.

The game was incredibly simple: fly your snow speeder across the landscape and try and take down the AT-ATs before they reach the base.  One level, one single scene from the movie. You might think I would be disappointed.

I wasn’t: I was playing Star Wars.

Empire Strikes Back was my first encounter with the world of licensed video games.  Though six-year-old me didn’t know it, there were a whole lot more coming.

The term “licensed” game simply means that someone has given the game designers permission to use a name, a character, an image that has already been used in another medium. Every Madden game that comes out is licensed by the NFL, for instance.  To most gamers, though, licensed games refer to those that are tied in with TV shows, movies, or comic books.

I cannot say with any authority what the first licensed game ever produced was, but based on my research, I am fairly certain it was the TRON arcade game of 1982. ’82 was a banner year for licensed games, with TRON, Empire Strikes Back (which came before Star Wars in the home-console gaming world), and even the Smurfs getting arcade or home console releases.  Once the floodgates for licensed games open, developers were more than happy to ride the river to profit.

It’s easy to understand why, from a business perspective.  In the suddenly up-and-coming video game market, here was an opportunity for companies to use proven properties — things people already knew and loved — and sell them as something new. It was a new realm of merchandising, and smart companies never miss a chance to merchandise.  And from a fan’s perspective, it was a chance to experience something you loved in a whole new way; not to simply watch it on a screen, but to be a part of it, guiding characters through the story like you never could before.

This was, in theory, how it would work.  Of course, in those early days of licensed games, “guiding the character through the story” consisted mostly of running them past a few screens of obstacles while some familiar music played.  The Smurfs, another cartridge in my cousins’ Atari collection, was about six screens long and, if it weren’t for the fact that your character was blue, could have been one of a hundred other games.

And yet, back then, many of us were perfectly all right with that.  Gaming was still new, and the licensed game concept was still enough to get us excited.  Of course, after a few years, customers started to wise up a bit. They suddenly weren’t so willing to shell out their money on any old piece of digital refuse with a familiar name slapped on it.  The pinnacle of this is the well-known E.T. game of late ’82, which many people credit with helping to trigger the Videogame Crash of ’83.

Despite this, licensed games did not die out.  With the advent of the NES and the Sega Master System, they came back stronger than ever.

Your Reputation Precedes You

Licensed games are often looked upon with great derision by most gamers. When we hear that a movie is getting a game made from it, we assume it’s going to be a cheap cash-in attempt of dubious quality. Quite often we are correct.

A bad licensed game is pretty easy to spot: first of all, there is the quality of the source material to take into account.  While the Noid might have been popular as a pizza salesman, trying to leverage that into video game sales was probably a marketing path best left unexplored.  As if 1989′s Avoid the Noid wasn’t a painful enough experience for the public, Dominos tried again in 1990 with Capcom’s Yo! Noid! Considering that the depth of the Noid’s character consisted of pizza and the destruction thereof, the games were similarly shallow affairs.  T&C Surf Design released a game based on the fact that kids were probably familiar with their shirts.  Slapping the name of a marginally familiar brand onto a game is perhaps the most callous type of licensing, and has not ever resulted in a single game that I think anyone would consider “good”.

That being said, having a really fantastic license is certainly no guarantee of having a great game, either.  Consider, if you will, Batman. Simply uttering the name conjures up images in most people’s minds that are richly infused with awesomeness.  In 1989, this was even more likely, as the recently released movie had done much to force the memories of the campy Adam West version out of most people’s minds.  Seeing a golden opportunity to build upon this momentum, D.C. Comics licensed the name to Sunsoft to create an official Batman NES title.  The results of this venture demonstrate another huge problem with licensed games: when the source material and the game have almost nothing in common.  The amount of relevant Batman content in Sunsoft’s title consists almost entirely of Batman himself and the Joker.  Beyond that, the game is a rather run-of-the-mill (if not very difficult) sidescroller chock full of jetpack men and electrified floors.  Sure, there were locations from the movie, and some cut scenes that shared the same story, but there were also an awful lot of missiles involved.

Lest this discussion lead you to believe that this problem was confined to the 80′s, we can look almost a decade later to Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi on the PSX as another prime example of disconnect between license and product.   The Star Wars franchies has spawned perhaps more games than any other license (of which we will discuss more later), and some live in far more ignominy than others.  Teras Kasi, set between Episode IV and Episode V, was a fighting game.  A very bad fighting game.  It took the Star Wars characters you know and love (and a few you’ve never heard of), and pitted them against each other in utterly uninteresting combat.  If you ever wanted to have Princess Leia duke it out with a Gamorrean, this was your big chance. If, like the rest of society, this was not on your agenda, then this game was a massive waste of time.

It’s Not All Bad

With the sheer number of licensed games out there, it’s almost inevitable that some of them had to turn out well.  Fortunately for gamers, there are a number of licensed titles that actually succeed.

The earliest licensed game I can remember truly enjoying was Duck Tales on the NES.  Produced by Capcom, it had all the trademarks of platformers at the time: colorful, detailed graphics, great music, and pretty smooth controls.  With that solid foundation, adding the characters from one of my favorite cartoons made it even more appealing.  It certainly helped that the source material had plenty of fodder for a variety of gaming experiences — space travel, haunted castles, and the like — which gave the designers plenty to play with.

Konami as well had a string of licensed game successes in the arcades during the late 80′s and early 90′s.  Starting with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, following up with The Simpsons, and finally leading to the X-Men arcade game, I can say with utmost confidence that Konami came into possession of more of my quarters than any other company during those years.  Again, the trick here is that Konami took a very solid brawler base, then tweaked each to fit the license they were given.  These were not particularly daring adaptations of the licenses, but they were enjoyable and memorable. By steeping these solid games in the trappings of their source, fans couldn’t help but enjoy them. The recent release of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Video Game follows in this tradition quite brazenly, and to excellent effect; the game oozes respect towards the source material, and provides a great gaming experience to boot.

Form and Function

When licensed games truly succeed, in my opinion, is when they are able to fully wed the source material with the gameplay in a way that just feels right.  As I said when I first played Empire Strikes Back many years before, I was looking for the chance to truly be in the Star Wars universe.  Many of the early Star Wars games took this idea quite literally, having the player simply play their way through the movies, reliving the same scenes over and over again.  This wasn’t always a bad thing – games like Super Star Wars were pretty good in their own right – but it always left me somewhat wanting.

LucasArts, perhaps sensing this desire among its fans, answered the call in 1993 with X-Wing. Here, at last, was a demonstration of the almost perfect unity of license and game.  In X-Wing, the player takes the role of a rebel pilot thrust into the events of the Star Wars universe some time prior to A New Hope. Now, instead of simply replaying scenes from the film as Luke or Han, the player was a part of the greater story, seeing the events from a whole new point of view.  This rich, well-written campaign was coupled with an excellent game engine that really gave the feel of (what I’d imagine) piloting an X-Wing would be like.  LucasArts followed up with the even better Tie Fighter, which broke even further into the expanded Star Wars universe and gave an improved gameplay experience.

This incredibly deep unity between license and game — taking the source material and not only respecting it, but delving even deeper into it — is a rare thing among licensed games.  When it succeeds, however, the results can be fantastic.  LucasArts seem to have a special affinity for this, as their Indiana Jones adventure games also managed to achieve that special connection.

So, if licensed games can hit such great heights, why doesn’t it happen more often?  The answer, unfortunately, is simple business.

The Business End of Things

Licensed games, just like almost every other game, are created to make money.  In the case of a license, however, there is an extra imperative to strike while the iron is hot, and make sure the game is released while the subject license is still fresh in people’s minds.  Most people would not be that interested in purchasing an I Am Legend game if one were to suddenly be released next week; the public interest window on that has long since closed.  Knowing that to be the case, most licensed games are timed to come out in conjunction with their source material. This means that most of these games are being pushed out on an accelerated release schedule, with minimal time for pesky things like design refinement and playtesting.  This is also why so many licensed games feel like reskins of other titles: they are.  It’s a lot faster to take a known, successful product and throw on a new theme to fit the license than to try and develop something from the ground up.

If you look back over the years, you’ll probably notice that the best licensed games come from long-standing franchises (Star Wars, for example).  I suspect that this is because with a known property, there is far less of a time crunch to get a game out the door: the fanbase is already established, and will still be there for the long haul.  This is not to say that these franchises are immune from pumping out the occasional piece of garbage, but that they are more likely to put out a solid product than those who are slaves to a marketing calendar.

Somewhere In a New Mexico Desert…

Licensed games, arguably, almost killed the video game industry once.  On the whole, a lot of them also tend to be pretty awful, or at least painfully mediocre. With rushed development cycles and marketers looking to cash in on brands as much as possible, they are often doomed from the start.  That being said, history has shown us that it is possible to produce good — or even great — licensed games, and that we shouldn’t always look down on them with complete disdain.  With a proper union between source material and gameplay, licensed games can actually go a long way towards providing an exciting, expanding experience for fans of a given license.  It takes effort, but it can certainly be done.

Just be wary if the title involves any food mascots.