A franchise reboot is announced roughly every other day in Hollywood. Since 2000 virtually every Marvel superhero has undergone a makeover for the big screen, and with a recent proposal to reboot the reboot of the Spiderman franchise, the trend has reached a point of absurdity.
The notion of taking a flagging IP and giving it a swift kick up the backside isn’t exclusive to the hills of Los Angeles. The games industry is also familiar with remodelling a once-popular series in order to increase its market appeal. Prince of Persia has already been rebooted twice in the past decade and Lara Croft has been given so many facelifts it’s a wonder she isn’t permanently staring at the ceiling. As the number of rebooted games increases, I can’t help but wonder whether they come at the cost of originality.
Prince of Persia: A reboot too far?First question: why reboot? The answer which immediately comes to mind is it’s an easy way of making money when faced with a dearth of original ideas. Cynical perhaps, but it’s difficult to argue that there’s no truth to the statement. To use a well known example; after the disappointing third iteration of Call of Duty, the series appeared at an impasse as the market became saturated with copycat WWII shooters. Rather than put an end to the cinematic FPS, Infinity Ward took the game mechanics out of the Third Reich and into the present day, resulting in two of the biggest selling games of all time. Simple, straightforward, a textbook reboot, you might think.
However, such an argument is highly problematic, not least because Call of Duty 3 was made by the relatively inexperienced developers Treyarch, whereas Modern Warfare was Infinity Ward’s baby. Furthermore, Modern Warfare was more than Call of Duty 3 with a lick of camo-paint. Taking a tiring franchise and giving it a spit-and-polish hardly guarantees success. The 2009 remake of Bionic Commando brought the grapple-and-swing gameplay of the 1988 original into the third dimension, and consequently was about as much fun as playing football with a beehive. The additional dimension transformed a straightforward side-scroller into an incredibly awkward and clumsy platform game that managed to get just about everything wrong.
“Dave found a novel way of responding to the latest iteration of Golden Axe”Rebooting a franchise is often a paradoxical endeavour. On the one hand, your once-beloved series is falling out of favour because after six sequels players are tired of doing the same thing in mildly prettier environments. On the other, fundamentally altering the game mechanics to create a new experience is counter-intuitive to what made the franchise successful in the first place, and more vitally, a betrayal to your remaining die-hard fans.
The solution might seem obvious – try thinking of something else altogether. But history has shown that metamorphosing a popular series can work to reinvigorate it. A prime example is Resident Evil 4, which departed its survival horror roots for a more action-oriented experience, subsequently becoming one of the most loved games of the series. Fallout 3 went even further, completely forsaking the isometric, turn-based RPG experience for a first-person, real-time perspective. Again, it was enormously successful.
For every Fallout 3 and Resident Evil 4, there are a slew of games which fall flat on their surgically restructured faces. Golden Axe received a makeover for the 2008 third-person action-adventure Golden Axe: Beast Rider. Only, it wasn’t so much a makeover as a complete gutting of everything that made the original great (most notably the cooperative mode) before refilling its hollow corpse with generic hack ‘n’ slash gameplay and mountable beasts that were less controllable than a drunken horse on an ice rink.
Sonic’s latest reboot was a little bit of a dragThere are countless variables which can affect the quality of a reboot, some of which can doom the renewal of a franchise before development has even begun. One such variable is the way technology has altered since gaming emerged as a pastime. No character epitomises this more than Sonic the Hedgehog. Whereas Mario made the transition to 3D with ease, Sonic has never quite managed it, simply because the linearity of two dimensions was always the most effective way to play a game based around the concept of a blue rodent that can travel at the speed of sound.
Interestingly, after fifteen years of attempting to crowbar sonic into a new perspective, SEGA have recently announced Sonic 4, which will go back to the second dimension, dispose of all the superfluous gimmicks which have plagued recent releases such as Black Knight and Unleashed, and best of all, stop him talking. The burgeoning smartphone craze alongside the rise of casual games means there is once again a market for quality two-dimensional platformers. Ironically, having almost been killed off by one technological shift, Sonic may well be saved by another.
Many fans were furious at Resident Evil 5’s distinct lack of scaresSonic isn’t the only franchise going through the bizarre process of having its reboot rebooted. Although Resident Evil 4 was an undeniable triumph, many critics felt Resident Evil 5 went one step too far into the action genre (alongside being almost exactly the same as the previous game). While there are no specific details of this reboot, the general belief is that, like Sonic, the series will return to the style of the earlier games. This highlights a rather worrying trend in reboots becoming a cyclical process, meaning that consumers are effectively paying for recycled material in franchises which should have died out years before.
In the end, though, it is impossible to judge a reboot on the fact that it is a reboot. The quality of the end product is far more important than the title on the box. Despite this, many developers and publishers remain adamant that reboots equal a short-cut to profit, when the truth is while the potential rewards may be substantial, successfully rejuvenating a franchise is often harder than starting from scratch. The ever-increasing corporate element in the industry is becoming so obsessed with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that they blind themselves to the best path to reach it. A reboot may not be a bad thing by default, but all great franchises have to start somewhere.
