'Officially Licenced Product'

Section: 

January 2005. The offices of publisher Vivendi Universal. In a back room on an unimportant floor, three marketing executives are gathered around a table. They're tasked with emulating the Q4 2004 success of Fight Club: a beat "˜em up that, despite having little to do with the film and leaving critics underwhelmed, was a commercial success.

We join them as their meeting has just started.

Lucius 'Luke' Johnting (LJ. 45 YO. Divorced twice. Likes ice cream and little league.): "...such a hit the board have asked other for film-game conversion ideas."

Dong Godown (DG. 40 YO. Studied dance at MIT. Held record for longest time spent waiting for a post-concert Kenny G. autograph.): "So do we get to choose our own films or what?"

LJ: "No, no we don't. The guys in Income Targeting and Audience Captureisation threw together a list of titles. We just need to think about the films, what type of games they'd make and something about special about them."

Toney Knoflicek (TK. 47 YO. Unsure about gender of his personal assistant.): "Like innovative gameplay models? Something that captures the film's essence but melds it to the game with great mechanics and an immersive storyline?"

LJ: "Uh, Yeah. But if you can't think of anything don't sweat it."

DG: "So what's first?"

LJ: "OK, Here we go!"

*He reads from a list and makes a trumpeting sound*

"'Enter the Dragon'. I'm thinking beat 'em up. But also Chinese guys with big hair. That whole 'Hip Hong Kong' 70s vibe. There's gotta be something worth mining there."

TK: "I get you. Kung Fu - but retro. A beat 'em up where... Where Bruce defends Shaolin's honour by kicking ass and getting cool new outfits with each win. We can tap into the martial arts and GQ/FHM markets, easy."

DG: "Great idea. But I'd like to expand on it a bit. Let's leverage the 70s aspect more. Let's bring music in."

LJ: "What're you thinking? Special moves linked to songs? When Bruce pulls a move we get an Earth Wind & Fire sample or something?"

DG: "Sort of. Imagine this,"

*He holds his hands up and moves them apart like a cinema curtain opening*

"'Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon Dance, Dance Dance Cultural Revolution!' A fighting game where, instead of choosing their own moves, players square off on dance pads and 'fight' to the rhythm of Bruce's squeals."

TK: "Woooh! Awwww!"

DG: "'Zactly. We can even have the "Meester Woper" sound clip, but jazzed up – like Cha-Cha-Chaka Khan." *He scratches an imaginary record*

LJ: "Using Lee's yelps is great, but shouldn't they fight to music?"

DG: "They could do, but how'd that make us different? They fight to squeals, but each round they win gets them a special move and that's..."

LJ: "That's when they hear the Doobie Brothers! Great! Why give them the music when they can work out for it, eh?"

*The trio laugh.*

LJ: "OK, moving on – good work, Dong – the next film is Awakenings. That thing with DeNiro as a 'tard and Mork as a doctor. Any ideas?"

TK: "Well this isn't an easy list, Luke. I mean, Awakenings? That's a tough sell. There's no explosions or tits for us to work with."

DG: "We got nurses though, right? Nurses sell."

LJ: "You're on fire, D!" *They high-five*

TK: "Cool, nurses it is. We change the doctor's sex – he becomes she. And he's got huge tits. I can see the billboards now: 'Feeling Bad? She'll Kiss It Better. Awakenings – XXX.'

LJ: "Boom, shake the room! We got the marketing campaign wrapped! Now what's the game?"

DG: "Well that movie's full of talking – so let's make it an RPG."

*They all pause for a second. The world seems to slow down. Some deep, dark part of their souls starts thinking about forgetting the marketing bullsh*t and actually making a decent game. An honest game. An important game.

Suddenly the world speeds back up.*

TK: "Let's it make a Lesbian RPG. She's a nurse in a nuthouse. She has to cure her sexy female inmates' sleeping sickness."

DG: "They need Awakening."

TK: "Yeah. That's her quest thing. Wake up the lezzers. Anyway, she does this by having turn-based fights with them."

LJ: "But they're not really fights, right? She's a nurse; she would've taken the hypocritic oath. No, she cures them instead. Yeah, that's the angle. Each time she meets a patient wandering around the mental hospital,"

TK: "A mental hospital full of lesbians. In skimpy gowns."

LJ: "She has to cure them. With meds. And when she does, she gets more and better dope to cure other patients with. That's how she increases her ... RPG stuff. Like her uniform gets smaller. Until it falls off."

DG: "I like the erotica, but where's the danger? What happens if one of these 'cures' goes badly?"

TK: "Well, she's pumping all these babes full of joy juice right? They're hopped up on yam yam. That can't be good for their minds - so let's show the bad trips they have,"

*He rolls his eyes and slowly waves his hands around while speaking in a stupor-like voice*

"We'll throw in a few ins-anity eff-ects, like in Eter-nal Dark-ness."

DG: *Moving an almost imperceptible distance away from TK*

"That's cool, but we need more. How about at the same time as these effects harm the nurse, they make the patient look sexy? So when screen goes purple and wobbly and all that, as a counterpoint, things'll happen like the patient's ass'll get crazy huge for a couple of seconds. Real fill the screen stuff."

TJ: "Yeah! And if the nurse can't select the proper drugs to counter this, she ends up suffocating under it. That'd be game over, man. Game. Over."

LJ: "A demented ass! That's genius. If we use these 'insanity effects' properly, we can add a whole new layer of sexiness to the game. Why stop at the ass? The players will even like the bits in which they're doing badly!"

DG: "We're on a roll guys. I can feel it. We're at the bleeding-edge of gaming creativity."

*The others nod in agreement.*

TJ: "Now we just have to push on. Keep moving forward with new ideas. What's next, Luke?"

LJ: "Let me see..."

- 1Dgaf

Comments

I'm up for the Dance Dance Dance Cultural Revolution, definitely.

Greatest... Article... Ever...

Mex wrote:

I'm up for the Dance Dance Dance Cultural Revolution, definitely.

Its gona sell like hotcakes.

That made my day...

That rocks.

Wow, it's like you were there! Do you have wiretaps on their office or . . . or . . . no, no that can't be it. It's simply too frightening to contemplate that you might be able to think on their level.

Any game that's got a demented ass has to be good!

Your talent is wasted here, 1Dgaf, you should be making beat 'em up ass games.

"Well that movie's full of talking – so let's make it an RPG."

Wow. I read this, highlighted it for quoting, thinking it was going to be the best laugh-out-loud quote, and then you follow it with a whole page of hot, doped-up, skimpy-nurse-outfit, lesbian, joy juice-pumping, ass dimentia.

I wonder what engine they'd use for that...

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

LJ: So what about this one? Some sort of pirate game?

DG: No way, the ocean part was really boring, at least the parts I was awake for. That's what I get for having a Shirley Temple before the movie. You know what was great though? The island.

TK: Oh yeah, with the monkeys and funny birds!

DG: I don't remember any monkeys.

LJ: Sure there were monkeys, all over the place. It's a tropical island!

TK: Exactly, they were everywhere. They had this one scene which was nothing but monkeys swinging around.

DG: I fell asleep halfway through, so I'm going to pretend that's the case. I was thinking of a bug collection game though, where you collect and classify the bugs. It'll be just like my bug collection, but with cyber-bugs!

TK: Yeah they could jump around fighting monkeys for bugs, which they can use to decorate their crib.

LJ: I hear cribs in games are "the bomb" as they say. We could have gold diamond-encrusted bugs with spinners on the back, and let the player hang them around their neck as they fight monkey ass.

DG: Umm, sure. How about boss monkeys, you know the clever monkeys that have fashioned an axe out of a rock and some of their feces.

TK: Perfect! They could be 30 foot tall and the player would have to use the special bug powers to defeat them. Huge boss monsters are totally in.

LJ: And for the finishing touch, we'll get Snoop Dogg to be a cool jive talking monkey that leads you to defeat the monkey king. You can tell him apart because he'll have a hat and gold teeth. Great job guys, what's next?

1Dgaf forgot to mention, the article is open ended so you guys can submit your own crazyass movie games. So if you got any, post em!

1Dgaf forgot to mention, the article is open ended so you guys can submit your own crazyass movie games. So if you got any, post em!

Yes. I cocked up. Still, I can now talk about the Terminator 3: Sports Day button-bashing game.... "They always seem to be running in that movie - why don't we make it a feature?"

Kurosawa's Seven Samurai

LJ: Kooo-ruuu-wha? Is that Chinese?

DG: I think so, but let's make it Japanese. That way, we can put ninjas in it.

LJ: I love ninjas. So a fighting game, with ninja vs. Samurai?

DG: Yeah, and we can give them cool swords and ninja stars.

LJ: How about we get the actors in for voice-overs?

TK: Wait a minute, guys. Isn't this movie really old? They might not sound the same anymore.

LJ: Old? Why are we looking at this again?

TK: Well, our market research guys must have seen the word 'Samurai' and automatically forwarded it to us.

DG: Hmm. Well, they would all speak Chinese anyways, right? Let's forget the voice-overs and concentrate on the fighter personalities.

LJ: Yeah, we can have one old teacher-type Samurai, a crazy Samurai, and a student Samurai.

DG: That's stupid. Let's just copy the personalities from Soul Calibur. And we need to have some chick fighters in there too, right? And what about the ninjas? Don't they dress all in black?

TK: Great point about the chicks, DG. Diversity is very important. So picture this: a GAY ninja, dressed in purple!

LJ: Awesome! That would be totally revolutionary!

DG: Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

Mean Girls

DG: Ok, I'm thinkin' an RTS with pratical joke mini games and a few timed missions involving shopping trips to the mall with this one.

LJ: Jesus, DG, is that a crack pipe in your pants cuz I'm going to need it for this idea to fly.

TK: Wait a minute, I think DG's onto something here. Scantily clad, barely legal school girls are hot right now. The lunch room and after school dances could be used for resource building and troop recruitment. And strategic battles would involve humiliating all the unpopular girls.

DG: That's what I'm talkin' about! Chicks will soak this up and the 8-14 male demographic will buy it for the bouncing boobs.

LJ: By god that is brilliant! And a week after release we'll put out a nude patch to reel in the 15-45 crowd. It's a no brainer!

*manic laughter and high fives all around*

"Hmm. Well, they would all speak Chinese anyways, right?"

Grr. That reminds of me when B movies villains are supposed to be Japanese and the actor's blatantly Chinese. I know that the actor is important, not the colour, but I can almost imagine the producers saying "Well they all look the same - and this guy's cheaper."

LJ: "Alrighty, next up... let me see... okay Hidalgo."

TK: "Hidalgo? Oh, right, Aragorn getting his cowboy on. Okay, I'm seeing horses, I'm seeing deserts, I'm seeing swords... I've got sh*t."

DG: "No, you're on the right track. Aragorn traipsing through the desert on a horse. He's the loner, just him and his horse, trying to win it all. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

TK: "I'm with you... Crazy Horse Taxi!"

LJ: "Golden. Though drop the horses and put him on a camel. Horses aren't funny, camels are a guaranteed laugh-a-minute especially if we have them fart, spit and sh*t every few seconds."

TK: "Awesome, camels. Aragorn has to pound ass through the desert on his camel, picking up Bedouin and other folk who want rides to the oases, bazaars, and Super KMarts. He has to race against the clock -- c'mon, who doesn't like the Race Against The Clock gameplay mechanic?! -- to get these people to the places or he misses out on his bonus basmati rice."

DG: "I'm feeling it. Now, how do we work in the harem?"

LJ: "I'm seeing GTA-style health generation through knocking boots with the harem babes. And hey, if he's too far out to get to civilization, he can get busy with the camel! Oooh! I'm seeing dating simulator with the camel! You have to buy new outfits for your camel in order to get the camel to go faster and perhaps not take bites out of your ass all the time."

TK: "We'll sell millions!"

Grr. That reminds of me when B movies villains are supposed to be Japanese and the actor's blatantly Chinese. I know that the actor is important, not the colour, but I can almost imagine the producers saying "Well they all look the same - and this guy's cheaper."

Exactly. Plus they wouldn't even realize that the movie was Japanese in the first place.

Aragorn has to pound ass through the desert on his camel

Good to see that they are keeping the diversity thing.

DG: "Guys, I've been thinking. I think there's mileage in the Crazy Horse Taxi idea with horses. Perhaps we can have an expansion pack. At the end of the original game we have some kind of cliffhanger, let's say a Harem babe is stolen. What do we need to get her back? A bounty hunter. Who's the bounty hunter?

IMAGE(http://www.uyinc.net/catalog/native/33017.jpg)

"Crazy Horse!"

TK: "So.. Crazy Horse is riding himself? Jesus, that's... totally post-modern. But it needs more, man. It needs more."

LJ: "Wait.. Wait.. It's coming to me. The Harem Babe has been stolen by an evil mastermind from United Kingdomland."

TK: "How do we know he's from there?"

LJ: "Because he's stolen her as a new prototype for his naked, robotic, Bearksin guards of course."

DG: "What, like the ones that dance at the Crazy Horse club in Paris? The club that's, like, totally not work safe?"

** NWS http://www.reunir.com/photos/Z1504.jpg NWS **

LJ "Yes!"

*TK collapses under the weight of the idea's self-referential irony.*

TK: "I'm with you... Crazy Horse Taxi!"

Brilliant stuff.