That’s not the good ‘help save the planet’ kind either. There’s no other that is ”reusing and reusing their old titles” as much as the games industry. Familiarity is ‘inherent’ within games.
When you pick-up any game chances are you ‘know’ what the controls more-or-less are before even playing it, because ‘X’ is jump and Square is probably attack.
”Is there any industry that relies so much on reusing and reusing their old titles as much as video games?” asks Masahiro Sakurai in his weekly Famtisu magazine column, translated by Polygon. ”Compared to other media like movies, dramas, animation, novels and comics, the glut of franchises and remakes is at an unnatural level.”
It’s the inherency of the medium that’s to blame for familiarity.
”You have to learn the rules of a game before you can play, and that presents hurdles from the very start,” he said. ”That’s why you have a generally unified approach to control methods between titles, and you can usually play one by taking what you already know and adding a feature or two to it — X means jump, Square means attack, and so on.”
Sakurai-san doesn’t feel big franchises should be criticised because they’re successful, but there does need to be some alternative to this merry-go-round of gluttony we’ve built for ourselves.
”Good games attract fans, and if you have fans, you have an advantage,” he wrote. ”You try to use that to make the title something bigger, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to give up on innovation. Popular, well-made games deserve praise, but titles that have some kind of unique creative spark to them also need to be praised in this way.”
”That’s what the judges are trying to do here, and it won’t work if it was just popular majority vote. That would lead to people just voting on names and past performances.”
Masahiro Sakurai is the creator of Kirby, and currently producing Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS.
