Licensed Games: The Tie-In Era's Real Casualties

Every list of worst games ever made is really a list of licensing deals, and the joke has been running so long that the actual mechanism has stopped being visible. We laugh at E.T. and Superman 64 as though they were failures of talent. Howard Scott Warshaw, who made E.T., had already made Yars’ Revenge, which is one of the best things on the 2600. The talent was there. Something else was doing the damage.

The something else is a date, and the people it damaged were mostly the ones in the building.

What a licence was actually for

Start with the business function, because it explains everything downstream.

In 1988 a parent walked into a shop to buy a game for a child and had no information. The magazines existed and the parent didn’t read them. The box art was a painting that frequently bore no relationship to the contents. There was no store page, no aggregate score, no video of somebody playing it. The purchase was a guess.

A licence solved that. Robocop on the box meant the parent recognised the word, and the child had been asking about Robocop, and the transaction completed. Ocean’s Robocop sat at the top of the UK charts for months in 1988 and 1989, and the reason is that the licence was performing the function that reviews and word of mouth perform now. It was distribution technology. It bought shelf space, it bought recognition, and it did both before anyone had played anything.

Once you see that, the rest follows. If the licence is doing the selling, the game’s quality is decoupled from the game’s revenue. And anything decoupled from revenue gets the budget that decoupled things get.

The film’s date is the design document

Here is the thing that actually breaks games.

A film opens on a Friday. That Friday was set by a distributor, negotiated against other studios’ releases, backed by a marketing spend booked months in advance, and it does not move for you. The game’s licence window opens with the film and closes when the film leaves cinemas. Miss it and you are selling a tie-in to a thing nobody is talking about, which is worth roughly nothing.

So the ship date is fixed before the design exists.

Games become good through iteration. You build the thing, you play it, you discover the loop is boring, you rebuild. That process has no fixed duration, which is why the schedule is the first casualty on every project that turns out well. A tie-in cannot spend schedule, because there is none to spend. Warshaw was given something like five weeks for E.T. — a deal signed in the summer of 1982 for a Christmas cartridge — and five weeks is enough to build a game once. It is not enough to build it, find out it’s wrong, and build it again. Everything people mock about E.T. is the sound of a first draft shipping.

The Alamogordo landfill story, incidentally, got mangled in the retelling and the 2014 excavation cleared it up: Atari buried a great many titles out there, and E.T. was some of them. The cartridge became a symbol because the symbol was useful, and the useful symbol obscured the mechanism, which was a date.

The genre-switching disease

The second structural wound is subtler and it produced the era’s signature form.

Your contract says the game represents the film. The film has a car chase, a shootout, a bit where the hero climbs something, and a finale. So you build a driving section, a shooting section, a platform section and a boss, and you connect them with loading screens. That’s Ocean’s house structure and you can see it across the whole catalogue, and on cassette it means the multi-load — a game that stops for four minutes between the driving bit and the shooting bit while the tape finds the next chunk.

Every one of those sections is a small game made by a team with one-fifth of an already short schedule. None of them can develop. Batman: The Movie in 1989 is the exception that proves the form can work, because Ocean’s team made five sections that were each competent and varied, and the game is genuinely good — but look at what it cost to get there, compared to a studio that could have spent all that effort on one idea until the idea was excellent.

The structure exists because the film’s structure is the spec. Nobody sat down and decided that alternating genres every fifteen minutes makes a satisfying loop, because it doesn’t.

The conversion factory

There’s a third multiplier that the modern reader tends to miss entirely, because the market it came from has no equivalent now.

A UK licence in 1989 had to ship on the Spectrum, the C64, the Amstrad CPC, the Amiga, the Atari ST and often the PC and the MSX, all on the same Friday. These are not ports in the modern sense — the machines share no architecture, no display model and no memory budget. The Spectrum has no hardware sprites and a colour system that fights you. The C64 has sprites and a slow drive. The Amiga has a blitter. Each version was a separate team writing separate assembler against a separate set of problems, and every one of those teams had the film’s date.

So the schedule wasn’t short once. It was short six or seven times in parallel, staffed by whoever was available, coordinated by a producer with a wall chart. The versions that turn out well are the ones where a good team happened to draw the machine they knew. The versions that are notorious are usually a competent programmer given eight weeks on hardware they’d never shipped on, told to match a design built for a different chip.

The conversion houses that did this work at volume — and there were several in Britain running like production lines — produced hundreds of games between them and are remembered by almost nobody, because their names weren’t on the box. The film’s name was.

Who actually paid

Players lost a few quid, and mostly at budget prices anyway. The real cost landed elsewhere.

The studios owned nothing. Work-for-hire on someone else’s IP means the developer takes a fee, delivers, and has no franchise afterwards. Ocean built one of the largest software houses in Europe on licences and never had a character of its own to sell in 1998 when the model stopped working. Compare a studio that spent the same decade building its own material — the Bitmap Brothers’ invented sports and worlds , or Team17 grinding towards something they’d still own thirty years later. The licence pays this year’s wages and forecloses next decade.

The approval loop ate the design. A licensor has veto rights over how their property appears, and those rights are exercised by people whose job is brand protection. Titus’s team on Superman 64 have described a set of constraints from the licensor that ruled out large parts of what a Superman game obviously wants to be, which is how you end up flying through rings. The rings are what was left after the vetoes.

Careers went sideways. Warshaw’s is the famous one. Multiply it by the number of capable people who spent the tie-in decade delivering competent work nobody could attribute to them, on properties they didn’t own, at a pace that guaranteed the result would be mediocre. That’s the casualty list.

The exceptions all break one rule

Test the theory against the good ones and it holds with unusual tidiness.

GoldenEye 007 came out in August 1997. The film opened in November 1995. Rare missed the licence window by nearly two years, which should have been a catastrophe and instead gave the team the one thing the model never grants: time to find out what the game was.

Ghostbusters, 1984, Activision. David Crane has said he built it in roughly six weeks by adapting an existing design he already had running. He beat the clock by not starting from zero — the systems were finished before the licence arrived.

Aladdin, 1993, Virgin. Disney lent actual animators. The licensor contributed production capacity rather than only constraints, which is a different deal entirely.

Batman: The Movie, again, on the Amiga: Ocean had built the licence machine well enough by 1989 that it could occasionally afford its own best people, and it put them on its biggest property. Scale bought back a fraction of what scale had taken away.

Time, prior work, or a licensor who gives instead of takes. Break one of the three structural conditions and a licensed game can be excellent. Leave all three intact and it cannot, no matter who you hire.

Which is why the era’s best film-flavoured games were frequently the unlicensed ones. Team 17’s Alien Breed is Aliens without the paperwork, and it is better than most things that had the paperwork, because nobody had to show it to anyone. Cinemaware’s It Came from the Desert does the same trick with 1950s B-movies — take the genre, skip the rights holder, keep the schedule. The affection survives. The lawyers were the problem.