Executive Meddling/Video Games: Difference between revisions

** In addition to the "3D titles only" rule, Sony also has a standing rule that requires all games released in the United States to have an English voice track. Because of this, many popular low-budget games like half the ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' franchise [[No Export for You|will never see the light of day in America]]. Sony seems to have lightened up on this recently though, with ''Yakuza 2'' being in Japanese with subtitles, and no English voice work in sight.

** Sony of America had this policy due to the antics of Bernie Stolar, a colossal jackass who refused to publish Japanese RPGs at all until ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' came out and made a lot of money. Then he was fired and went to Sega, and we know how well that turned out.

*** ''[[Little Big Planet]]'' is exempt from this, being a 3D sidescroller. Not all Sidescrollers are 2D.

**** It's actually more of a 2.5D sidescroller.

* The story goes that one of the designers of ''[[Full Throttle]]'', a game about a biker who kicked the crap out of people and was investigating the brutal bludgeoning murder of an old man by a ruthless [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]] who had also ordered the old man's daughter killed, and had further framed him and his gang for the foul deed, had an idea where the lead goes on a peyote-fueled quasi-dream sequence that took place inside his own head. The executives at [[Lucas Arts]] said no, as that would be inappropriate material. That designer nonetheless held onto the seed of the idea, and eventually created ''[[Psychonauts]]''.

* Whether it was a more executive decision or not is unknown, but apparently the 'Meat Flag' muliplayer game mode for ''[[Gears of War]] 2'' by [[Epic Games]] was renamed 'Submission' at the behest of the PR team at Microsoft.

** Both this specific event and [[Executive Meddling]] in general have everything to do with [[Square]]'s falling out with Nintendo, as well. Square was a ''huge'' supporter of the CD peripheral, had plans to use it, and loudly criticized Nintendo deciding to drop the project. Nintendo punished Square for its vocal criticism by refusing to allow expanded memory carts from some of their ambitious projects late in the SFC's life cycle, like ''[[Bahamut Lagoon]]'' or ''[[Rudra no Hihou]].'' Further, the failure of the Sega CD and the inability of their own CD add-on to ever get off the ground convinced Nintendo that disc-based game systems were a dead end, leading to the cartridge-based N64 -- Square quickly realized the N64 and its cartridges weren't capable of running the games they wanted to make and went over to developing for Sony systems.

* ''[[Command and Conquer|Tiberium]]'' was to be the second FPS set in the C&C universe. It had a solid, original concept at its heart: you play as a GDI Forward Battle Commander, actively leading your AI-controlled troops from the front lines. It had a terrific art style; everything in the game world had a realistic, hard sci-fi look to it. It had the fans of the series salivating with anticipation... and then was suddenly canceled with no reasoning cited other than "failing to meet quality standards." Shortly after the game's cancellation, several disillusioned developers of the game [http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20462 began posting on Gamasutra], and from these testimonies comes a rather depressing tale. It seems that the project was doomed by its leadership, or lack thereof. According to the posters at Gamasutra, many of the lead producers (and there were apparently several) were less experienced than many of their subordinates and were only recently promoted to their positions. There was much jockeying for power, with each producer trying to outdo or replace the work done by their predecessors (including gutting the FPS/RTS mechanic at its core). At least one poster claims these managers were actively trying to sabotage the project and thus save face rather than have a broken game released with their names attached. Even if only half of it is true, it's a fact that this game was in development for a good 5 years, getting nowhere, and no one seemed to want to save it.

** Or the game of ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]],'' in which all of the achievements (worth 1000 gamepoints) can be completed in the first 15 minutes in the tutorial mission.

*** Some horribly cynical people have suggested that some developers put ridiculously easy achievements in games as a marketing tactic, as there's a small but obsessed group of gamers out there who will buy the game just for a quick boost to their gamerscore. If it's a crappy licensed game that'll sell like hot cakes with kids but otherwise hold no appeal to the "hardcore", then it might just be a worthwhile ploy.

** This is arguably for the better, as achievements give players "tangible" results for what they do, breathing new life into a game they'd have put down otherwise. Also, requirements for achievements sometimes reveal things that are rather clever/interesting that a player wouldn't have thought to do otherwise.

*** On the other side of the coin, most people do achievements just for the sake of getting them and then never play in the new style again or put the game back down.

* At some point after releasing ''[[Tales of Eternia]]'', Namco (and after the merge, Bandai Namco) decided not to localize any other 2D Tales game. For that reason, many great [[Tales (series)]] games never got to America (except for ''[[Tales of Phantasia]]'' due to special reasons), such as ''[[Tales of Destiny]] 2'', ''[[Tales of Rebirth]]'', and ''[[Tales of Hearts]]''. ''[[Tales of Eternia]]'' even got a PSP port in 2005, but despite the fact that said port was released in Europe no American version is in sight.

** Of course Europe has never seen 80% of ''Tales'' games, all they have had is ''Tales of Phantasia'' on the GBA (very slow compared to the [[PS 1]]), ''[[Tales of Symphonia]]'', its sequel, ''[[Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World|Dawn of the New World]]'' and ''[[Tales of Vesperia]]''. Those "cameo" battles must leave a lot of people thinking "What the hell are they cameoing from?".

** Regarding ''[[Tales of Eternia]]'', there's actually a different reason for that -- It was originally changed to "Tales of Destiny II" because of potential copyright infringements with ''[[He-Man and the Masters of the Universe]]'' toy lines. Some have suspected this was the reason for the PSP port not getting an American release, but on the plus side, at least the PSP is region-free; and it's possible to get an English version.

* For a game that was ''born'' from [[Executive Meddling]], we have the ''[[Spyro the Dragon]]'' franchise in all its glory. In order to compete with the companies of [[Super Mario Bros.|Mario]] and [[Sonic the Hedgehog]], Sony realized that they needed to appeal to the "kids market" in gaming, considering most of the games in the late 90s for the [[Play Station]] were [[Rated "M" for Money|teen and adult oriented]]. So with the aid of Universal Games and Insomniac, they created a game that was basically [[Recycled in Space|Sonic as a dragon]]. Funny thing is, Insomniac never had full rights to the franchise (and apparently, didn't want anything to do with it, as seen in ''Year Of the Dragon''), in which it was sold off to Universal only and it became a [[Franchise Zombie]]. Well, after the release of ''A Hero's Tail'', long runner [[Sierra]] bought the franchise, and gave it a severe [[Continuity Reboot]] (The whole Legend of Spyro series), which due to insufficient man power and funds, created a [[Your Mileage May Vary|controversy of the quality of the games]]. Needless to say, Activision bought out Sierra and let them keep the franchise in hopes "to have promising results," which of course, costs Sierra its better, older franchises like ''[[King's Quest]]'' and ''[[Space Quest]]''.

** In a straighter example of this, the [[Updated Rerelease]], ''Conker: Live And Reloaded'' heavily censored a significantly larger portion of the game's foul language (As mentioned above, combined with the gore, the foul language was the entire point of the game, [[Irony|though by this point it had actually become less taboo]]).

* Much like the ''[[Swat Kats]]'' [[Executive Meddling/Western Animation|example]], ''[[Thrill Kill]]'' was canceled after being bought out by EA, due to its violent content. To further twist the knife, EA refuses to even sell the rights to the game to another company, because of the violence, essentially invoking [[Moral Guardians|moral guardianship]] over the game itself. Fortunately, they did allow the developers to keep the engine, which was used to create ''[[Wu Tang Shaolin Style]]''.

* ''[[The Witcher]]'' video game, under the hands of publisher Atari was heavily meddled to the point of unacceptable (even developer CD Projekt Red thinks so). The US version got a [[Blind Idiot Translation]] script, removed adult content and a DRM scheme that CD Projekt Red never intended to put in. Not until the Enchanced Edition and 1.5 patch released by the original developer was things fixed, it reworked the entire script, removed the DRM scheme and many other fixes to make the game the way it was intended to be.

* Ever wonder why ''[[Toejam and Earl]]'' 1 & 2 were about [[Funk]] music while ''Toejam and Earl'' 3 was all about [[Hip Hop]]?