Feature: 'The Top 20 Underutilized Licenses'

Time for a Gamasutra thought experiment - what books, comics, movies, and dormant game franchises richly deserve to be made into games? The site's editors have banded together, locked horns, and produced this no doubt debatable result. With licensed gaming seeming bigger now more than ever, we’ve rounded up a collection of twenty un-optioned properties that have the potential to become great games, as well as existing game franchises in need of a revival. Our list pulls from a wide range of media -- books, movies, and comics. Bantam Books’ Choose Your Own Adventure series, for example, is worth considering for a video game adaptation: “Everyone loves books, but their narratives can be awfully linear. Enter the Choose Your Own Adventure series, which lets readers choose which page to jump to at key points in the storyline. Do you run from the tiger, or attack it with a sword? Do you marry the rich contessa, or abandon her for the plain, funny girl next door? With the CYOA books bringing some of the interaction of video games into the literary realm, bringing it back to the video game realm should be a snap!” Descriptions and designs are also provided to illustrate how each license could possibly be adapted, as with our proposal for a game based on the classic 90s film Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray: “Some form of Majora's Mask's time-based gameplay would work perfectly for Groundhog Day: The Game. In each daily repetition, the player would learn more about the daily schedules of the local businesses and people, using that information to complete self-bettering goals (learning the piano, saving a falling child, etc.). While the events in the game should share the same general premise and environment of the movie, the events shouldn't echo the movie's exactly. Instead, the game should show the un-shown days, perhaps with a few wry hints at the movie's events for fans.” You can now read the full feature on our analysis of twenty underused licenses, possible game design opportunities, and suggested developers to take on these unrealistic projects (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).