As I watch trailers and videos about Insomniac Games’ upcoming title, Sunset Overdrive, I am captivated by a question. “Where have all the weird games gone?”. When players peruse their local gaming retailer, they are barraged by a multitude of ads for military sims, sports sims, stereotypical RPG’s and new installments in stale franchises.
In 2002 Xbox live first launched with MotoGP, and one of the craziest games I have ever played, Whacked! Players were thrust onto the stage of a wacky game show and played as characters such as Lucky, an angry Scottish rabbit who had all his feet cut off, Lance, an exercise obsessed lion, Eugene, a green penguin with a split personality, and a host of other crazy characters. There were game modes such as Chicken, in which masses of psychotic chickens chased you around a map as you tried to survive and fight back against them, think Diablo 2’s cow level, with much more poultry.
Odd offbeat games are always a fun breath of fresh air. You can only grind for a new scope, or kill zombies for so long. But to address the question, “Where have the weird games gone?”. It seems most publishers have traded groundbreaking, daring titles for a sure thing. What would you bank millions of dollars on? A solid proven product or idea? Or something completely out of the box? The artist in us would love to choose the latter, the businessman would choose the former. As passionate fans, we forget the videogame industry is… an industry, shareholders must be satisfied, quotas must be filled, sales numbers must be met.
Here is where I feel we as gamers must become responsible. Our creative battle between what gamers wish to see, and what publishers wish to distribute, cannot be fought on forums. Complaining about how “over-hyped” an upcoming title is (a la Destiny) will not affect change within gaming. The way these people operate is through their wallets. The responsibility has been laid at our feet, and we must financially support projects we believe in as gamers and consumers. Tired of repetitive shooter 24: ultra modern super advance warfare? Tired of Zombie Resort 47? Stop supporting it, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll force them to get weird again.