LICENCE TO THRILL
IN THE EIGHTIES, THE LICENCE WAS KING. GAMERS WERE OBSESSED WITH PLAYING THE LATEST ARCADE GAMES IN THE COMFORT OF THEIR HOMES, WHILE LICENCES BASED ON MOVIE AND TV SHOWS WOULD DOMINATE THE CHARTS. GARY BRACEY EXPLAINS WHY THEY WERE SO POPULAR
Licences really began to come of age in the Eighties and publishers would fight over themselves to earn the rights to convert the most popular arcade games, films and TV shows. One company that excelled at this was Ocean Software. Many developers would base their games on arcade classics including Jon Ritman, Geoff Crammond and Jeff Minter, and Ocean was no exception. “Before we became ‘Ocean’, we were ’Spectrum Games’ and doing rip-offs of classic arcade titles,” explains Gary Bracey who worked at Ocean as its software director. “Then the opportunity to license the official Hunchback coin-op was presented to Jon Woods and that was the start (a little before I joined the company). That was the first licensed Ocean game, and we soon realised that a recognisable brand was a great marketing hook so Jon focused his early energies into the acquisition of such licences.”
One of the early benefits of acquiring arcade games was that the cost of the licence was relatively cheap. It led to a number of conversions appearing under both the Ocean label and its acquired Imagine Software label. “Jon stayed very much at the forefront of that, having established great relationships with the likes of Konami and Taito in Japan,”
Gary continues. ”In the early days, we were given carte blanche to adapt whichever of their games we wanted, but not long after the massive success of the NES, those companies realised they could make much more money by doing it themselves and so it became a lot more challenging to get the high-profile coin-op rights.”
Interestingly, while Ocean had success with the likes of Hunchback its early TV and film adaptations didn’t find the same critical success and we’re keen to know why. “Errr… because they were shit?” says Gary. “The problem was that in the early days, Ocean had a very small in-house dev team and had to ‘farm out’ much of its development to external freelancers,” he continues. “There was little-to-no oversight of these developments and so those external studios weren’t motivated to do much. This resulted in very poor quality products… if they even materialised at all. This was one of the reasons I was brought in – to basically oversee and manage the development (both in-house and external), because there was no one doing it!”
Gary’s introduction saw a rise in overall quality across the publisher’s output, and while
Ocean still produced some stinkers during his tenure (the C64 version of Chase
HQ and Miami
Vice immediately spring to mind) there’s no denying it released some of the best licences of the time. Of course, it wasn’t just
Ocean that saw the merits of licensing coin-ops and films, and plenty of
other developers were eager for a slice of the pie. Activision tackled various movies and coin-ops, including many by Sega. If you enjoyed Capcom games, odds are a home version would be published by US Gold, while the likes of Alternative Software and Hi-tech Software specialised in TV and cartoon licences. Elite dabbled in both ponds, delivering arcade conversions of Commando and Paperboy and tackling things as diverse as Frank Bruno’s Boxing and Mike Read’s Pop Quiz. Firebird produced the likes of Bubble Bobble, Flying Shark and Mr Heli, while Mastertronic used a Skips tie-in to flog Action Biker on various 8-bit systems. Chances are, if something was popular on the TV, silver screen or even the lunch canteen, a publisher would find a way to capitalise on it.
One of the reasons licensed games were so popular with publishers in the first place was due to the low cost of acquiring them, although that did change. “They were really very cheap,” admits Gary. “Movie companies just saw it as incremental revenue – not a big earner – and so we were able to acquire them relatively cheaply. Robocop changed all that and was the game that made Hollywood realise that they could generate meaningful income from videogame licensing. That was the last ‘cheap’ licence – I think we paid around $20,000 for all digital rights – all computer platforms, all console platforms, coin-op and pinball!”
Robocop is worth highlighting, as along with the earlier Platoon it popularised an approach Ocean often took with its film licences, cleverly cutting the games into minigames to capture key elements of the movie. “Simon Butler was definitely a key contributor to the concept, as I think the first successful iteration was Platoon,” Gary recalls, admitting it was a team effort. “I remember we needed to read the script and pick out key scenes which we thought might translate well interactively. Platoon had a number of such scenes but for different action scenarios and so the brainstorm session resulted in, ‘Well, why don’t we do all of them, rather than just picking one?’ Of course, this meant significantly more development work (and therefore time) as we were making several games in one. But the formula was a good one and worked in such titles as Robocop and The Untouchables.”
That formula worked well for Ocean, and it continued to have success with numerous licences well into the late Nineties until it was eventually purchased by Infogrames in 1996. Games based on films and TV remained popular with gamers, only really slowing down with the current generation of systems. Nowadays, titles like the PS4’S Spider-man are the exception rather than the norm and news of a newly licensed game typically fill us with dread. In the Eighties however, licences were celebrated, mainly because they allowed us a way to enjoy our favourite movies, TV shows and arcade games on the home systems we loved.