The development of the art of making sequels: Video Game edition

Sequels: Possibly the most productive cash cow on the farm. People will always flock to the sequels to their favorite games, whether its a good game or not. This works for two main reasons: People will rely on what they know to be good, and people fear change. And since the main thing sequels do is give people more without actually changing he formula much, or at all...

But what about the early days, when gaming franchises were a relatively unheard of thing? The times when series were just starting up? And how do those times compare to the modern day?

Just why were NES game sequels so WEIRD?


If you look at the NES and its most successful games, you'll see things like Mario, Zelda, and Final Fantasy. You'll also see that a lot of these games spawned sequels. And you may also notice that all of those sequels were just kinda... different. To show you what I'm talking about, lets look at some of the big-names on the console...

The Legend of Zelda
Ah, nothing says "instant classic" quite like the first ever Zelda game. Spawning one of the most successful franchises ever, The Legend of Zelda brought a whole new style of game to the masses, and it is possibly one of the most referenced games in present day pop culture.

The Sequel
And now for something completely different! Almost every single thing about the original game was changed for the sequel, to the point where the only thing that made it a Zelda game was the cast of returning characters. To this day, it goes down as one of the strangest flops in Nintendo's library of big name games. Not that it was bad, it was just...

Oops!
A few years later, A Link to the Past was released. It went back to the first game's style of play, and was a monumental success.

Final Fantasy
Everyone knows the story here: A dying company made one final game, but that game was so popular that it pulled them out of the gutter and plagued mankind with androgynous men swinging around airplane wings for decades to come. It was basically DnD, but with a computer that took care of all the number crunching for you. Efficient!

The Sequel
All that got tossed out the window. Instead of straightforward leveling and character developing, we got the controversial "use it or lose it" style of stat raising, making you do things like sit around and let your naked warrior get pounded on by monsters to get more HP, or roasting easily-slain goblins with your level 10 fire magic so you can get through the next dungeon. It's not a very popular entry in the series.

Oops!
Final Fantasy 3 went back to the classic "experience points" system, among other things. Since it was never released outside of Japan until the DS version a few years back, it might not be as popular as some of the other examples on this list, but its certainly better than FF2.

Metroid
The ultimate test of your map-making abilities. The first Metroid game dumped you into a cave and said "go to the end." But the end was behind all sorts of obstacles that you had to go exploring to find ways around. You found tools that could be used both in combat and also to reach new areas. It was at least popular enough to make a sequel!

The Sequel
Like the first game, but without all the intuitiveness. Instead of "going to the end," you now have to "kill all the things!" Also, killing all the things makes pools of acid drain out for some reason, letting you go to new areas. It was all very strange.

Oops!
Super Metroid went back to the first game's style of exploration. It is heralded as one of the best games ever made.

Super Mario Bros.
Everyone has played this game. Anyone who says otherwise is a lying whore. Mario was, and still is, immensely popular, and was a key player in saving gaming from the Great Crash.

The Sequel
YES, I KNOW. SHUT UP.
We all know about the whole Doki Doki Panic thing. You can argue that the US version of Mario 2 isn't actually a Mario game until you're blue in the face. But the thing is, both versions of Super Mario Bros. 2 fit here!

The game we got, with all the turnip tossing and magical flying princess, fits in for obvious reasons. But the one we know of as "The Lost Levels," the actual Mario 2, was radically different in more subtle ways. It jacked up the difficulty, gave Luigi a different play style, and tossed in its own slew of dick-move gimmicks.

Oops!
And Super Mario Bros. 3 undid all of that. We got more standard Mario platforming, but without the side order of Rageslaw OR the tall cool glass of turnip juice. And it is one of the best selling games of all time. Hmm...

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Anyway, I think you see my point. The early trend was to make your sequel as different as possible, with the idea that your audience would want a new game to play. It was quickly discovered that this was not the case, so the next batch of sequels went back to the original formula... and were wildly successful. This continued on for many many years, with the only real changes in the games' core formulas being the result of a console upgrade.

But is this still the way of things today? There are a lot of games that still follow the old way, like Zelda, Bioshock, and Mario, but there are also games that are bucking the trend, like Resident Evil and Castlevania. It almost seems like games like Metroid: Other M and ideas like the recent Final Fantasy games finding ways to play themselves are ways for game developers to get back into the mindset that a sequel should be something completely new, rather than giving the players "expansion pack sequels" like Super Mario Galaxy 2.

We're in a transitional period, it seems, and I'm rather interested to see what comes of it.