As usual, I decided to start documenting myself about this new topic having a look at the Wikipedia. Surprise surprise: its tie-in definition is so nicely complete and inspirational that I'll just browse the contents and comment them all along.

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"A tie-in work is a work of fiction or other product based on a media property such as a film, video game, television series, board game, web site, role-playing game or literary property. Tie-ins are authorized by the owners of the original property, and are a form of cross-promotion used primarily to generate additional income from that property and to promote its visibility."

Scrolling a bit down, you can see a South Park bag. It's a tie-in product: a mail bag with Cartman and friends on its side. Aw. Branded stuff.

I remember that, when I was a kid, I loved the Sega's Sonic The Hedgehog so much that I wanted its branded stuff very hard: magazines, stickers, school diaries, copybooks, school bags... anything with the blue mascotte was a treasure to me. And in the 90's that stuff wasn't so hard to find, even in italian supermarkets. The only obstacles between me and that treasures were my parents and their sturdy common sense: a 10-pack bubbles-decorated anonymous copybooks cost way less than three thin copybooks with Sonic on it... and copybooks are still copybooks regardless what's printed on its cover.

But is this the same for videogames? In videogames graphics, music and gameplay mechanics are mixed and balanced together in order to create a compelling and consistent experience - not unlike what happens in movies. So, how a tie-in videogame can be just a videogame with licensed music and sprites? Your turn, Wikipedia.

"Video game movie tie-ins are expensive for a game developer to license, and the game designers have to work within constraints imposed by the film studio, under pressure to finish the game in time for the film's release. The aim for the publishers is to increase hype and revenue as the two industries effectively market one another's releases."

Bingo! The videogame is bound with the "impositions of the film studio" by design: a tie-in videogame main purpose is to assist another market. On paper there should be that "cross-promotion" we've found in the definition but there is a catch...

"Movie license video games have a reputation for being poor quality."

But why tie-in videogames doesn't work well like our my beloved childhood copybooks? Why the only appearance of my movie hero in a videogame doesn't make it better than a videogame without him?

"One of the first movie tie-in games, Atari's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was deemed so bad, it was cited as one cause of the video game industry crash. Such poor quality is often due to game developers forced to rush the product in order to meet the movie's release date, or due to issues with adapting the original work's plot into an interactive form."

Adapting the original work. You don't have to adapt how the copybook works in order to make a Star Wars copybook but it's not the same in videogames. In videogames the context is not only given by the graphics or the music but also by what the player is meant to do in the game. You can't make a colorful platformer about a robot hero who can baraely jump - but it looked like a good idea in C64 tie-in videogame of Robocop 2 (1990). Ugh.

Nevertheless tie-in videogames weren't worthless: along the years tie-in videogames started to be confined in the adventure genre and then, after becoming less and less common around the 90s and leaving more time to game designers for improving videogames storytelling techniques, they are coming back with a brand new formula that works.

One of the first acclaimed and famous tie-in I remember is Star Wars: X-Wing (1993), which was a 3D space shooter set in the Star Wars universe. I wasn't into PC gaming - and neither into Star Wars - but many of my friends were so happy to pilot the iconic Star Wars spaceship and fight for hours. Putting hours of spaceship battles in a movie could not be a great choice but videogames instead usually offers a single experience with multiple variations. That's why X-Wing and many other modern tie-ins are just cherry picking key elements or concepts from the original product, offering alternate storyline or characters.

The Telltale Games The Walking Dead (2012) videogame, inspired by the TV and comic series with the same name, is an excellent example of a good and sane tie-in videogame. It offers a different storyline and different characters compared to the other products but adapts the same environments, philosphy and tension in an interactive way. It worked so well that I've started watching the TV series only after playing the game!

Plot!

Aw. The old good tie-ins of the 80s. I've decided to celebrate them adapting three very different stories into the same videogame. I admit that I've took inspiration from some famous TV series but don't worry: I tried to make them the more vague and wrong possible, in order to avoid spoilers and maximize the adaptation effect. The game picks a tie-in randomly at start and at every game over. Enough talk! Just try them!

In platformer scenes, use LEFT/RIGHT for moving, UP for jumping, DOWN for crouching and the A BUTTON for firing. In running scenes just use LEFT/RIGHT for moving. In puzzle scenes, use UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT for moving the cursor and the A BUTTON for selecting a tile.

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