The idea for this post originated with something Mike Stoklasa once said. If that name's not familiar, try "Mr. Plinkett." If that name's not familiar, go to RedLetterMedia.com right now, do not pass Go, do not collect $200,000.
In his review of Star Trek (2009), he mentions that the Dominion War arc on Deep Space Nine broke the modern (24th-century) Trek franchise. Now, as a diehard Niner I found myself in the very rare position of disagreeing with Plinkett. The point of the Dominion War arc was to stretch Gene Roddenberry's bright shiny brave new world to its breaking point. I direct you to the episode "In the Pale Moonlight," in which Sisko sells out the Federation's principles in order to save it.
This is not "breaking a franchise." This is merely deconstructing it. Plinkett argues that after the Dominion War, there was no way to raise the stakes even more, but that was kind of the point of the Dominion War in the first place. After Deep Space and Voyager wrapped, the franchise owners had two options. They could have another 24th-century show set in the aftermath of the Dominion War, but that would have been too close to the original premise of Deep Space - you know, the Federation kinda-sorta helping a war-torn civilization get back on its feet - to really let it stand apart.
The other option was to abandon the 24th century and go somewhere else. This is what they did, but they decided to do a prequel and the result sucked. I think that move killed the franchise a lot more than the Dominion War ever did.
Now, I saw the Plinkett reviews a while ago, so why am I only coming to this now? Because there was an article about the Nintendo Wii U that caught my eye.
See, innovation is key to any business plan. Deep Space started out as a thinly disguised copy of Babylon Five, but it really came into its own (and started laying the groundwork for That Other Show) once the Dominion War started. Voyager at least managed to be different from NextGen. Enterprise was just... well, NextGen with less tech, and supposedly less continuity to worry about, both of which were solutions to legitimate problems that cropped up repeatedly in NextGen and Deep Space. It's just that those solutions didn't work, Enterprise had its own set of problems, mostly related to the fact that it was never very good, etc etc.
Now over to the Wii. In my own humble opinion, the greatest video games of the last decade or so have been Half-Life 2, Portal, and the three Mass Effect games. I'll also mention Assassin's Creed and StarCraft II because I've gotten a lot of playtime out of both of them. Now you know what all seven of those games have in common? None of them are available for the Wii.
There are games for the Wii and its predecessor that are good. Don't get me wrong. There are Nintendo console games that are great. F-Zero GX will forever be the greatest racing game of all time (let's face it, steering with a keyboard sucks). Zelda has re-made the same game at least four times now. Super Mario Galaxy was a great step forward for that stale platformer. Super Smash Brothers is pretty much a mainstay ever since the 64 days.
But here's the thing. Nintendo substituted innovation in its games for innovation in its console design. The result is every fanboy can use a lightsaber, but you're SOL if you want a good shooter. Or an original story. Every single one of the "greatest video games of the last decade or so" I mentioned above is part of a franchise, but in a different sense than the Nintendo games. Mass Effect 3 does not have the exact same story as the original Mass Effect (well, aside from the part where the plots revolve around an ancient artifact that starts with the letter C but isn't a weapon or originally built by the Protheans like everyone thought, the games end with a mad dash towards a Conduit followed by a scene where you can get the big bad to shoot himself...)
See what I did there? I nitpicked. But every Mario game since time began has had the exact same plot: Bowser has the princess and the plumber needs to save her. Every Smash Brothers game is just the Nintendo all-stars beating each other up because they've gotten bored playing board games or golf or tennis or go-karts. The Zelda games play with the formula a bit, but it's generally true that Link and Zelda are involved, and that Ganon(dorf) is Up To Something.
The Point of No Return
Where Plinkett was right about the Dominion War arc was that it was a point of no return. Once the Dominion came screaming through the wormhole, pretty much every episode had to address it, and when they didn't, when the crew dropped everything to screw around in the holosuite, the show lagged. Gone was the peaceful future where every single problem known to man had been resolved. (In terms of drama, this was a very good thing. One of the main reasons I'm a Niner in the first place is because too much TNG is stale, boring and preachy.) But once the Dominion War started, there were simply things the show couldn't do anymore.
Same thing with the Wii. Once Nintendo introduced their motion-control lightsaber stick, they'd passed their own point of no return. To go back to a traditional console controller would be to admit defeat. But the problem is, outside developers aren't going to waste the time to make two different versions of every game. In the past, porting games from one console to another (or from consoles to the PC) was fairly straightforward. You just mapped everything to a different button. Now instead of a console-PC divide, you have a Nintento-and-everything-else divide (again, note that Mass Effect 2 and 3 came out on every system except Nintendo's).
Now when you pass the point of no return, you generally - not always - find yourself closing more doors than you opened. You get jerkass consumers like me who would rather fight mecha-Cthulhu (and frak a rock-faced bird-thing) than swing a fake lightsaber around, which is why I own the Mass Effect games and not the Force Unleashed games. You lose outside talent. Portal, as Yahtzee said, has one of the highest meme-to-content ratios, but it also has one of the highest sucess-to-cost ratios. Opening the Mass Effect series up to the PS3 brought in a huge stream of revenue. But you can't do that with Nintendo because they've decided that "innovation" is more important than processing power.
Now to get to the meat. The video game industry is based almost entirely on Medal of Duty: Call of Honor and every other game just like it. There are enough people out there, with sufficiently large wallets, to choke down round after round of stale WWII shooters, but they're the ones who help pay the costs of making games like Mass Effect.
To drag this back into television terms, it's like having a massive story arc that slowly bleeds viewers. Eventually, you have to dumb things down and do some standalones to try to bring in new viewers and let them catch up. It makes the fans upset, but it's a necessary evil. (See the episodes 14-16 of BSG Season 3 for a prime example of this.)
I've strayed really far off topic and covered an absurd amount of ground here. "People are a problem" is what I'm trying to say. You need to plan your innovations carefully, because they are massive, massive risks. You're probably better off not taking risks. But when you do, and your audience likes them, the payoffs can be massive.
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