Of Mice and Sequels

George Steinbeck never had any sequels to his literature published, but I have a conspiracy theory that they exist.  For example, there were plenty of plot points remaining in Of Mice and Men that could have been answered in Of Mice and Men and Rabbits.  Or what about The Great Gatsby 2: Return to West Egg?  I think there's a lot of potential here!

A quick look at the games I'm playing now (Portal 2, Dragon Age 2, Uncharted 2) will showcase that game developers have the same mindset of squeezing cash from the cow of cash giving until no more sweet cash-like milk will errupt from her utters.  But how many times will developers crack open perfectly sealed stories to capitalize on the notion of "franchise" in order to gain a few extra bucks?  And do we - as fans - contribute to this madness?

I was thinking about writing a bit on sequels last night as I was falling asleep, and when I awoke in the morning and started my internet surfing, I'd found that Yahtzee Croshaw had already written a damn treatise on the subject.  Curse you, Croshaw!  It's like this English/Australian hybrid-man who speaks too fast is simultaneously invading my dreams and sucking out the nectaur of creativity like a viscuous fluid to nurish his savage and wanton needs.  And what's more, the bastard is doing it using time travel since he wrote the article supposedly days ago, when I've just had the idea last night.

JealousyAnimostity aside, I have to say that while I partially agree with Yahtzee, there certainly is some fun in playing a sequel, again evidenced by my current queue's love of the number 2.  So what's the what?  Why are sequels so prevalent, and why do we keep playing them?

Sequels - that is to say, direct continuations of the previous game, not franchise continuations with completely seperate characters and stories - are most successful when planned.  Let's take Bioshock and Bioshock 2 for example.  In the first title, the exploration and mystique of Rapture had been fully detailed and played out.  You had a nice little story and it was concluded with some finality.  The coffin firmly nailed in the story is then accosted by a crowbar in an effort to pump the corpse for some missed cash.

However, I was thrilled at the chance to go back into the underwater city.  There was a lot of Rapture we hadn't seen, and I was more than okay with giving that a go.  The problem errupts in that the story of BS1 was wrapped up too nicely, leaving no dangling threads to explore in the future.  This requires a sequel to create threads, which BS2 actually did in the form of theressomethinginthesea.com - an online marketting campagin featuring a man who had his daughter kidnapped and taken to Rapture, but instead of following up on this man's plot point, the game pretty much delegates him to an NPC with some audio logs and dismisses the whole ordeal.

I still enjoyed the game for what it was, but I'd love to see less recycling and more innovating.  Andrew Ryan's greatest fear was that his city would be discovered, which is why secrecy was so keen.  You want a sequel?  Capitalize on that.  U.S. government discovers Rapture, fixes it up and continues its ill-advised scientific experiments with the genetically splicing ADAM.  Shit goes wrong (as shit does) and you get hired as a merc to get out some government big wig who is trapped in his office.  This is a chance to bring fans back to the environment (Rapture), but explore wholy new story concepts and introduce some substantially different gameplay.   BAM, better sequel made.  You can pay me in chocolate, 2K.

So sequels can be good, but they must be planned, or they must be inventive and creative.  And I wouldn't expect to be picking up The Raisins of Wrath from Amazon.com anytime soon.