Make-overs: Changes of Games for Changes of Audiences

Mishtram | April 13, 2007 | News | Misc

1up has come up with an excellent article which goes over the remaking of several different games for different target groups. Often, games which we thought were never changed, such as Fox, or Mario, faced large changes for different audiences. Most visibly different are those from Asia to North American audiences and likewise. Within, a good amount of descriptions are provided for you to see the differences that many of the games have. Regions do make a difference.

Videogamers may look at their hobby as being "art," but the fact is that games are still commercial products -- they exist primarily to make money. It's the publisher's job to make sure that a game can actually sell, and companies will go to great lengths to make sure that happens.

In some cases, this involves drastically changing a game and giving it a complete makeover. Perhaps a publisher thinks a title will sell more if it's associated with popular cartoon or movie characters. Sometimes, companies want to create a brand-name association by tying a game in with a well-known franchise. Maybe the game is too culturally alienating and needs to be made less "foreign." Or sometimes, the pesky red tape of licensing issues prohibits certain characters from appearing in various regional markets. The quality of these "makeovers" tends to vary wildly -- many involve mere sprite hacking, but the more ambitious localizations tend to create whole new experiences, to the point where they almost feel like sequels. Regardless of the reasons, what follows are several games that were given massive makeovers to make them more suitable to a given audience.

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Mishtram | April 14, 2007

Personally, looking at the scores of games they had listed and seeing ones like Mario being totally changed, and ones like the Mean Bean Machine looking totally different was a bit of a shock. I remember playing that game when it originally came out for the Genesis, and it having an Anime makeover doesn't fit, IMO.
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Requiem | April 14, 2007

An interesting article, certainly. Some of the reasons for the surgery are understandable, though a lot of them seem to be based on the presumption of cultural alienation (see the numerous changes from or to anime, for example). I'm not sure if that's a valid concern, or a rather misconstrued perspective of console gamers. It's interesting that the majority of the games featured are for the 16-bit consoles or earlier. An indication of a more accepting attitude towards global culture, perhaps? Given the growing popularity of various Japanese icons and styles in the West in general, I can't imagine any similar facelifts to contemporary games. Or perhaps I'm just not aware of them.
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Sakura | April 14, 2007

I think that they changed most of these for the better. Mario was completely changed, and I think that what was released here looked amazing. I had no idea that they changed games so much though. ^^;
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Gary15 | April 14, 2007

I think you are right Requiem, games companies are obviously becoming more and more aware of these factors, they want to give their game as much ranging appeal to different cultures as possible, as this of course means more sales.