MILAN, Italy — It took 300 staff working in
five cities about five years, but the second edition of one of the most
ambitious mash-ups in video game history arrived last Thursday: “Mario +
Rabbids: Sparks of Hope”.
اضافة اعلان
The game merges
Nintendo’s Mario, the Italian plumber who has given his name to an entire
universe of games, with
Ubisoft’s Rabbids, a series focused on the adventures
of a species of screeching, hyperactive rabbit-like animals
Nintendo, like
other media companies, is highly protective of its creations.
Only fellow Japanese
studio Sega has been entrusted with characters from “Mario” before, for special
editions games celebrating the Olympic Games where they compete with “Sonic the
Hedgehog”.
“Nintendo told us
very early on: ‘This is your game, this is your vision, we respect it,’”
Ubisoft’s Xavier Manzanares, who is overseeing the new game’s development, told
AFP. “That’s where it’s interesting, so we had real creativity, really
interesting room for maneuver.”
The first game in
the series, “Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle”, has garnered more than 10
million players since its release in 2017, said Manzanares.
“I don’t think we
would have bet on that in 2017,” he said. “It attracted a lot of attention
because there are not many brands that do a pair-up with ‘Mario’, that’s for
sure.”
A history of mash-ups
The idea of fictional universes colliding — characters from one popping
up in another — is far more developed in cinema franchises and comic books than
in video games.
Superheroes, for
example, have a long history of showing up in a rival’s storylines.
In video games,
Nintendo has created mash-ups featuring its own characters, like the “Super
Smash Bros” series that brought together the likes of Pikachu, Donkey Kong, and
others.
Occasionally, two
studios join forces, like in the “Kingdom Hearts” series, which matched up
“Final Fantasy” of the Japanese publisher Square Enix with characters owned by
Disney.
This is much
closer to the idea of Spiderman and Superman walking into each other’s
storylines, as happened in 1970s crossover comics and many times since.
Julien Pillot, an
economist specializing in cultural industries, told AFP this kind of
collaboration in video games was rare and tricky to pull off.
Issues of rights
and royalties cause headaches, he said, and the studio loaning its characters
is likely to make onerous demands to ensure its brand is protected.
‘New universes’
Ubisoft, though, said it had been given real leeway, even to create new
crossover characters in the form of “Sparks”. They are star-shaped creatures
combining “Rabbids” with “Lumas”, characters from the game “Super Mario
Galaxy”.
“For us, it was
important not to have ‘Rabbids’ on one side and ‘Mario’ on the other in two
separate silos,” said Manzanares. The aim was to “really to create a new
universe with both”.
The French firm’s
developers have been working across two principal locations in Milan and Paris
with support from other studios in China, India, and
Montpellier in southern
France.
Manzanares played
down the challenges involved in such a creative endeavor being carried out
across so many locations.
“We’ve been
working like this for a long time, whether it’s on the games ‘Far Cry’,
‘Assassin’s Creed’ or ‘Just Dance’,” he said.
Analyst Cedric
Lagarrigue told AFP that video game firms were increasingly working on global
lines like this. North America or Europe often leads on the creative part, he
said, then processes like making 3D characters or environments, “can be done
anywhere in the world”.
Manzanares said
all Ubisoft’s locations had autonomy and each one brought something to the new
game.
“We really worked
on this merger,” he said. “It’s been a big eight-year job” bringing the two
games to the market.
Read more Gaming
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
