A licensed game is sold under a name its publisher does not own: an arcade machine, a film, a television series, a sports star or a comic hero. The publisher pays the owner for the right to use the name and hopes the name sells the game. For a decade and a half that bargain paid for a large share of the games industry. It also produced some of the best-reviewed games of the 8-bit era, some of the worst, and the most famous failure in the business.
Arcade machines first
The first licences that mattered were arcade games. In 1980 Atari licensed Taito’s Space Invaders for its home console, the VCS, later called the Atari 2600. The console had sold slowly until then. Space Invaders made it the machine to own.
In Britain the first licences were cheap. Ocean Software’s first was the arcade game Hunchback, whose maker, Century Electronics, turned out to be a few miles away in Oldham. Jon Woods remembered the price: “Three thousand.” By the end of the decade arcade rights went to the highest bidder. “Buying arcade rights has become a highly competitive and expensive business,” ACE reported in December 1988, with publishers bidding against each other for the official versions. The Out Run licence, it said, was “rumoured to have cost US Gold in the region of £250,000”. U.S. Gold’s Tim Chaney later recalled a guarantee of about a quarter of a million, as the U.S. Gold entry sets out.
Films: E.T.
Atari also made the first famous film licence. It paid for the rights to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the summer of 1982 and wanted the game in the shops for Christmas. Its programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, recalled in 2000 that the deal took until the end of July to negotiate and the game had to be finished by 1 September: “That left you with five weeks to do the whole game.”
Atari never published what it paid. Electronic Games wrote in April 1983 of “a reported 10 million dollars”; Wireframe, in 2020, put the fee at $22 million. The same April 1983 issue of Electronic Games reviewed the game. It “looks like it was turned out in about five weeks”, the reviewer wrote, and called it “an insult to arcaders”. The full story is in the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial entry.
Unsold stock helped sink Atari in the 1983 crash. In September 1983 the company dumped surplus cartridges and equipment at the city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico: the New York Times reported 14 truckloads. The story grew into a legend that Atari had buried millions of copies of E.T. In April 2014 a documentary crew and a team of archaeologists were allowed to dig at the site. They found cartridges of dozens of titles, E.T. among them, along with joysticks, boxes and manuals. About 1,300 cartridges were recovered, and James Heller, the Atari manager who had organised the dumping, put the number buried at about 728,000. Warshaw was there.
Ocean’s licence years
No British publisher bought more names than Ocean. It signed athletes (Daley Thompson’s Decathlon), television (Knight Rider, Street Hawk), arcade games and, from 1987, Hollywood films. In the telling of Ocean’s sales director Paul Patterson, a licence was worth more than its marketing: it let Ocean offer Commodore and Atari a famous name to put in the box with their computers.
Wireframe’s history of film tie-ins dates Ocean’s film breakthrough to Platoon in 1987. No other publisher saw the potential in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam film, and when the game succeeded, Ocean “suddenly found itself regularly receiving scripts from Hollywood”. Buying a licence while a film was still in pre-production gave Ocean “the space to release a tie-in game at the same time as the movie’s cinema or home release”.
RoboCop showed how far the idea could go. Ocean bought the rights from Orion Pictures, “then sublet the licence to Japanese studio Data East, which turned it into an arcade game. Ocean then exercised its option to convert that game over to home computers in the West.” A home-computer publisher’s licence ended up in Data East’s arcade cabinets, and came back as Ocean’s conversion. Owning the licence also meant owning the reference material. Peter Johnson, working from home on the Atari ST and Amiga versions, was sent “the Data East arcade game supplied by Ocean, built into a handy portable suitcase, alongside a finished build of the Spectrum version”. The film itself he had only seen at the cinema; the game was timed for its video release at Christmas 1988.
CRASH gave the Spectrum RoboCop 92% and called it “a superb implementation of the licence”. In September 1990 the magazine reported that it had spent 32 weeks at number one in the all-formats chart. Batman: The Movie followed in 1989 and reached number one on several charts that Christmas. When RoboCop 3 was delayed, Ocean’s game of it came out before the film.
Ocean’s films grew more expensive. David Ward later said its first licences had cost a few thousand dollars and Jurassic Park, its last film licence, three million.
What the reviewers thought
Licences sat at both ends of the review tables. CRASH’s index of every review it had printed, published in January 1988, gave Ocean’s comic licence Batman 93% and its film licence Cobra 93%, but its television licence It’s a Knockout 39% and its arcade Donkey Kong 48%. The best games on a licence were often those that treated the name as a starting point: Ocean’s 1986 Batman was an original isometric adventure by Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond.
By 1990 the argument was public. ACE opened its new reader debate in May 1990 with “Software licensing — good or bad?” For the case in favour, Ocean’s Gary Bracey said: “There’s better impulse buying with licensed games,” and “We see the 8-bit market as solely a licence market.” He called RoboCop “a computer game on celluloid”. Against it, System 3’s Mark Cale said: “It’s killing the market. It stops innovation.” Readers voted by telephone. In August a reader wrote in: if 75% of ACE’s readers thought licensing should stop, “how come games like Robocop stay in the charts” for so long? The magazine agreed it was odd that “such apparently strong feeling against licensing does not seem to affect the sales of licensed games”.
Tighter schedules, and GoldenEye
In the 1990s licences grew larger and schedules shorter. Wireframe describes how, with publishers “eager to streamline development costs after shelling out for huge licences, and with development cycles shrinking to meet film release schedules, the quality of the games dipped in the mid-nineties”. It names Probe Software’s Batman Forever and Capcom’s Street Fighter: The Movie — “essentially a game adapted from a movie based on its own arcade hit” — as the games that “lowered the bar significantly”.
The best-known exception was allowed to miss its film. When Rare started work on GoldenEye 007, film licences had such a bad name that Karl Hilton’s first thought was “Oh God, a film licence.” The game came out in August 1997, nearly two years after the film. Its director, Martin Hollis, told Wireframe that when the team missed one Christmas, Nintendo of America’s chairman Howard Lincoln sent him a fax about meeting buyers’ schedules. “My attitude was it simply wasn’t ready.” Edge gave it nine out of ten and said it “immediately dispels any fear that the title will follow in the steps of previous film adaptations”.
Sources
- David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu and Richard Schmalensee, Invisible Engines (MIT Press, 2006), and Retro Gamer issue 100, March 2012, pp. 90–95: Atari’s Space Invaders licence of 1980.
- ACE issue 15, December 1988, “Licensed to clone”: arcade rights as a “competitive and expensive business”; the rumoured £250,000 for Out Run.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015): Tim Chaney’s recollection of the Out Run guarantee, as set out in the U.S. Gold entry.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013): Hunchback and the £3,000 (p. 23); Paul Patterson on licences and bundles (p. 46); Platoon and RoboCop (pp. 49–52); David Ward on the cost of Jurassic Park (pp. 64–65). Recollections, told decades later.
- ClassicGamer Magazine vol. 1 no. 2, Winter 2000, pp. 35–37: Darrin Powell’s interview with Howard Scott Warshaw (“five weeks to do the whole game”).
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 14, April 1983, pp. 37–38: review of E.T. and the “reported 10 million dollars”.
- Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, pp. 28–31, feature on movie tie-in games: the $22 million E.T. fee; Platoon, scripts from Hollywood and pre-production deals; the RoboCop sub-licence to Data East and Peter Johnson’s suitcase; RoboCop 3; the mid-1990s decline; Martin Hollis on GoldenEye 007.
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 46–47: Howard Scott Warshaw’s account of the 2014 Alamogordo dig.
- “Atari Parts Are Dumped”, The New York Times, 28 September 1983, as reported in later coverage (web, secondary): 14 truckloads at Alamogordo.
- Andrew Reinhard and others, “The Video Game Graveyard”, Archaeology, July/August 2014 (web, secondary): the April 2014 excavation and the archaeologists who led it. https://archaeology.org/issues/july-august-2014/digs-discoveries/new-mexico-atari-dump-site-excavation/
- “Long-Buried E.T. Cartridges Unearthed at New Mexico Landfill”, Xbox Wire, 26 April 2014 (web, secondary): E.T. cartridges, joysticks, boxes and manuals found alongside other Atari games. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2014/04/26/ent-atari-dig/
- “Atari video game burial”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): about 1,300 cartridges recovered, and James Heller’s figure of 728,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: review index (Batman, Cobra, It’s a Knockout, Donkey Kong). Issue 59, December 1988: RoboCop review, 92%. Issue 80, September 1990, p. 27: RoboCop 2 preview, “RoboCop spent 32 weeks” at number one in the all-formats chart.
- ACE issue 32, May 1990, “The ACE Debate: Software licensing — good or bad?”: Gary Bracey and Mark Cale. ACE issue 35, August 1990, letters: the phone-vote result as a reader reported it, and the magazine’s reply.
- Edge issue 48, August 1997, pp. 66–68: GoldenEye 007 review; Retro Gamer issue 38, 2007, pp. 28–33: Karl Hilton on film licences, as set out in the GoldenEye 007 entry.