This week has seen the launch of yet another spiritual successor Kickstarter, with Koji Igarashi revealing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and having it funded fully within a matter of hours. This is on top of the continued success of Yooka-Laylee and the release of Broken Age Act 2, signalling the successful completion of one of the biggest Kickstarters of all time. The running theme with all of these successes is that they cater to a market that has supposedly lay dormant for many years, either due to publishers not wishing to take a risk with an old genre or the fact that many consumers were simply burnt out by that particular genre.

While I am happy that these Kickstarters have done so well, part of my mind is quite worried about how easy and common cashing in nostalgia has become in recent years. Across all forms of media, we are getting reboots, spiritual sequels, continuation of long dead series and I feel the market is becoming saturated by nostalgic products. Ultimately, these products are safe ways to gain tons of money, by attaching a legacy team or IP to a new project and just waiting for the cash to roll in. However, when triple A devs do this, it would be seen as a lazy cash grab while when an old team reforms or an old IP is brought out of the archive, money is given hand over fist. So, what is the deal here and why does it seem that every week, we get another Kickstarter revival?

Don’t get me wrong, I am pleased that teams like Playtonic have come together to make games like Yooka Laylee. I have put my money down and wait with baited breath for the real thing but I feel that it was inevitable that the project would get funded many times over. I mean, you have a team of revered industry veterans who are trying to breath life into a stagnant genre with a devoted following, of course they were going to make an excess of cash. Plus, I trust that the team will make a stellar product. These are a group of guys who have shipped so many games in their collective time in the business and have worked within a large company, that they know how to handle a budget and deadlines. Pillars of Eternity is another example of being able to trust a developer in meeting audience standard but this is not always the case.

Take for example, Broken Age. Most reviews of that game as a whole say that it does not really know who its audience is for. The writing is not quite clever or witty enough to be for long time adventure game fans, yet it is too complex to be for kids. The actual puzzles do not improve on the incredible obtuseness of old adventure games and are not great for introducing new players into the adventure game genre. If you wanted to bring someone into adventure games, you’d probably give them a Telltale game or show them Life is Strange. Yet, the way that the Kickstarter was marketed and the fervour behind the initial pitch, you’d think Broken Age would be the shining beacon which would usher in a golden age of adventure games. This is one of my major problems with nostalgia-fuelled Kickstarters, is that the developers end up creating something that the consumer didn’t necessarily ask for.

 

Will Yooka Laylee stand on its own? Or will it feel like a hollow imitation of the Banjo series?

This also deals with the question of expectation. Go back to Yooka-Laylee. Grant Kirkhope has said on Twitter that people have been complaining that the orchestrated soundtrack stretch goal for Yooka-Laylee makes it too unlike a traditional Banjo game. While this may be a minor complaint, it is still a clear example between what audiences expect from a Kickstarter, compared to the developers. As Yooka-Laylee is a brand new IP, it makes sense for it to make certain design decisions which make it different from the source material that it is drawing from. Yet, backers who see this project as being a basic update of Banjo into the new generation, they will expect a MIDI based soundtrack, complete with lots of marimba samples and other hallmarks of the Banjo series. We have a clear divide between what the consumer may expect and what the developer wants to do, which is one key difficulty with making these legacy Kickstarters work. Moreover, you have the problem of a developer who makes tons of money trying to use this newly accrued wealth to create a product that uses backer money to full effect, while not creating some unwieldy beast of a game.

Shovel Knight tread the line between honouring nostalgic fans whilst also creating something new with the requisite parts. It improved certain aspects of platforming based on new gameplay trends, adding in obvious checkpoints and the ability to gain lost money back, along with keeping elements of retro platformers in, like the tough but fair difficulty curve and mechanics drawn from seminal platformers like Castlevania and Megaman. Having said that, while establishing that it was based on these games, it made sure that the sum of its parts added up to create something new. It used the force of nostalgia to create a game that could stand up on its own. It also had the effect of creating a sort of synthetic nostalgia for players like me, who never grew up with Castlevania or Zelda II, yet now yearn for that style of platforming. Like with Playtonic, it goes back to Yacht Club being made up of industry veterans who had not only a clear grasp on how to develop a game within certain time constraints, but made sure that their own vision for the game was fulfilled whilst keeping in mind backer expectations. Keeping this correct balance between drawing on nostalgia whilst innovating is the key trick to making your Kickstarted game greater than the sum of its parts.

That is what has me worried about Igarashi’s Kickstarter. From the interviews he has given and the information on his Kickstarter, it does not necessarily sound like he is that bothered with creating an experience which both draws and innovates on the tropes that he initially pioneered in Symphony of the Night and so on. It feels like he is more picking up where he left off and not really aiming to go further, rather than using this opportunity to draw on what has been successfully since his last Castlevania, in order to create something which can stand on its own. Again, this could be me having the wrong expectation of the project but that is one worrying element of the whole process. Different levels of fan will come at a legacy project with different expectations and someone will end up disappointed in some way.

A new project like Little Devil Inside may not get funded, as nostalgic Kickstarters have stolen its thunder.

Another issue with this rise of the nostalgic Kickstarter, is how it does steal the limelight from smaller titles who are trying something new, yet will be drowned out by the ruckus created by one of these titanic projects. It creates a worrying similarity to the triple A market, where mid level games with unique ideas are skipped over because EA are rebooting some old film tie in franchise which was once popular. While it may be the return of a long dead series, you know it is going to make tons of money while the other more experimental game may be buried or never funded.

There is also the bigger question of why so many nostalgic titles are suddenly resurfacing. Why are we getting a relaunch of Toejam and Earl instead of the same developers taking a punt on a new IP? The answer on the surface is to say that it is to get a quick return but it seems to be because we are living in a more uncertain and dangerous world to the past. It is much easier to escape into an old franchise, forget the issues of today and simply yearn for those days when life was simpler.

Of course, you’d much prefer to enjoy the colourful worlds of Yooka Laylee, rather than stare at yet another grey and brown shooter where gruff men have to fight an unseen terror from a far off land. It is a much more comforting thought to pop on Shovel Knight and remember those days back when you were a kid, when all you had to worry about was your homework and if you could beat World 4-2 of Super Mario World, rather than thinking about taxes, General Elections or threats to your own privacy. As we live in a more uncertain, seemingly destabilizing period of time, jumping back into the past seems more fun than thinking about something new. Or it could be that people just want to jump and collect things with googly eyes again, who knows?

What do you think of the sudden wave of legacy Kickstarters? Do you think they are ultimately lazy or do you want more and more of them? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.