On Friday Evening, I finished Bioshock while saving all of the Little Sisters. By itself, it was a very emotional and powerful ending but the themes of fatherhood hit particularly close to home. The game was phenomenal from start to finish and it will easily be the game of the year.
Earlier today, Take Two held their earning call and praised their hit title. Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick said of the game's success "Clearly, we have a new hit franchise on our hands." This stuck me quite odd. While the game is clearly a critical and financial success, I don't see one game as a "franchise." Zelda and Madden are franchises, long running series that have been successful year in and year out.
I understand that this talk came from the people responsible to the shareholders that want a promise of more success to come. Games that transcend the banality of our industry are not immune from the franchise mentality that plagues this industry. Shareholders want high returns on little investment, they want sock prices to go up. Unfortunately, they want to capitalize on this success.
But it has not always worked out. Great games are not always the launching pads for viable franchises. For many reasons, consecutive titles in a "franchise" fail to meet expectations: KOTOR, Maximo, Prince of Persia. On the other hand, the major franchises have all started all small, developed a cult following and progressively improved from year to year: GTA, Final Fantasy, Tony Hawk, even Halo. Bioshock set the that first franchise step pretty high and its going to take quite an effort to maintain that level of excellence.
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