Powered By Their Fans Turbine vs. Nintendo
Matt Cooper
One of Winston Churchill’s most famous quotes is “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Originally written by Italian philosopher and novelist George Santayana, when Churchill gave this very memorable line he was addressing the House of Commons about the issue of Austrian independence just a few short years prior to the start of WWII. He was trying to make an argument that ignoring the past trends of both the Italians and the Germans made war inevitable, and sure enough it was. Even though not every situation is as dramatic as
WWII, the lesson that Churchill was trying to make clear in the House of Commons can be applied to a variety of subjects today. Sports, school and politics are good examples of how viewing past trends can help predict what to do in the future. In industry, and in particular the videogame industry, taking a look at what previous competitors or experts in the field have done can keep a company from making some of the same blunders early on in their lifecycle. Turbine is by no means a company early in its life cycle. Created in 1994, this company is more or less going through an industrial equivalent of a midlife crisis. Having been a company purely focused on the creation of medieval MMO’s, it is now seeing a shift toward superhero style MOBAs.
Turbine is a studio that invests heavily in a single intellectual property at a time and really pours their heart and soul into that product. Nintendo is another company that tends to sink a lot of time and money into products it believes will work. By looking at trends that Nintendo made in the past, it will be easier to predict what direction Turbine will want to take in the future.
Turbine was founded in 1994 by John Monsarrat and other students from Brown
University. The founding of the company is an interesting one. The initial funding came from a payout after Monsarrat was hit by a car. Not a very typical start to a videogame company. The company was then run out of Monsarrat’s mother’s basement with 12 fellow employees.
Asheron’s Call was the first game that the company released in 1999. Andrew Park, a gaming journalist from the gaming news outlet Gamespot, made the claim that, “Asheron’s Call is a solid, well-rounded online roleplaying experience that’s at least as good as any other out there.”(Park) Asheron’s Call was Turbine’s first real brain child and they kept the servers running on that subscription based came until mid-2013. The game even fostered a sequel that was later released in 2002. It was not until the release of Dungeons and Dragons Online in 2006 did we see Turbine even focus on another IP other than Asheron’s Call.
Turbine’s focus on Asheron’s Call is very reminiscent of Nintendo’s direction in the early
80’s. Within a span of three years Nintendo had released three Donkey Kong games and a spin off to the series Super Mario Bros. Nintendo is an extremely creative company, but likes to rely heavily on its well established brands. The reason for this could be seeded in the company’s limited success in the videogame market during their initial endeavors. Some of the first games that Nintendo produced, like Computer Othello and Block Fever, were just poor digital recreations or clear rip-offs of other well established arcade games of the time. The late 70’s were a bad time for Nintendo as they tried, and failed, to establish themselves in the arcade market. It was not until an internal studio known as R&D1 began producing games do we see glimpses of the Nintendo we now know today. This studio, helmed by Gunpei Yokoi, began to produce some of the classics from that time period. Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and Duck Hunt all came from this studio. For Nintendo R&D1 became the goose that laid the golden egg.
Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, was an employee of
R&D1 and this studio is where he found his start. Even though shameful rip-offs represented
Nintendo’s first steps into the videogame industry, their business model and focus changed dramatically after they finally started taking a more creative stride. Game journalist, Luke
Plunkett, from the gaming website Kotaku puts it perfectly by stating, “Everybody has to start somewhere, and if a few copycat games were what Nintendo legends like Gunpei Yokoi and
Shigeru Miyamoto needed to cut their teeth on, then by god, let's be thankful they did.”
(Plunkett) Nintendo might have been lost in the dark initially, but once they found games that sold well their formula for success became an example for the rest of the industry.
This formula for success relies heavily on a brand and characters that are well established.
Based on the past two decades of Turbine they appear to be trying to follow a similar formula.
Turbine being a young studio in the early 90s put all of their eggs in one basket. They believed that thy product that they had developed could carry the company and with it they could make a name for themselves. Years later after the success of Asheron’s Call, Turbine is still using the same formula for success, only with some minor tweaks. Instead of trying to establish characters of their own, that players may or may not fall in love with, Turbine is now well known for creating games with well established brands. The first game that Turbine made after Asheron’s
Call was Dungeons and Dragons Online. Dungeons and Dragons is a well-established tabletop role-playing game first seen in 1974. This means that Turbine had over 30 years of lore and fiction to draw from when they were creating their online experience. This model of taking recognizable franchises and using them as the foundation for games allowed Turbine to focus on making the game as fun as possible, while not skimping on compelling backstory and lore.
George Lucas, director of Star Wars claims that, “The big game of the next five years will be one in which you empathize strongly with the characters through a love story. That will be the
Titanic of the games industry, because you have actual relationships on screen instead of people being shot.” (Lucas) Turbine and Nintendo understand this and fill their games with characters and lore that a consumer will recognize and feel a connection with. Nintendo has been using the same characters that it has had for years to launch successful titles like Mario Party, Mario Cart,
Super Smash Bros., and dozens of other spinoffs based on a stalwart cast of maybe twenty well known characters.
Based on Nintendo’s success with this model of game production, it is easy to see how
Turbine is setting itself up for success in the future. 2010 marked the year that Turbine was acquired by Warner Brothers. The company recognized Turbine’s potential and saw the acquisition as beneficial for both parties. Warner Brothers was absorbing a company that had a proven method of producing games and Turbine now had access to all of the intellectual property that was under Warner Brothers protection. This of course included any DC Entertainment property. Shortly after being acquired by Warner Brothers, Turbine began work on a DC themed
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). The premise of this game was that multiple DC universes are colliding and that each hero from that respective universe is brought to one world to fight for control. Any DC superhero you can think of can be controlled by the user and the library of playable heroes expands every day. Turbine continues to focus on gameplay development, while building off a well-established creative base of characters and worlds.
The entertainment industry is filled with thousands of creative story tellers that express their thoughts through numerous mediums. Movies and literature have been providing people with outlets for story telling much longer than videogames have. Turbine strikes creative gold by using these established stories and worlds for their games. Nintendo does not use the creative works of others to fuel its games, but they do rely on a creative brand that is both tried and true.
Turbine and Nintendo use characters and narratives that they know players will have an immediate connection with. A player will feel a strong connection with a character they are familiar with and both companies rely on this to sink more time into making a game that is both fun and worth every penny. Turbine has a unique model that focuses heavily on established brands, but they can learn a lot from Nintendo who have mastered milking the cash cow.
Works Cited
George, Lucas W. "USC School of Cinematic Arts Panel." Interview. Variety. Variety Media, 12 June 2013. Web. 04 Mar. 2015.
Parkin, Simon. "Beyond the Shoot-Em Up: How Gaming Got Killer Stories." TheGuardian. The Guardian, 20 Apr. 2014. Web. 04 Mar. 2015. Plunkett, Luke. "Nintendo's First Arcade Games Were, Well, Pretty Sucky." Kotaku. Kotaku, 4 Nov.
2011. Web. 04 Mar. 2015.