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Concord vs. Cheetahmen

I recently wrote a blog post about the recent video game Concord, which is not only arguably the biggest failure in the entire history of video games (because it took 8 years to develop, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and was completely shut down in less than 2 weeks, all purchases refunded), but was even more of a failure than at first seemed.

How so? Well, Sony, the company that had purchased and thus owns Firewalk Studios, the development company that created the game, envisioned Concord to not only "revolutionize gaming" but in fact become their flagship franchise, the video game franchise that would be most associated with Sony. Where "Mario" is the flagship franchise of Nintendo, and "Final Fantasy" the flagship franchise of Square Enix, "Concord" would be the one for Sony.

They planned it to not only be an entire series of games, with new entries coming out for the foreseeable future, they wanted this flagship franchise of theirs to span multiple media formats, including an animated Netflix series (which as of writing this they are still intending to publish regardless of the utter failure of the game), paraphernalia, comic books, and so on.

This even though the game itself is absolutely and completely unremarkable and outright mediocre. Hundreds of millions of dollars, and 8 years of development, did not result in some kind of monumental game of epic proportions, with vast open worlds full of intricate details to explore, with involved fully voice-acted and animated main quests and thousands of side quests, etc. It resulted in a very small "hero shooter" type of game with a dozen-or-so mediocre levels and half a dozen mediocre characters, and that's about it. Something that any competent game studio could have created in six months with a hundredth of the budget, and that's no exaggeration.

This entire debacle reminded me if the infamous video game Cheetahmen for the NES, published in the "Action 52" game collection cartridge in 1991.

The idea for the game collection came from one Vince Perri, who after having seen a family member play a bootleg NES cartridge containing hundreds of pirated games thought that it would be an easy way to make millions in a legitimate way: Just create a game cartridge with 52 games, sell it at an outrageous price, and become rich.

More notoriously, though, the flagship game of the collection was "Cheetahmen". And, right on this topic, Vince Perri envisioned it to become an entire franchise spanning multiple forms of media, including an entire game series with multiple entries, comic books, an animated TV series, paraphernalia, and so on and so forth. In fact, he even produced a TV commercial with mixed live action and "Cheetahmen" cartoon characters to promote the game collection, which was shown on TV at the time.

And, just like Sony's Concord, the game failed miserably and was an absolute disaster. The parallels to Concord are astonishing and hilarious.

There's one big difference, though: Cheetahmen (and the entire game collection) was developed in just a few months, with a budget of a few thousand dollars, while Concord took 8 years to develop and a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Which is why, while the two projects are quite similar in many respects, Concord is by far the bigger failure.

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