A Tale of Three Trilogies: Introduction
From some time on, I’ve been spending my free time playing three gaming sagas that, to my judgement, are pivotal in codifying some of the most distinctive elements of triple A contemporary games. These sagas are Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper. My initial hypothesis when playing them was that, just like Jaws codified Hollywood blockbusters and established the basis of a business model that has been supported to this day, there have been games that have done the same thing with the language that currently holds “triple A” production today.
Nowadays, the concept of “Triple A” has adquiried too many signifiers and descriptors, to the point of acquiring an amorphous shape that tends to mean, at least within my circles, “anything that I don’t like about current games.” Depending on who you ask, it can also mean “arena-based games” like Fortnite “microtransaction-filled games” or “games that require online connectivity in order to be played.” Other times it can be about more significant critiques, like “big works that compound hundreds of unpaid and/or abusive labour but which, in the end, amount to nothing more than mediocre products.” Even these descriptions are reductionist by omission, and are usually employed to foster a more general problematization of current trends in game design. They also carry with them a claim for a shift towards new ways of understanding the industry, if not videogames as a whole. But we cannot forget that “Triple A” used to carry positive connotations, especially in its begining, as for most of the ‘00’s, it was used to describe games that required higher budgets but supported ambitous and artistically daring ideas.
There’s a significant difference between the games that began to be tagged with that term in the late 90’s and those that are tagged today. Although we’ll probably never have consensus on whether Shemmue, 3D Final Fantasies and Sonic Adventure are as good as nostalgia tends to say to us, I think we tend to agree that their conception came from genuine artistic motivations. Even when those motivations began to fade away o letting ground to market imperatives, there’s something to the industry of that time that reminds me of 70’s Hollywood, as those were times in which companies seemed to be giving money to any author with enough contacts that dared to suggest its ideas. There’s probably something to the fact that the lack of perspective around 3D games was instrumental to that loose attitude, but at any rate it can’t be denied that we’ve rarely come back to that era, with things like Echo Night, Boku no Natsuyasumi, Chulip and Seaman getting release in a very short span of time. For a moment, it seemed that Sony, Nintendo and Sega were dedicated to reclaim the supperiority of their platforms with interesting projects, and the market sustained that idea so much that we’re still reeling from that particular era. But be that as it may, the economic reality of that time was that there was a bigger space for avant-garde ideas in the mainstream market.
It was a very short-lived era as well. By the time the PS2 was getting to be known, Sony was going through many acquisitions and consolidating any studio that had any semblance of success during PSX dominance. Third party companies began to do the same thing, and before we even realized the industry had become homogenized. Infogrames became Ubisoft, Electronic Arts became an official dispenser of FIFA’s and Sims and Activision started making Call of Duties and supporting World of Warcraft. We didn’t have to wait to the financial crisis of 2007 to see this happen, because the dominant trends were already headed towards centralization. Whathever the vision that these businessmen had, they were adamant about the need to standardize the industry, and to do that, they resorted to externalization first, and franchise building next.
The “golden age” that I’m drawing here exist in my head more than in reality, to be honest, and I bet it’s easy to find holes in it. With the risk of sounding too obvious, Nintendo was one of the companies that contributed the most towards that standartization, especially in regard to tridimensional spaces. It’s true that playing these games toway gives away that impression: Super Mario 64 has an experimental vibe that is reinforced with the abstract nature of its adventure and the ridigness of its challenges. Ocarina of Time is probably the game that resembles a current RPG more today, but still has some excentricities today that Majora’s Mask would only deepen. And even though the Nintendo 64 didn’t sponsor seminal 3D titles like Tomb Raider, one can see studios taking notes from these games all over the industry.
This situation manifested itself in an era of assimilation and adaptation, with games like Spyro the Dragon, Rocket: Robot on Wheels and Crash Bandicoot. None of these titles are necessarily the same: Bandicoot owes itself to an earlier paradigm of difficult platform titles, and Robot on Wheels seems more interested in testing the viability of certain physics than in being a traditional video game. Other companies would add themselves to this wagon of assimilation, like Argonaut with Croc, SCE Cambridge with Medievil and Interactive Studios with Glover. It was a time of experimentation, of trying to find out what would stand the test of time, and more importantly, a time of uneasiness in which no one knew what to do nor how to do it right. That’s why Nintendo is key to understand why the PS2 ended with that kind of catalogue, because no one but that firm could have excerted such an influence to wade through all the uneasiness. By the time Jak & Daxter and Ratchet were showing themselves, this ambiguity had all but dissipated and left with it an air of contradiction that attracts me and confounds me in the same way.
The next articles are going to be a journey through those attractions and contradictions, and they’re going to be an effort to understand why creators opted to make their games in those ways and ended stablishing what triple A titles would look like. By self-imposition, it’s going to be a chronological journey that will start with The Precursor Legacy and will end up in Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (though I may say something about Deadlocked and Jak X if I feel like it). The reason that I want to bring these games and not others that would be similar (like the ones made by Argonaut or Interactive Studios) is because the studios behind them still have a significant role in providing and defining triple A games today. If by the beginning of the ’00s they were trying to redefine what mascot-based games needed to be at the turn of the millenium, at the end of the decade they succumbed to the realistic FPS craze that would turn everything into brown, 30 frames-per-second first person shooters. If all goes well, I hope to finish this by the end of the summer. Hope you like my impressions!
Originally published at, and slightly modified from, http://laeradelvideojuego.wordpress.com on July 5, 2021.
