The world wants a Mega Man board game, and what the world wants—and is willing to Kickstart—the world will get. Which is good, because apparently the world wants this bad. Within 24 hours of going up, Jasco's Mega Man board game blew past its goal several times over on Kickstarter.
I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that a Mega Man board game would go over so well. Mega Man is, after all, one of the most beloved video game characters of all time. There’s also a weirdly long history of entertainment devolution; video games being converted into real world table games. It's a practice as old as video games themselves that continues to this day.
It made a certain a sense to boardify the earliest video games—how else were you supposed to play Frogger or Donkey Kong in your own house in the early 1980s?
But as video games became primarily homebound occupations, why would you want to make board games out of them? One reason might be because board games are almost all, by nature, social, whereas—with the exception of Pong—early video games were often solo endeavors.
But now video games are already social. How many people can you play the World of Warcraft board game with? Two to six? How many people can you play World of Warcraft with as a video game? A whole world. And some of those people might even be secret government agents!
People playing World of Warcraft: The Board Game via Fiickr
So whom am I kidding? The big reason that this happens today is because video games are brands and brands make money. That’s the only conceivable reason I can come up with for why a Star Wars Angry Birds Jenga game exists—that’s three big brands crammed into a single product.
via Hasbro
Sometimes Hasbro’s hasty cash-ins feel sort of sad or desperate. Did anyone ask for a Farmville board game? No? Well, fuck it, just slap the name on Hungry Hungry Hippos. That way Farmville can annoy you even if the power goes out.
via Hasbro
The most egregious cash-in offender has got to be the ouroboros that is the Words With Friends board game. What’s weird is that Hasbro is already the company that owns Scrabble. What’s not weird is that the Words With Friends board game is reportedly very cheaply made.
via Hasbro
I actually kind of admire whoever thought of taking Temple Run out of the in-the-pocket convenience of phones and putting it into a kit that you need to set up. Pretty ballsy move, to also make a card game. Likewise the Bejeweled board game really lays bare the tedious nature hidden behind the video game’s seamless joy. You never think about the people who are refilling the board with jewels that you just can't wait to make disappear. Picture being that person. That's the game.
Notice also the room via Hasbro
But I don’t want to get pre-emptively down on the new Mega Man game. The team at Jasco Games are saying they’re game designers first and Mega Man fans second, and they're really devoted to making it fun to play—to the point where they've posted a first draft of the rules already. For whatever its worth, the Mega Man game seems like it works being a board game to its advantage—players control both their own Mega Man, as well as the Dr. Willy robots that oppose their fellow players.
In the hands of a capable adaptor, a game can move from the screen to the table. Just look at solitaire!
