LUDIC LOG

NATIONAL VIDEO GAME ASSOCIATION INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

From: D. Riordan, Marketing

To: P. Jusik, Design; M. Franklin, Planning; A. Halliwell, Vice-President

Re: New Strategic Implementation

Gentlemen:

As you're all aware, the industry has taken some big hits in recent months. From Columbine to Western Kentucky to the former East Germany, every time some basket-case teen goes buck-wild with a stolen handgun, we take it on the chin, publicity-wise, when a nosy Parker from the press finds out he's got Doom on his PC or Final Fantasy VII on his platform.

The question isn't if we deal with it -- we do. The question isn't when we deal with it -- the answer is now. The last thing we want to do is sit on our hands until someone finds out that Mohammed Atta was a PaRappa the Rapper freak, or that Zacaraias Moussasoui was late for the airport because he wanted to get to the next level of Redneck Rampage. The question is, what can we do? We obviously need to tone the content down a bit; we've been over this and over this and there's simply no way around it. No one complained about the Atari 2600 or Super NES, not only because the graphics were too cruddy to convey gore, but because their heroes weren't sociopathic madmen (and yes, Paul, I realize you're going to bring up Mario, but we didn't know about his criminal record when we hired him). On the other hand, we don't want to screw the pooch. We don't want to fuck with the franchise. We all learned the same thing in business school: don't mess with the brand.

So here's what we've come up with downstairs. We propose what we term in marketing "pulling a Coca-Cola": keep the brand, change the flavor. We hold on to the franchises that put our butts in Lexus seats, but we make them "family-friendly" (that's code for "less fun") by taking the gore out, much like our boy George did last year, ha ha. Why will this work? Because the older demographic -- 20something slacker types -- are starting families and have to pretend to care about child safety issues. Because the younger demographic, once they start becoming purchasing vectors, won't remember the way the games used to be, only the titles. And because the middle demographic -- teens and tweens -- will buy what we tell them to buy. Here's a few ideas we've come up with to pull this off.

Tomb Raider: Sexy Lara Croft no longer deals with murderous mummies and throat-hungry wolves, but internecine bureaucracies and officious customs agents, as she carries out the important and educational work of an archaeologist.

Resident Evil: The tone shifts a bit and the focus of the story becomes an evil resident intern at a big city hospital who's trying to get his M.D. even though he slacks off on his homework and always foists his on-calls to other students. Your character is another resident, who's trying to expose his ne'er-do-well attitude to the instructors.

Grand Theft Auto: Our newly less-criminal hero now focuses less on executing people with shotguns and more on performing routine preventive maintenance on his car, making sure the belts and fluids are checked, the oil is changed, and the tires are regularly rotated.

These are just us blue-skying, of course. The boys in Development will be our angels here, and they'll be responsible for coming up with new franchises that will carry us into the future. Todd's guys have already come up with some great ideas once we start phasing out the old killfests, like Double Entry Bookkeeper, Compliance, and an amazing first-person shooter called Handstamper: Re-Entry Patrol. The important thing is: whatever didn't kill us, will only make us stronger -- and we'll get stronger without killing. (That's trademarked, by the way, so don't use it without talking to Legal.)