The One

So, for a long time, I’ve wanted to do some independent game development. And along the way, I’ve worked with friends to develop ideas that we thought would be cool – stuff we wanted to play. One of the things that’s been sort of weird about it is that we’ve often anticipated trends by about two years – a very “standard” development time for a game.

So, while a bunch of the ideas were good, they’re not as novel as they once were. There’s one in particular that I’m still pretty convinced I’ll make one day, but that one’s the most ambitious of all.

So, whenever I’ve said I wanted to do some sort of independent development, I’ve always felt like there was someone nipping at our heels – that the ideas had a fuse, and it hit whether we did it or someone else did. And the problem with that is that starting a company and pursuing a really innovative idea is extraordinarily difficult. What you want, I think, is to take an idea that isn’t particularly new or innovative, and put your own spin on it, and start a company with that. Known quantities – things that are predictable – things where your experience counts for something. But you’ve still gotta make it interesting.

I think this is the one: Bowling RPG.

Seriously. It’s ridiculous, I get it. But it’s perfect.

Wii Bowling is awesome. It’s visceral, accessible, and puts the player in the game in a way that almost no game before or since has. But there’s nothing to it. You bowl, and that’s it. It’s fine as a casual experience – something that you don’t dive particularly deep into. But it’s also not all about what videogames can do. There’s no long-term reward structure, there’s no story, there’s no progression of any kind other than a skill rating. There’s also no character. There’s no fantasy.

So, what if it were more? Your bowler starts as a member of his high school bowling team. You’ve got your character, a cast of your classmates, and the various other high schools you’re competing against in your bowling league. As the game starts, it’s about the competition, and working with your teammates to defeat the other teams. You bowl, using the Wii Sports mechanics, but you also get to talk to your teammates, get fired up over rivalries with the other teams, etc.

As the game progresses, you find that things are maybe more than they seem – that the bowling ball is more than a simple hunk of whatever bowling balls are made of. They’re conduits to something bigger. You start bowling more formidable opponents. They have techniques to throwing the ball – shouting names like in old kung fu movies, they can get the ball to skip across lanes, approaching the pins at a steeper angle than otherwise possible. They can hit the 7-10 split using what looks like supernatural technique.

You go on a quest to learn these techniques. You find the bowling master, on top of the mountain, and he tells you that there’s more to the world that you can see, and that you – and your teammates – have a destiny.

The deeper you get into the crazier side of bowling, the crazier the applications of the bowling mechanics become. Instead of simply bowling against pins, now you’re in high-noon style duels in the middle of a war-torn Times Square with a demon whose bowling arm is like Tetsuo’s mutated arm from Akira. As he sends his giant, car-sized ball, a flaming ball filled with crackling lightning, down the street towards you, tearing up the asphalt in its wake, you muster your last ounce of strength, call out some crazy technique, and you wind up and send your ball directly at it. Your small ball hits perfectly, shattering the demon’s ball, and it continues on its path toward the demon himself. As he spins desperately out of the way, your ball knocks down the skyscraper behind him.

Your teammates are an integral part of the story, and the bowling-based combat. You can combo attacks with them (multiplayer?), and each has his or her own backstory you learn more about as the game progresses.

The comic above is a soccer-themed manga called (obviously) Whistle. It’s a great example of a very straightforward but awesome execution on the sports manga formula. Plucky kid makes good with a small-town team, and works to defeat larger-than-life rivals. It’s great because the main character isn’t saddled with angst – he loves what he’s doing, and busts his ass to get better at it. It manges to be incredibly inspiring without being (too) cheesy. The cast of characters is diverse, lovable, and sympathetic. A game with this kind of cast of characters, with a mechanic that’s accessible and proven to be interesting…

Mechanically, it’s simple to make. It’s all in the story and the art, but the talent to make those things awesome is out there. It’s an idea that people are still chasing, because I think that there isn’t a game that uses the Wii to its full potential yet, and this, to me, does. So in that respect, there are undoubtedly people scrambling to find an idea like this, but I don’t think anyone would approach it quite in this way.

I think this is the one.

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