Fighting is Magic Receives Cease & Desist from Hasbro (Equestria Daily)

This coming December will mark the ten-year anniversary of me playing my first “dancing” video game, DDRMAX2 for the Playstation 2. Despite this time kind of being the peak of the whole “a video game that actually helps you lose weight?” craze, it was kind of a low point for the Dance Dance Revolution series. Konami appeared to have decided to stop production of future arcade releases, and the home versions that were coming out at that time were poorly received, not just for poor music choices but also for changes to the game’s mechanics that frustrated long-time players. On top of that, the “boss songs” that had been considered impossible to get perfect scores on were now falling, one by one, to players who were begging Konami for something more difficult. There was a fan-made DDR clone for personal computers called Stepmania that players could add their own songs to, and design their own steps for, but it was rarely seen outside of people’s bedrooms, let alone in arcades.

Enter a video game company called Roxor Games. Partnering with musicians and dance game fans in the Seattle area, Roxor came out with their own dancing game called In the Groove (or ITG for short). Although the game mechanics were nearly identical to those of DDR, ITG had a much sleeker, less cartoony look, with songs that were selected to appeal more to North American gamers. It also added new gameplay elements, like having to bend down and hit the sensors with your hands in certain songs. The first arcade release of ITG lacked polish, but it gave hardcore dance game players the challenge they’d craved for years. (The home version of ITG was the first game published by RecOctane, who then went on to publish the first Guitar Hero games.) The second release, In the Groove 2, sanded off many of the first game’s rougher edges, and the series seemed to hold great promise.

Before In the Groove 3 could become a reality, though, Konami decided they’d had enough. To their credit, Konami had finally stepped up its game, creating better home versions of DDR and finally releasing new arcade versions. However, instead of welcoming the new competition to the dance game market, Konami sued to try to get In the Groove pulled off of the market. Gamers debated the merits of Konami’s case against Roxor — Konami did hold several patents relating to dance video games, although some wondered if the patents were so generic that they needed to be struck down for stifling innovation — but the outcome was never in question because Konami was a huge multi-national company and Roxor was a comparatively puny operation. There was no way Roxor would be able to afford to keep litigating the matter as long as Konami’s money let them keep hiring more lawyers, so in the end Roxor sold the In the Groove franchise to Konami in exchange for Konami dropping their lawsuit.

In the Groove 3 was mostly complete at the time, so there was some curiosity as to whether or not Konami would complete the game and release it for the growing In the Groove fanbase. Unfortunately, Konami elected to kill the In the Groove franchise, and the game was never officially released. Almost immediately after buying their competition, Konami got slack again, and none of the subsequent releases of DDR were received that well, not just because the games lacked innovation and good music, but because In the Groove fans nursed — and keep nursing to this day — a grudge against Konami for killing the In the Groove franchise. I count myself among those fans — it didn’t help that Konami took my favourite DDR song out of the game to make room for Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” (I wish I was kidding about that) — and stopped buying DDR games altogether. I haven’t even stepped on an arcade dance game in over five years, opting instead to repurpose all the equipment I got for home DDR/ITG to make my own Stepmania setup.

The similarities between the DDR/ITG war, and Hasbro’s recent actions against fan works based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, almost go without saying. This is actually the second example of Hasbro forcing a fan-made game to shut down production in recent memory; last year a collectible card game called Shards of Equestria was published online, basically a My Little Pony version of Magic: the Gathering. The cards were distributed for free — all you had to do was download the PDFs of the card sheets and print them out — but shortly after the final release version of the game went live, Hasbro sent a cease and desist order to the creators, and the PDFs were soon taken down.

What is most troublesome about Hasbro’s actions towards the creators of both Shards of Equestria and Fighting is Magic is that these ultimately did not have to happen. We are in a very odd time right now when it comes to franchising and licensing, as media companies are increasingly looking to crowdsource their merchandise. Perhaps most famously, New Line Cinema partnered with CafePress to let CafePress users come up with their own merchandise for Snakes on a Plane before the film was released. Hasbro already has a similar deal in place with WeLoveFine.com, where fan artists create shirts, bags, and all sorts of other merchandise for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and other franchises.

Hasbro could have licensed Shards of Equestria. (The game’s mechanics are identical to those of Magic: the Gathering, but that’s another Hasbro property.) They could have licensed Fighting is Magic. They could have “bought” both games, and given that the creators of both neither received nor sought any financial compensation for their work — they only wanted to help promote a show they love — I doubt Hasbro would have had to spend that much money. (Given the huge battle scene in the season two finale of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a fighting game based on the franchise wouldn’t be out of place.) Instead they’ve just killed two huge fan projects that so many people put hundreds upon hundreds of hours of time into, and which probably would have only helped Hasbro by exposing the franchise to gamers who might not have otherwise given My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a second look.

To be blunt, it seems like Hasbro needs to be saved from itself at this point. At first they seemed welcome to the unexpected adult fanbase My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic attracted, and they still are relatively cool about some fan works. When Hasbro caved in to pressure and “un-named” Derpy Hooves by changing the opening of “The Last Roundup,” and didn’t allow fans to have their say as to why the name was not offencive, that should have been the first sign that things were starting to deteriorate. (I already did a .musecast about the Derpy controversy, and I’ll probably do a follow-up blog here soon. Yes, I know I’m writing a lot about ponies these days.) In all honesty I think this past season of the show has been incredibly underwhelming — only half as many episodes as the first two seasons, and the good stories have been no-brainers the fanbase had already been clamoring for (multiple Pinkie Pies wreaking havoc, Scootaloo finally bonding with Rainbow Dash)  — and the fact that they’re about to affect a major change on one of the main characters in tomorrow’s series finale leads me to believe that Hasbro has run out of ideas for the show, even as the online community continues to produce all kinds of media that highlight all the uncharted waters the show could still navigate.

I mentioned earlier that In the Groove 3 never saw an official release. I have it, though. The files of the nearly-completed game got leaked, and ITG fans finished up Roxor’s work and made their own In the Groove 3. Similarly, the PDF files for Shards of Equestria are still circulating online, even if the game’s original site is pretty much shuttered. Some pre-beta versions of Fighting is Magic got leaked a few months ago, and I can only hope that even though the game’s original production team has disbanded, fans will take it upon themselves to finish their work and realize the potential the game had, not just for the entertainment of bronies and pegasisters, but to help expand My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic‘s reach. The show has already done too much good to let Hasbro keep kneecapping its own franchise.

The one possible bright spot in all of this is that the creator of the Friendship is Magic line, Lauren Faust, made an offer on Twitter to the developers of Fighting is Magic to give them some original characters they could use for a new game, so they would just have to change graphics on what they’d already developed for Fighting is Magic. Perhaps it’s too much to ask, but maybe if Lauren offered the characters for everyone to create derivative works from, under a Creative Commons license, and created a production bible for a show based on the characters (like she did for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic) to help guide writers, she could help spark a new franchise that would truly belong to its fans, and allow the fanbase’s creativity to blossom without the worries of corporate owners coming in whenever they felt like it to squish a fan-based work dead. (In a perfect world I’d start a Kickstarter to buy the Popples franchise from Hallmark for this very purpose, bringing me full circle to my own childhood, but I just don’t see that happening.)

I still love My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic dearly, but more and more I see the franchise’s true future, and best potential, being realized by its fans and not its owners. If Hasbro keeps undercutting fans’ efforts to bring that potential to reality, though, maybe that future will have to be realized in another franchise.