Sequels: Hubris, Distraction, and Obsession

15 min read Original article ↗

What makes a game franchise live or die?

Most discussion about game franchise deaths are by players and press. Sometimes, there are industry post mortems. Rarely, developers complain about management or team.

My career intersects four 20+ year game franchises: Tribes, Marble Blast, Zap, and Blockland. Over the decades, I’ve had time to reflect on those franchises: what worked, and what didn’t. Since I hold a different perspective from most, I wanted to contribute to the sequel discussion by writing about my own hands on experience.

Disclaimer: The combined 84 year lifespan of these four franchises can’t be captured in a single article. I use “we” to reflect that games are team efforts, and “my” to indicate a game I worked on – not ownership/sole responsibility. Official sequels and spiritual successors are put on equal footing. Finally, there are many, many factors that contribute to franchise success and failure – I am focusing on teams in this article. Please contact me with any corrections.

Ultima for Game Developers

First, with apologies to Richard Garriott, I present three franchise-relevant developer vices and their matching virtues:

  • Hubris and Self-awareness. Hubristic teams perceive their experience of the franchise as the primary one, and believe that they are have a unique ability to create a perfect sequel. Self-aware teams understand where they sit in a continuum of games and talent, and what is realistic for them to build.
  • Distraction and Focus. Distracted teams spend their energy on microtransactions, unnecessary game mechanics, and empire building. They ship half-baked experiences. Focused teams iterate on gameplay, iteration, and quality. They ship solid core experiences which can drive secondary feature success.
  • Obsession and Pragmatism. Obsessive teams overcommit time, money, and attention out of overwhelming passion. But excess rarely leads to a great and profitable game. Pragmatic teams invest their time, money, and attention to maximize success, quality, and profits.

Second, there are three team types to consider:

  • OGs are the focused teams that create the first game in a franchise. They find the fun. They usually have limited resources, but spend them well.
  • Fans are pragmatic teams that respect and enjoy the franchise. They build on the existing games and pay close attention to what worked (or didn’t).
  • True Believers are the obsessive teams consumed by their passion. They are too close to the game, which distorts their design sense. They over-index on late game/high skill players, build too many power user features, and ignore new player needs. The inmates are running the asylum.

The last key element for consider is modding, user created extensions or modifications. There are 250k mods for Minecraft, 110k mods for Skyrim, and 4k for Kerbal Space Program. Scope ranges from “a new hat” to complete overhauls of the whole game. Mods drive re-engagement, community loyalty, and sales longevity. My experience has been overwhelmingly with mod-heavy games.

Almost every franchise starts with a pragmatic, self-aware OG team focused on making a great game. Successful sequels tend to be made by pragmatic, self-aware Fan teams focused on making a great game. Failed sequels tend to be made by obsessive, hubristic True Believer teams distracted from their goal by publishers, features, or funding.

That said, some teams to start out obsessive, then become pragmatic when they realize they will run out of money before they will ship. Sometimes distractions become core gameplay. Some teams1 start as OGs and become True Believers, There are no absolutes.

Teams are by no means the only factor in a franchise’s life or death, but they do have a big impact and I’ll focus on them in this article.

On to the case studies.

Tribes: OGs to True Believers

Starsiege: Tribes came out in 1998, the same year as Half Life and StarCraft. It effectively created the FPS-Z genre (first person shooters focused on vertical movement). Tribes 1 quickly gained hundreds of thousands of players, and a sequel quickly followed. 

Tribes 2 came out in 2001 – just as Sierra’s empire was falling due its acquisition by CUC International. CUC was the largest financial scam in US history before Enron came along. Sierra and the Tribes franchise were an unfortunate casualty of the resulting implosion. As the walls were crumbling, the executive producer, two directors, and the lead programmer for Tribes 1 and 2 were able to build a little escape pod that ended up being GarageGames.

I was a very early hire at GarageGames, and I got to know the founders well. They were not able to negotiate the rights to Tribes, just the underlying technology. This became the Torque Game Engine, our main product. I spent about 90% of my time working on the engine and interfacing with our customers/community, many of whom were Tribes fans and/or modders graduating into professional game development.

For the OG team, Tribes was a pragmatic project driven by a self-aware focus on market opportunity, creative vision, and heavy iteration. Most of the team had never made an FPS before – yet Tribes was not only the first major FPS-Z, but also the first major multiplayer-only FPS!

Tribes 1 and 2 spawned an amazing community of diehard fans for whom the series became a foundational piece of their creative and even social universe. Visiting the offices or getting ahold of code from the original Tribes was a big deal. In other words, True Believers.

The Tribes series had incredible mod engagement. Tribes 1 has ~2000 mod releases, and Tribes 2 easily that many again. In fact, there are Tribes 1 mods still being updated in 2025, 27 years after launch.

Building on the success of Tribes 1 and 22, many sequels followed. However, none captured the magic or commercial success of the games made by the OGs. When the Penny Arcade guys – who were hardcore Tribes players – make a strip like this, you know your franchise is in trouble:

A pattern for Tribes sequels3 developed pretty quickly:

A team of hubristic True Believers become distracted
while obsessively building their dream game.

Unpacking this a bit:

  • As hubristic hardcore True Believers, the teams’ focus tends towards the extreme end of the skill curve, creating distorted play experience. The game becomes inaccessible to new players.
  • Distractions included single player campaigns4 , free-to-play5, leveling, and grappling hooks. Players bounce off of unfamiliar and extraneous elements, which also consume precious team resources.
  • Hi-Rez/Prophecy especially manifested obsessive resource allocation, spending over $20M on two sequel attempts that earned single digit millions. Both were shut down within 6 months.
  • Repeated failures hurt the fanbase, making it harder for each subsequent title to succeed.

Legions, the spiritual successor I worked on, fit the profile, too. We made a proof of concept which got a great response, resulting in another Penny Arcade strip. Once production began, True Believers took over and began fighting over the design. Although the OGs were present in the company, they had limited involvement.6

Sensing disaster, I focused on other projects. The Legions team did away with those advocating more moderate design choices, leading to an overly hardcore game. In the end, the game was doomed by distractions – it was launched on a new web platform with a very small install base. Even if the platform hadn’t been DOA, the Tribes fanbase was greatly reduced by years of bad sequels, so it would have been hard to turn a profit. Despite the drama, Legions did eventually transition into a community version with limited success.

Sequels are a tough row to hoe, and Tribes is a great example of a franchise going wrong and never really recovering.

Blockland: Fan Sequel

Second, Blockland, launched in 2007. You build with bricks that resemble (but are legally distinct from) Legos. It’s multiplayer so you can build with friends. Eric “Badspot” Hartman was the primary developer/designer, while I focused on core rendering, networking, and physics tech. It had a wildly dedicated community. There were around 7000 mod releases, and users often logged over 1000 hours7.

The game inspired its community – some of whom became game developers – some of whom ended up trying to make clones – some of whom succeeded and built communities around their own project. And 18 years after Blockland’s release, one group appears to have nailed it. Brickadia is a spiritual successor8 developed by fans of the original, on track for release mid-2025. 

It is incredibly flattering to have a game you built receive such an awesome remake. In this case, I am an insider on the original, outsider on the sequel (although they have very kindly shared builds with me).

What are they getting right?

  1. Self-awareness. True fans, not True Believers. Blockland is clearly the starting point, not their whole world. Their look and feel is similar to the original game – a good way to excite old fans, without alienating new players.
  2. Focus. They captured the Blockland feel. Launching it is just like the old days. Check out their dev blogs – every change is based on detailed, thorough analysis of attempts and failures as they iterate towards a better game.
  3. Pragmatism. As a small team, they don’t need huge sales numbers. But they are also spending the effort to build a better and richer base game. Unreal is more difficult to mod than Blockland, so creating more complex and powerful game systems up front, like wire-programming, saves the community from needing complex mods up front.

They have been steadily working on the game for a long time, which is a major accomplishment for any indie team.

I’m genuinely excited for Brickadia to drop.

Zap: Community Handoff

Zap is a multiplayer, competitive, team oriented twin stick shooter released by GarageGames in 2005. We built it to as a demo for a new networking library, but it was so fun it turned into its own product. After open sourcing it, the community took over and developed it for the next two decades as BitFighter. They added a ton of great stuff including scripting, more game modes, enhanced AI, Discord integration, and procedural levels.

BitFighter kept a focused group of fans engaged for 20+ years. It succeeded in a sense by existing at all – because the only viable way forward was pragmatic focus. A small team of volunteers can’t make progress any other way (which is why so few open source games go anywhere). You could argue they were obsessive since they devoted so much spare time to it. So were they Fans or True Believers? You decide. Whatever they were, it worked.

Why didn’t an official sequel succeed? The studio developing Zap 2 simply ran out of money, shut its doors, and took the IP with it. Many years later, I worked with the IP holder on a vertical slice to try to get publisher interest – no luck, unfortunately. We might see an official revival someday, but as of writing it’s in limbo. Sometimes unlucky finances are all it takes to to put an IP into deep freeze for a long time.

Marble Blast: OGs to fans and back

First released in 2002, three more versions of Marble Blast came out over a 5 year period. For a while, Marble Blast Gold was bundled with every iMac, which did wonders for the player base! I worked on Marble Blast Ultra (2006), the version for Xbox 360/XBLA, which also did very well.

Marble Blast has a dedicated community – dozens of total conversions and thousands of custom levels over a twenty year period. They revived multiplayer after the official infrastructure was shut down. There are open source clones9 in active development to the present day, including binary patches that extensively modify the game.

In 2018, a team of OGs (including me) and community members working together released Marble It Up!. Working with people who grew up playing Marble Blast and were excited to work with the original team was a genuinely joyful experience. Marble It Up! supported custom level creation, leading to ~1,000 community levels (and counting). A partnership with Apple Arcade led to Marble It Up! Mayhem (2019) for iOS and macOS, which added multiplayer and a ton of new levels and cosmetics. Marble It Up! Ultra (2023) is a multiplatform release building off of the Mayhem work.

I had a central role in making Marble It Up!, so I can speak from direct experience with both the originals and the sequels. We did several things right:

  1. Fans and OGs, not True Believers10. We all respected Blast, but did not view it as scripture. We benefited from having many years to reflect on its weaknesses (and strengths). We knew how to build a quality, accessible experience from non-Marble projects.11 We knew our take on Marble Blast had to hold its own in a new market 20 years later.
  2. Self-awareness. We are seasoned game developers with a long history together. We understand one another’s strengths, weaknesses and how to make a successful game together. We also understood where Marble It Up! sat in the larger market.
  3. Focus. We committed to making our core gameplay meet or exceed the original game’s. Our own from-scratch networking, rendering, and physics systems gave us maximum control, fidelity, and a solid 60hz even on the Switch. Thoughtful improvements like gravity surfaces, ghost races, gate powerups, time stop becoming time slow, rewind, and control/physics tweaks for easier beginner play made the game better and more accessible.
  4. Pragmatism. We operated under a realistic budget (zero dollars for the first version) and hard constraints on timeline and team size. Accordingly, we had to limit feature and content scope to just the most important things. We avoided fixed costs to optimize for long tail revenue. And we pursued opportunities to fund further development, Apple Arcade being the best example.

Not everything was perfect: we didn’t include enough content in the first version, and had mis-steps with multiplayer hosting for mobile. We could have hit distribution harder, and haven’t yet shipped DLC. We didn’t always ship everything we wanted – but we did ship, and avoided the fatal risks of obsession and distraction.

In the end, we released three profitable, well received games recognized as the spiritual successors to Marble Blast. The series hit 88/100 Metacritic on Xbox, a 76/100 across all platforms, and a 92% positive rating on Steam. I’m very proud of the franchise and the team that made it possible.

(PS – Go to our Steam page and buy Marble It Up! It’s also available on PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. We have posters. Your life will be enriched by them!)

Conclusion

I’ve seen hubris, distraction, and obsession damage franchises, and self-awareness, focus, and pragmatism help them grow. Tribes has suffered under True Believers, while Marble Blast benefited from fans and OGs collaboration. Blockland and Zap had long lives thanks to pragmatic and (I say this with the greatest affection) borderline obsessive fans creating amazing mods and content.

The four franchises I’ve worked on accumulated ~15,000 mods over 20+ years of play. I made major contributions to the game engine behind most of them while at GarageGames. I worked on the launch titles for three of them (Marble Blast, Zap, Blockland) and sequels or spiritual successors for three of them (Tribes, Marble Blast, and Zap).

There are plenty of bigger and more public franchises I could analyze: Duke Nukem Forever, Sonic, Doom, Indiana Jones, and on and on. But I’d only be reading between the lines – probably with good guesses, but still only guesses. Something for another post, perhaps. Direct experience makes for a more interesting and valuable discussion.

The factors keeping a game franchise alive are complex and multifaceted, but there are clear indicators of success or failure. I hope this article gives you useful information – that it contributes in some small way to future development in some franchise somewhere. I love a great sequel!

Thanks for reading.

  1. This appears to have happened to Duke Nukem Forever. ↩︎
  2. There are many Tribes-adjacent titles with ties to the OG team or community, including Firefall, Legends, Stasiege: 2845, Ascension, Tribal Wars, Freefall, and Midair 1/2. I won’t discuss them due to a lack of direct experience and the limited space available in this article. ↩︎
  3. Not every Tribes game after 2 matched this pattern exactly – but they all rhymed. ↩︎
  4. To be fair, if anyone was going to make Tribes single player work, Ken Levine would be on my short list, and many reviews remarked on the single player’s story quality. ↩︎
  5. Tribes: Ascend from Hi-Rez. ↩︎
  6. It turns out that running a business takes a lot of time ↩︎
  7. Check the Steam review. For extra hilarity note how many negative reviews there are from people who have played hundred of hours after the negative review. ↩︎
  8. There are Lego games with similar features, as well as other 3rd party brick builders, but Brickadia is the only one specifically intended as a successor of which I am aware. ↩︎
  9. Platinum Quest and OpenMBU to name a few. ↩︎
  10. There standalone remakes and remixes of Marble Blast made by people more in the “True Believer” category. ↩︎
  11. Every game developer should have to build a metric-driven social/casual game once, just to get their head around what onboarding and first time user experience really mean.  I dislike the casual F2P business, but the lessons are valuable. ↩︎