They didn't ruin your childhood... you did: A Spyro Story

Videogame franchises tend to evolve with every new game. Be it the characters, the gameplay, the graphics, pretty much every game in a given franchise is different. Sometimes the differences are subtle; like in the Pokemon, Modern Warfare, or New Super Mario Bros. series. And sometimes the differences are more pronounced, exemplified by the Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus franchises.
I've always been one that's quite open to change. I love it when developers keep things fresh and give the next game in their series a radical new art style, or totally revamped gameplay. I do understand that a lot people prefer franchises that make smaller, more subtle, tweaks to each game, and I'm totally fine with that to. What I'm not so fine with is when people get upset to an irrational degree when companies make drastic changes to a new game in a series.



Let's talk Spyro. The original came out on the PS1 to commercial and critical success. People seemed to love taking control of the fiery purple dragon and traversing around the whimsical and wonderful world that insomniac had created. In 1999, a sequel was released. Like the original, it was an action-platformer, and like the original, it was pretty darn good. It expanded upon the first game the way that some would argue a sequel should, and made the game bigger and better in just about every respect. The next year the third and final Spyro game for the original Playstation hit store shelves to almost universal praise. This was considered by pretty much everyone to be the greatest Spyro game ever. It gave players a larger world to explore and fine-tuned the established action-platformer gameplay to a polished sheen. It didn't make too many differences, save for the addition of extra playable characters, but it didn't really need to. It's gameplay still felt fresh and new.



Fast forward to 2011, and the Spyro franchise is not as it once was. The purple reptile had starred in a number of games since his PSX days and while not all of them were necessarily bad, they were not nearly as revolutionary or exciting as the original trilogy. This might have had something to do with the fact that Insomniac no longer owned the Spyro license. The series was growing stagnant and needed something new.

In February of 2011 Activision announced Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure; a dungeon crawler RPG that featured collectible models that you could collect in real life and use in the game. It was radically different than any Spyro game before it, and was set to reinvigorate the franchise with a new art style and cast of characters. In fact, the only thing the game had in common with others in the series was that Spyro had his name on the cover. It might have done Activision well to keep their scaly friend out of the picture because the announcement enraged Spyro fans everywhere. They claimed that they had tainted Spyro's name forever and ruined their childhood memories with the original games. Some fans even went as far as to send the developers death threats. It was ridiculous.



The fact that gamers are so attached to franchises to the point where they claim that developers ruined their childhood memories with the original games is kind of disgusting. Those memories that you had with those games are your own. No one is going to take them away from you. If you don't like something that a dev is doing with a new game in a franchise, that's fine, just don't play the game. Don't let yourself ruin those memories.

I've seen similar behavior for fans of the original Devil May Cry series that express dismay that the new DMC is coming out, as well as from fans of the original Tomb Raider. To those people I say just don't buy the new games and don't ruin the old games for yourself. Or maybe you could have an open mind and try the new games out! You might even enjoy them more than the originals... just a thought.