If you mean combining characters from different games, that might be kinda hard to do. Don''t most games have different worlds and histories that wouldn''t fit together?

If you just mean using the characters and writing a new story based in the same world, there are plenty of fan-made games like this.

I''d like to see some "fan-fic" games based on films / TV series.
There must be loads of great films / TV series that''ll never get made into official games.

Some games use tangentially affiliated worlds. All the Final Fantasy games are technically in the same universe, and there are rare crossovers. Some relics, like weapons or armor, and some characters, like Bahamut, persist throughout, and Final Fantasy tactics even has Cloud Strife from FFVII as an Easter Egg, as well as a bunch of other tributes and homages. In Vagrant Story, you can find an item that belonged to a secondary character from Final Fantasy Tactics. It would be a simple enough matter to just have a big rift suck a bunch of heroes to a far-off planet. Here''s an example:

A tribe of mystics is being oppressed by an evil god, and so they band all their powers together to cast a spell that has been forbidden. Their magic deals with the structure of reality, and with the fabric of space, time and probability. They find this ancient, powerful spell, disenchant all the wards their predecessors cast to prevent its use, and use it in a ritual. They are using this ancient magic to summon a warrior who can overthrow the evil god, but due to some semantically indistinct syntax in their casting, they mistranslate the scroll and phrase it as "bring a good power to match this dark one, from worlds beyond our own". Oops. The rift opens, and out fall Samus Aran, Lara Croft, Sonic the Hedgehog, Luigi, Fox McCloud, Tommy Vercetti, Rikimaru, John Preston, Link, Tidus, and a T101. Bam. Welcome to Crazytown. Now, you''ll have to rake up the licenses for that sort of thing, but that''s not the issue here.

You could have them all run amok, or form cliques, or try to escape back to their home dimensions. Heck, make that the point. They can''t go home until the evil god bites the dust, because he''s got the Necronomicon, and, well, you know the rest. That''s just a writing thing. The game design would be trickier. I think you could do it, but fanfic is generally forgiven because it''s low-budget and doesn''t try to make money. It would be a bona fide shame to put an entire game''s worth of effort into something that could never see the light of day.

Speaking of which, what''s the batman vs. The Predator thing I keep hearing whispers about? Can it be found?

To my knowledge Batman vs. Predator was only a comic book. I''ve seen it. On the cover, Batman''s in the Batmobile, as the Predator on top is tearing back the roof with his wrist-blades.

...never read it though.

I would like to see more games like this.. In a way, Kingdom Hearts could fall into this category, with an original main character, and all the disney worlds/characters included to push the plot and gameplay forward. I had a remarkable expierience playing the game as it was interesting to see the Disney worlds in a new light as worlds that needed to be completed in order to achieve harmony in the different worlds..

I personally would love to see more games like this, where we can re-expierience different aspects of all our favorite games.. For example, what if Cloud and Tidus DID meet eachother? How would they interact? What decisions in the game would they agree on, and what would they quarrel over, then lets throw in Tifa who may fall in love with Tidus, and what would Yuna say? Granted, these are only 2 games but you get the idea, what about an all star cast of all the Final Fantasy games? It would be a hit I think, of course theres only one company who could concievably(sp?) accomplish this with the licensing issues, but it would make for a good adventure and a fun playing expierience.

Thats a good question, does anyone know the answer? If a freeware game has certain tradmarked icons in it, for instance characters from another game, is it infringeing on the licenses from the originating companies? Does anyone know?

I think that any unlicensed use of trademarked materials is grounds for legal action, but whether or not the copyright holder pursues it is up to them. A number of harmless tributes and fanfictions are out there without being in any way acted against by the people whose intellectual property they are appropriating.

Parody laws protect things like political cartoons and pornography, but honest attempts to use the characters in a story are not in that category. It's strange that legislation protects low-quality cartoon porn, but doesn't offer any shelter to honest tributes to the same characters and ideas.

I figure that if you make a good game using known characters, and never attempt to do any harm to the company that owns them or make any money from the deal or compete with the original lincensee, it'll be more trouble to rally the lawyers to kill you than to just leave you alone. So go nuts, and if you make it worth their while to slap you down, you probably asked for it.

P.S. - Thanks a million EricTrickster. I've been looking for that for weeks.

[edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on January 5, 2004 5:11:33 PM]