Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
There’s a natural arc to a trilogy—especially in video games. First, an idea is presented. Then, that idea is expanded and innovated on. Finally, all those developments are refined and pushed to their extremes, usually with lots of explosions and the occasional inevitable heroic sacrifice. More times than you might expect, the world is blown up, or at least radically altered in a way that detonates the prevailing status quo.
And then, what comes next? How do you reset the world after you’ve, y’know, blown it all to hell? It’s part of what makes fourth installments such odd ducks.
In games, this tension is exacerbated by the highly mutable nature of the medium. At least in the modern era, films made 10 years apart from each other will frequently look at least a bit similar. But in games, a decade is an infinity. (Especially in the early days of the medium; comparing a game from 1985 to one from 1995 will almost inevitably be night and day. Young art forms evolve fast.) For many franchises, the four-game divide is where that tension gets to strut its stuff, often on brand-new technology: Some series played it safe when they jumped from a regular console to one with “super” or “64” in the names, but just as many took the opportunity to radically redefine themselves.
And so, as a prelude to our May The Fourth Installment Be With You coverage this weekend, we’re devoting this week’s edition of Game Theory to a look at the question: Which video game franchises broke all the rules when they got to game number four?
Mega Man 4 (1991)
Capcom’s original NES Mega Man games follow a classic “Present, Innovate, Refine” trilogy: The first game sets a baseline (explore six stages with a boss at the end whose weapon you take when you kill them), Mega Man 2 blows that concept out by expanding both level designs, and the movement tools used to navigate them, and then Mega Man 3 tweaks things slightly with a longer, and more difficult, version of past ideas. (Those stages where you run through much harder remixes of earlier stages, until you have to re-fight the bosses from 2? Woof.) For 4, though, Capcom set out to radically redefine one of the franchise’s two basic verbs: Shooting bad guys. (Jumping, at least, remained largely sacrosanct.) By adding a charged shot to the Blue Bomber’s arsenal, Mega Man 4 not only introduced a whole generation to the pain of lingering thumb cramps: It also forced a new understanding of how the games’ 2D combat worked, changing fights from free-for-alls to something more timed and strategic. (A focus on enemies that tended to guard themselves against shots in some way also made aiming suddenly matter way more; few things in a game feel crappier than getting a shot in 4 all charged up, and then seeing it plink harmlessly off an enemy’s shield.) Of all the core ideas that Mega Man would spend the next 20 years iterating on through its various sequels and side series, the charge shot was the last one to be added to the mix: A seemingly small fourth-game change that fundamentally redefined how the entire franchise played.
Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
Once upon a time, no military video game shooter could have a higher aspiration than recreating World War II’s Omaha Beach invasion with ever-more “guys getting picked off next to you as you scramble for ammo” intensity. That most especially included Activision’s Call Of Duty, which spent three installments squabbling in the mud of Europe with franchises like Medal Of Honor before series originator Infinity Ward hit on a novel idea: What if you made a military shooter that didn’t take place exclusively between 1939 and 1945? The resulting game, Modern Warfare, not only made Activision insanely rich: It also redefined first-person shooters for the next decade, minimum. (Killing off the World War II-based shooter for just as long barely even qualifies as a side effect.) With an incredibly quick-moving and slick take on multiplayer gunplay—taking the lethality of Counter-Strike and tuning it more tightly to arcade sensibilities—COD4:MW so fundamentally re-oriented its home series that when it got a direct sequel, it was called Modern Warfare 2, not Call Of Duty 5. At the same time, Infinity Ward boldly asserted that the up-to-then boilerplate presentation of shooters could at least try to tell stories worth taking seriously: Modern Warfare‘s plot might boil down to slightly different flavors of Clancy-infused pulp, but at least had the temerity to try to land a few narrative punches.
Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 (2015)
Scott Cawthon’s fourth Five Nights At Freddy’s game is fascinating mostly for how it boils down the franchise’s basic premise to its most elemental form. No more hapless security guards watching grainy monitor footage of Chuck E. Cheese rejects steadily creeping up on them. Not much (weirdly convoluted) lore about the ghosts of serial killers trying to kill from beyond the grave. In Five Nights At Freddy’s 4, you’re just a little kid. There are monsters in your closet. If you don’t keep an eye on them, you’re going to die.
To be fair to Cawthon—and as we noted in our retrospective on the series a few years back—almost every Freddy‘s game tries at least something new, resisting the urge to just be “More meme-ready murder mannequins, and worse.” But FNAF4 is an outlier, even by those standards. Its storytelling is minimal. (Fans still debate what its gameplay is even meant to represent; a brain-dead child’s dying dream is not an especially out-there theory.) Its commitment to making you feel powerless is near-absolute. (No security shutters or networks of cameras here: Just a flashlight, and the hope that the monsters waiting for you to stop paying attention are shy.) Cawthon would return to haunted pizzerias with further (and better) installments (and after he stepped away from the franchise, it’s only steered harder into those more familiar waters.) But Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 sees the series at its most experimental, dialing into the fact that it runs, not on goofy mascot designs or streamer-targeted jumpscares, but a core of childhood fear.
Dragon Quest IV (1990)
Enix’s first three Dragon Quest games (released in the States as Dragon Warrior I-III) were fairly straightforward affairs, casting you as heroes (singular in the first game, teams in latter installments) tasked with defeating stock fantasy villains and bringing peace to the land. Its characters, and its scenarios, were fairly basic: Go here, kill that, gain that many levels, repeat until video game concludes. With the franchise’s fourth installment, though—its final one on the NES, its size pushing the system to its limits—the games’ developers became far more ambitious. Instead of a single team of heroes, players spent Dragon Quest IV‘s first hours rotating through different characters with very different goals, and sometimes radically different gameplay: Heroic Ragnar could slam monsters into the dust, while dancers Maya and Meena engaged in a bit of subterfuge to achieve their goals. (The most fascinating, by far, was Taloon/Torneko, a merchant who could barely fight at all, with players spending most of his chapter running a shop and trying to stay away from monsters as much as possible.) The whole thing culminated in a more traditional fantasy setup as the fellowship finally converges around a “legendary hero” destined to stop all the threads of evil that had been troubling them in their individual stories, but the sheer scope of the game made it a bold outlier from a franchise that’d previously colored firmly inside the fantasy map.
Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
Grand Theft Auto IV is actually a “fourth” game from two different directions. There’s the numeric, obviously, tracing the series back to its roots as a top-down, arcade-like set of crime thrillers. But it was also the fourth game of the franchise’s far more successful 3D era, after a trilogy of games (Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas) that all operated off the same basic engine and made their mark on the PlayStation 2. But while the stuff you do in GTA IV is mostly familiar—steal cars, shoot at cars, get hit by cars—developer Rockstar Games’ attitude toward all this mayhem was markedly different when the time for new hardware came around. With its story of Niko Bellic, a recent immigrant seeking some semblance of the American dream in crime-ridden Liberty City, Rockstar signaled its interest in telling “serious” stories (albeit in a world where the restaurants are still called things like “Mr. Fuk’s Rice Box” or “Fanny Crab’s,” and the majority of the characters still talk like rejects from the worst sub-Tarantino knock-off you’ve ever seen). Four games in, it was no longer enough to give players a whole city as their playground for murder, mayhem, and larceny: Now all that chaos had to mean something, too, a trend Rockstar would continue in its Western Red Dead games, and, to a lesser extent, the slightly less morose Grand Theft Auto V.
Super Mario World (1990)
A clear example of more powerful technology allowing developers to push the scope of a series, Nintendo’s Super Mario World is less radical for what it lets Mario and Luigi do than for how it reconfigures players’ brains. Players still run, jump, and fly their way through brightly colored levels, killing whole pet shops’ worth of turtles in quick order, just like in the Mario games on the NES. But now, racing to the flagpole (or, in this case, a finish line) was no longer enough to see even half of what the game was hiding: Players instead had to treat levels like puzzles and mysteries, as they sought out routes locked with hidden keys, thought their way through haunted mansions full of ghosts, and realized that there was far more to the game than a straight A-to-B line from Yoshi’s House to Bowser’s Castle. Super Mario World didn’t just revolutionize Mario, but platforming games as a whole: Its willingness to hide not just warp zones or small secrets in the margins, but whole levels, worlds, and routes through the game, pushed the genre’s boundaries as readily as its seamlessly scrolling screens.
Wizardry IV: The Return Of Werdna (1987)
Sir-Tech’s first three Wizardry games are essentially the ur-text for video game dungeon crawlers: Three big wireframe dungeons full of monsters for your increasingly powerful heroes to turn to orc-flavored paste, each a little more complex than the one that came before. Wizardry IV is… not that. An early example of the “playing as the bad guy” genre, the game instead dumps you into the dusty robes of Werdna, the bad guy from the original Wizardry, and with a similarly backwards goal: Climbing back up out of the dungeon that has now become your inadvertent tomb, recruiting crews of monsters to fend off the deadly bands of heroes now roaming your former home. Wizardry IV has a well-earned reputation for being insanely hard: Even discounting the fact that the heroes you’re fighting, some of whom were taken directly from parties that players sent in to Sir-Tech after beating the previous games, could absolutely stomp your poor minions’ asses, there’s also the matter of the vengeful ghost pursuing your shithead evil wizard for some much-deserved (and instantly fatal) vengeance. But it’s decidedly unique, a clear sign of developers wanting to give fans something more than a simple “more of the same” when they got to installment number four (It failed, by the way: Company co-founder Robert Sirotek later dubbed it “the worst-selling product we ever launched.”)
Resident Evil 4 (2005)
The games in this list can basically be broken down into two categories: Those that marked weird offshoots for their franchises that nobody ever explored again, and massive swings that marked a huge sea change—for both the series, and, sometimes, gaming as a whole. Resident Evil 4 is, uh, the second one. Building off of some more reaction-based elements that made their way into Resident Evil 3 (and skipping over Code: Veronica, much as Capcom has been doing for years at this point), RE4 represents a fundamental re-conceptualizing of the entire franchise. Ditching clunky tank controls, worrying about every bullet, and the general sense of being a weak, fragile being in a horror movie, RE4 is the Aliens to earlier games’ Alien, an action spectacular that isn’t afraid to still get scary at points. (Notably, in the sequences where the game puts dopey hero Leon Kennedy up against foes who can’t be easily gunned down with his arsenal of tuned-up handguns and shotguns.) Given how much it transformed the gaming landscape in the years after its release, it can be hard to remember that Resident Evil 4 was a fundamental rejection of many of its franchise’s core principles; the fact that it was fun as hell, and has stayed that way for two full decades at this point, has helped ease it from outlier experiment to mainstream success story.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013)
Having killed off its former main character—a heroic Assassin who died, Messiah-style, to save the world from unimaginable danger—in the previous year’s Assassin’s Creed III, Ubisoft Montreal opted for someone a little different for the modern-day protagonist of Assassin’s Creed IV: Some fucking no-name video game playtester stuck working in an office in Montreal. The first-person modern-day parts of Black Flag remain a huge part of the game’s oddball reputation, all but suggesting that you, the player, are basically playing as yourself. (They’re also surprisingly fun: It’s kind of neat to skulk around a cubicle farm, snooping on your co-workers’ emails. Who knew?) But the core game underneath all those faux-Google shenanigans is also an odd one, focused as it is less on the assassinating than it is a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas. (You still assassinate people, mind you, there’s just a lot more sea shanties being sung in between the kills.) AC IV is a classic fourth installment: Caught between the exhaustion of having completed a big trilogy, and the unwillingness to really shake up what had been working by embarking on the next major shift. (Assassin’s Creed would rest in this gap until it got another total overhaul a few years later with Assassin’s Creed: Origins.) Black Flag is fascinating for the exhaustion it suggests: Developers imagining life on the beach, but unable to present it without constraining it in the bounds of their day-to-day drudge.
Leisure Suit Larry 4 (N/A)
Yes, this is a screenshot from Space Quest IV, on account of Leisure Suit Larry 4 not existing. The title says “Space Quest XII” because Space Quest IV is a game about time trav— no, you know what? Doesn’t really matter.
There is no Leisure Suit Larry 4—which is, as far as unorthodox swings for a long-running game franchise go, pretty extreme. Sierra’s series of softcore sex comedies instead jumps straight from Leisure Suit Larry 3 to Leisure Suit Larry 5, with the latter game acknowledging the disconnect by having protagonist Larry Laffer suffer amnesia due to the “missing disks.” The whole thing was, of course, an elaborate joke from series creator Al Lowe, a man who’s always enjoyed a surreal meta-joke as much as a series of raunchy adventure game puzzles. (Lowe had reportedly been frustrated that an attempt to take the series in a multiplayer direction in the 1990s—and god only knows what that would have been like—had been scrapped, and so said he’d jumped straight to working on Larry 5.) Larry 4 became a long-running joke at Sierra, in what would turn out to be its waning years. (A plot point in the actually extant Space Quest IV revolved around future scientists finding what they thought was a copy of the game, only to install a society-destroying computer virus onto their systems.) Even here, though, we find the tension of the fourth installment rearing its head: Lowe has said, at times, that skipping over the fourth game also allowed him to avoid undoing the happy ending he’d created for his characters in LSL 3: Easier to just skip past the dissolution of all that hard work.
Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime (2002)
And so we jump from a franchise with no fourth installment to one with two equally plausible candidates: Although most chronologies rank the Game Boy Advance’s Metroid Fusion as “earlier” than the GameCube’s Metroid Prime, both games came out on the exact same day, and both represent big fourth-game swings for Nintendo’s long-running space action franchise. Fusion, for its part, is a darker shadow self of the Super Nintendo’s massively successful Super Metroid, with bounty hunter Samus Aran frequently on the run from a predator too powerful for her to take down, and notes of moral ambiguity shadowing the government that usually pays her bounties. Prime, meanwhile, is a more radical reinvention, transforming the side-scrolling series into a first-person shooter, to messy, but sometimes dazzling, effect. (The touch of having Samus’ eyes visibly reflect on her visor screen when she’s looking at a bright enough light gets brought up every single time this game gets talked about, but only because it’s genuinely awe-inspiring the first time you see it.) Both games spawned legacies, as the franchise basically bifurcated: Much of the DNA of Fusion ended up in follow-ups like semi-remake Zero Mission and Other M, while the Prime series continues to make a shooter of the series to this day. Neither is “pure” Metroid—the series only really got back in touch with its more silent elements with its most recent game, Dread, and even that still carries heavy traces of Fusion. But both represented fertile, if very divergent, paths for one of gaming’s oldest franchises to follow.
Ultima IV (1985)
The story goes like this: In the early 1980s, parents started writing to game designer Richard Garriott, complaining that his Ultima series of computer role-playing games made theft and murder into desirable actions for their impressionable teens. Rather than do what 95 percent of game developers might do in response to this kind of hand-wringing (i.e., toss the letters in the trash, possibly to the accompaniment of a lewd hand gesture) Garriott actually thought about what these moral guardians were saying, opting to go back and question some of the fundamental tenets of video game design. The result: He and his team at Origin Systems decided to create a role-playing game in which the goal was not to tear down a generic doomsday villain (basically the plot of Ultimas I through III), but to raise up one’s self: Where the measure of progress had as much to do with a character’s goodness as their power. The result was Ultima IV: Quest Of The Avatar, which remains, to this day, a milestone in narrative game design. Yes, you still kill a lot of monsters on your quest to become the Avatar. Yes, the game’s eight-Virtue morality system is often hilariously simple. (Don’t rob the blind shopkeeper. Got it?) But that basic concept—of caring about how a video game hero goes about their business, as much as what they actually accomplish—was still such a powerful idea that it massively expanded the kinds of stories games could tell. (The decision to entirely forego a villain, having the final test instead be a measure of one’s mastery of the Virtues, is experimental even by modern standards.) After three successful games, Garriott blew up the basic template of not just his games, but pretty much every game in their genre: The result was a masterpiece that revealed the kind of progress that happens when creators leave the safety of a series’ assumptions, and instead take that huge fourth-game swing.
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