While adapting popular IPs into games is nothing new, it’s rare for a publisher to focus solely on games for younger audiences. Outright Games specializes in family-friendly experiences, adapting popular children’s shows into playable titles. The company has recently helped produce games centered around franchises like Bluey, Paw Patrol, Transformers, Peppa Pig, and many more.
Adapting these IPs for a younger crowd comes with its own unique challenges – for many kids, these titles represent some of their first experiences with video games, which means they need to be accessible to a much larger degree than typical releases. It’s also important to balance a game that both adults and kids can enjoy, so that parents can play alongside their children. Outright Games has launched a slew of these titles in the past year, including the release of Bluey: The Videogame this week.
Screen Rant sat down with Outright Games’ chair of the board of directors Nick Button-Brown to discuss how IP adaptations first begin, balancing fun for older and younger players, and the responsibility that comes with crafting children’s games.
Nick Button-Brown On Adapting Children’s IPs
Screen Rant: First I would just love to learn a little bit about how a collaboration project usually begins for Outright Games with another IP. How do you typically find whatever your next big project will be?
Nick Button‑Brown: There’s a few different ways that projects can start. I guess the most important thing is that we like making games for kids. And so fundamentally we want to make a game that works for kids, and that has a few important parts of it. We definitely like the social side, but it has to be appropriate for a kid. A three-year-old kid playing Paw Patrol doesn’t want to play a GTA-style game. They want to be one of the pups. They want to play with the pups, they want to be part of the pup story that they see on TV. And so it’s trying to find something that works for the fan of the game. We started playing around with what the mission of the company was, and it was very much around delivering an experience that the fan of the brand wants.
So yeah, we are all gamers. I used to make hardcore shooters, first-person shooters, and then obviously I had my own family and it was a long time until my kids could play anything that I’d worked on. And so it was quite nice eventually to actually be able to let them play the things that we were working on. I guess the experience I want is what I had with my kids. Both of my kids started playing video games with me and we played couch co-op. So, for my daughter, it was LEGO Harry Potter, she loved the Harry Potter books. To start off with, she wasn’t very good at it and the game was okay because I could drag her along and show her things and over time she got better at it. And then that took her into other games and other experiences.
And my son had the same thing, but with LEGO Marvel Super Heroes. And still their favorite gaming memories are those times when we were having shared experiences and we were exploring the IPs that they loved. And my son still knows far more about Marvel IPs from the game than he does from any film. Still obsessed with the Red Hulk. I don’t know why the Red Hulk was the one that worked for him. [Laughs]
But that feeling of having a kind of an awakening experience. It’s not a hard experience; it’s a gentle experience, it’s a welcoming experience. So that’s what we want to make. We want to make welcoming experiences for kids. How do we decide which IPs to work on, what kind of games to work on? They just kind of come from so many different places. Sometimes it is a conversation with a licenseor. We’re talking to a film studio and they’re like, “We’ve got this great film coming,” and we’re like, “Great, let’s make a game of the great film.”
Sometimes it’s a little bit deeper than that; we’re talking to toy companies finding interesting things that they’re working on, fitting it with interesting IPs. So interesting IPs looking at different mechanics. We have a group of developers that we work with frequently.
Often, it is we’ve got a developer with a particular kind of game, like one is we did is DC Justice League, which is a really nice game. It’s a really welcoming, open game. It’s a lot of fun. So it’s a nice style of game. And then the question comes: “Well, that dev has finished with DC Justice League, what’s the next thing we can do with them? What’s an IP that might work in that way that might add to the experience?” And maybe we can add more functionality as we’re going along. So maybe next time we would add – I’m not going to tell you what we’re going to add next time, but the genre should grow over time and should get better.
And you were talking about how Outright really specializes in games for kids and sort of being their first real exposure to video games. Does that feel like it comes with a certain kind of pressure? What are the unique challenges with maybe being a kid’s first exposure to what gaming is?
Nick Button‑Brown: Oh, it’s a responsibility. I love gaming. Gaming has been incredibly good to me. I love the industry; I went out of the games industry for a while and came back because I like it. My friends make games. We’re doing interesting things. Everything’s really exciting. So there is a responsibility to try and encourage more people into games to try and get good experiences, so there is a real responsibility, give people a good first experience.
At the same time, there’s also a responsibility to the parents. We do have to provide safe spaces for kids. We need to provide – the parent knows what their kid is going to get. It’s reliable, it’s of a good quality, it’s safe. You’re not going to get anything massively surprising. You’re not creating a forum where people can prey on unsuspecting kids. It does have to be a good, safe, friendly experience. We do quite a lot with quite young kids. So we actually have a Cocomelon game, we have Paw Patrol.
And to be honest, when we first did Paw Patrol, people didn’t think kids that young gamed. Paw Patrol is three to six, maybe three to seven, and when we first did that Paw Patrol game, people didn’t think that younger kids played console games. But our theory was: there’s hand-me-down consoles. The consoles are in the living room. If you provide a good solid, friendly experience, then they will play.
And Paw Patrol went very well for us. So we’ve done quite a lot in that age group. We do older age groups as well. But we have to behave well. And I think we do, I think in everything we do, we try hard. Of course we’ll get things wrong, but we do try and behave well. We do try and create that safe space, we do try and be reliable for the parents and give people that gateway into a fun experience and a whole different narrative gameplay world experience.
And in terms of challenges in development, what about when it comes to adapting these specific IPs? I’m sure it’s a case-by-case basis, but I’m curious if there are some IPs that are very strict about what you have to include or what you can’t include or anything like that to sort of stay faithful to their brand.
Nick Button‑Brown: Absolutely. Probably a good example is something like Bluey. We’re just about to release a Bluey game. Now, Bluey is created by an Australian studio. And what’s behind Bluey, it’s a real emotional – this is them delivering a kind of Australian story, a take on Australia to the world. And it’s not for them a product, it’s not a brand; it’s their soul that they’re putting into every episode. So trying to deliver something that stays honest to that soul. Gosh, that does sound quite overblown. I do mean it. Ludo, they put their heart and soul into making every episode. You can feel the craft in every single moment of what they’ve made. And we try to make something that encapsulates that soul and kind of sticks with that soul, and so it’s really important.
The things that are important to them is what we’ve got to make in the games. Some licensors have very strong brand guidelines, but they’re normally there for a good reason. You are fitting in with what’s gone before, you are telling the story and the way that people want to see it. And again, it is a little bit about safety.
But I do think there’s also very different ways that you make the games. Making a game for kids is not the same as making a game for adults. We’ve built a lot of in-house specialism, we have some really, really smart people that understand the difference between making gameplay for kids, even down to how it controls, how the interactions are, what happens when you go to multiplayer, the menus are different. You have to be really, really thoughtful about how somebody’s going to see it, particularly if they haven’t played many games before. Yes, there are things that you and I will of course know what happens when you do that, and if the controls aren’t right, then you just invert the controls. But trying to explain to a kid who’s never seen it before, “If this feels wrong, invert it,” it’s really, really difficult. So we’ve got a really good production team that will add to the developers who are working on the games and try and make the experiences easier to get into.
You were talking about how you would play couch co-op with your own kids, and that’s obviously a large goal of most of these games as well, to sort of facilitate that kind of play between parent and kid. How do you balance still keeping it entertaining enough for the adult while also, as you said, keeping it on that entry level of gameplay?
Nick Button‑Brown: It’s really, really hard trying to find something – you’re not looking to set something which is equally a challenge to both the kids and adults, you’re trying to create an experience where both of them can enjoy it. So it’s not you are writing a game for adults and you are writing a game for kids and the two games are together, it is trying to get that shared experience and create that fun. I do love couch co-op, I was so sad when couch co-op died. I’ve pulled up some of my old couch co-op games for my son. We just started playing Portal 2, which is like the perfect cooperative experience.
You are working together, but there’s not a jeopardy there. It’s not like if you fail, you die; you just go back and start again. It’s much more about being rewarding rather than punishing. You are reinforcing positive behaviors, you are encouraging all the time. We try quite hard to make sure everything we do is trying to encourage players.
And in terms of your few upcoming projects, I know you’ve got a Bluey game and also a Transformers game coming out soon. I’m curious what you think fans –
Nick Button‑Brown: We’ve got a Grinch game as well.
Oh, I didn’t know about that one. I love the Grinch.
Nick Button‑Brown: It’s amazing, nobody’s ever made a Grinch game. [Laughs] It’s quite good fun. But it’s a Christmas story. One of the reasons why we were looking at that was every year I used to get all the Christmas films out, and eventually they were digitized and I put them on the front page of the computer in the lounge and the kids could kind go in and watch what they wanted. And it was like, “Wouldn’t that be lovely if we could do that with a game?” A game that you can go back and play each year and it becomes a familiar part of your Christmas experience.
I love that. In terms of these IPs that are coming up, what do you think fans of them – especially young fans – appreciate the most about the adaptation of them?
Nick Button‑Brown: I really like what we’ve done with Bluey. I think it’s appropriate to the soul of Bluey, it’s appropriate to the vision that Ludo originally created. We do want to make fun games; I love fun games. I love deep dramatic stories as well, but sometimes I just like a fun game. So I’ll be happy if people play our games over Christmas and have fun, that’s a good outcome.
Do you have a dream IP project adaptation that you haven’t gotten to do yet that you’d love to do?
Nick Button‑Brown: I probably should say something much more interesting, but I don’t particularly have a dream one. I think there are things we’d love to try. I’d love to work on a Harry Potter at some stage. Many of my friends have worked on Harry Potters over the years and I went through those IPs with my kids. I’ve read bedtime stories with of the books; I’ve read page to page through the whole series three times. Sometimes with those IPs, they’re adult IPs more than they’re kids’ IPs. I like working on kids’ IPs, not enough people want to work on kids’ IPs. I think we should.
I’m happy working with the Grinch, I think the Grinch is cool. And the people that we work with love working with them as well. We’re not looking going, “We want to be doing something else.” These are quite good and quite good fun. And sometimes with dev, you reach a stage of your career where it’s like, “I’d actually quite like to work on something like that.” I was at Crytek, so Crysis and hardcore shooters and I did Ryse, which was a very, very violent Saving Private Ryan-esque sort of game. You play the Grinch and you just smile a little.
