David Edery (whom you may know as the Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade) has an interesting post up about CliffyB’s announcement on Gears of War 2’s achievements being linked to things you did the original. 

This got me thinking about a concept that has so far been poorly explored, likely because there hasn’t been a good platform to launch it on until relatively recently.

If you recall the first time you saw Memento, there’s an experience of having an incomplete series of events handed to you.  You’re thrust into the middle of a series of events, and the logic of how you got there, and what’s going on, don’t become entirely clear until the end.  If you’ve ever read the Vlad Taltos series of books in the order they were published, you’ll experience something similar (or for that matter, read any other series of books with a sophisticated plot, out of chronological order).

It would be interesting to reproduce this sensation in game format - by having a series of games with linked content, as David describes.  Instead, however, of treating this content - hidden until certain events in a sequel are unlocked - as an easter egg, use it as the core of the design process.  Imagine a game where the central concept is the corruption of a timeline.  You play through the first game, thrust into the middle of a series of events, not really understanding what’s going on.  By the end of the first game, you have a grip on the immediate scenario, but there are a lot of plot holes.  Playing the second, or third game gives you a similar experience.  However, in each of these games, there are events you can trigger which will have causal effects in one of the other games, altering a timeline either before, or after the position in which you triggered it.  This effect unlocks further content in the other games, forcing you to go back to them and play that content.  The entire experience is understood only through playing all three games, and retracing what you’ve done with significant alterations.  Another alternative would be to run parallel dimensions at concurent timelines, so that the game mechanic would be the same, but instead of altering time, you alter space.

Creating a series of titles like this would be extremely high risk - if one of the titles doesn’t get made, the entire experience is ruined.  This is a risk that nearly nobody in the gaming industry is has so far been willing to undertake - and yet in other formats, notably television, this type of risk scenario is now common-place.  The risk could be mitigated by making the titles digital distributed at a lower price point through something like Xbox Live Arcade, and by using a common infrastructure such that most of the risk is entertained in the first title, and it will cost significantly less to make titles 2 and 3 (assuming a trilogy).

Now if only there were a large games company with significant financial backing that was trying to do something progressive and could afford to entertain some risk…