What's with all the GO games?!
Pokemon, Deus Ex, Sushi, Dinosaurs?!
There's been a tonne of GO games recently: Pokemon, Deus Ex, Jurassic, and Sushi to name just a few.
What's going on? Well check out our video to find out!
Whilst you're there, why not subscribe to the channel? GO on, you know you want to!
If it weren't for the immeasurably better fashion sense and hair game, you'd be forgiven for thinking the world had gone back to 1997 this summer - as Pokemon took the world by storm once again.
And while Pokemon Sun and Moon are coming out later this year, it wasn't the mainline entry that caused a relapse in Pokemon fever -- it was Pokemon GO.
In many ways, GO was the perfect suffix for this great outdoors game: you have to GO outside and play it, right? You have to move. You have to GO.
But there's more GO games which you don't have to stick your boots on for. Hitman GO, Angry Birds GO!, Lara Croft GO, Jurassic GO, Deus Ex GO, now Sushi GO. What's going on?
Is it simply devs trying to piggyback on the wild success of Pokemon GO? Or on the critical acclaim of Hitman GO and Lara Croft GO before it?
We don't know precisely why Hitman GO was originally called that, but the developer does offer a hint.
In an interview with Gamasutra, Square Enix Montreal's Dan Lutz said that in an early version of the game, you could let Agent 47 lie in the shadows and wait for his enemies to come to him.
They later scrapped this, as they felt it was overpowered, and forced the player to be proactive, to go to their targets.
Assuming this forms part of why Hitman GO was called that, it's then logical that the next two games, in the same board gamey style, and from the same studio, would follow suit. Lara Croft GO and Deus Ex GO are born, then.
But what of Angry Birds GO!, Jurassic GO and Sushi GO? On the face of it, they've nothing in common with our other GO games - Angry Birds GO!'s a racing game, Jurassic GO has more in common with Pokemon Snap, and Sushi GO is a maths puzzler where you trade dumplings!
You could argue Jurassic GO shares the same collectibility with Pokemon GO - going and finding all the dinosaurs can elicit the same feelings as finding that elusive Pikachu -- but that in itself doesn't warrant sharing the GO tag, does it?
And Sushi GO, well that's based on a board game released in 2013, so predates everything. It seems this game got the GO treatment simply from it sounding cool and the fact it's both quick to learn and quick to play.
Speed is the key here. GO is the perfect suffix for an iOS or Android game. It sums up mobile's immediacy, and the fact you can just open your phone and play, wherever you are. It says "Come, on, go play it!" It's a positive, happy message, and the recent spurt of GO games can probably be attributed to, well, coincidence, the fact no-one's copyrighted it yet, and maybe just a hint of piggybacking.
In any case, it beats Pokemon Stop.
