South Park was pure irreverence and continues to be so. From the television series came malice, irony, a biting satire that spared no one. In that fictitious town nothing is saved and every event is like a pig: nothing is thrown away. From 1997 to today, success has always been strong, with some moments of tiredness and then a sudden recovery, as has always happened with Family Guy and The Simpsons, which share a much larger market share.
On the other hand, MacFarlane and Groening have never had to fight with a nocturnal time slot, almost as if they had to hide the broadcast, or with transfers to channels that were difficult to reach. If it hadn't been for Comedy Central, in Italy, we would have forgotten South Park long ago. And like any self-respecting license, it was unthinkable not to try to have a videogame declination, to create not only an even stronger bond between the spectator and creation, but also to weave a dense network of merchandising ready to expand like wildfire. the success of South Park in oil. Except in recent years, however, this attempt has not been successful, but now we will tell you the story of how this story evolved.
The first two attempts were unsuccessful
In 1999, two years after the airing of the first series and that anal probe that affected Cartman and the entire population of South Park, the publisher Acclaim published the video game of the same name for Nintendo 64. Developed by Iguana Entertainment, the title was created using the same game engine as Turok and it was decided – perhaps a little by chance – to turn our attention towards the shooter: why an irreverent series based on always biting dialogues and situations bordering on the absurd should decline into a first-person shooter approach still remains a great mystery today.
To defeat the threatening turkeys who decided to invade the town, once our character was chosen among the four protagonists, it was possible to rely on a series of weapons found around the stages, until reaching the exit and the escape point , also anticipating the tanks that could have gotten there before us. An incomprehensible approach, with the entire magic of the series impoverished to settle for a product that could be made with little effort.
The music didn't change in the following months. If Acclaim was asked to cancel the sequel to the previous game, no one could stop them when it came time for South Park: Chef's Luv Shack.
A set of minigames that always saw the four heroes of South Park – Eric Cartman, Kenny McCormick, Kyle Broflovski and Stan Marsh – taking turns to carry out the requests of Chef, the school canteen cook. The absurdity of it all was that in the single player mode it was not possible to challenge the AI, so victory was always guaranteed, even with a negative score caused by wrong answers. Do we really have to say more words about this product?
New attempts for new genres
It was 2000 when South Park Rally landed on PlayStation, PC, Dreamcast and Nintendo 64. Those were the years in which four-wheeled proposals proliferated, with wild races to grab victory and while Mario Kart was leading the way already in 1992, Crash Team Racing had already been born from the mind of Jason Rubin and Naughty Dog.
It was the best time to propose a version of South Park vehicles. The development was entrusted to Tantalus, who in 1996 had developed Wipeout and a year later the 2097 version: for the Australian development studio South Park Rally it was the first original product, with a development of just 8 months thanks to the previous work carried out on 7th Gear, a title never published but which was already in production in Melbourne.
Also distributed by Acclaim, like the previous two titles dedicated to South Park, the game was criticized even by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who accused the publisher of the very low quality of the product. A very cumbersome control system, tracks that were not at all inspired and which tried in vain to replicate environments that did not belong to the series and a power-up system that failed to offer a valid alternative to those of Super Mario and the aforementioned Crash Team Racing. In short, a hole in the water, but which certainly contributed to making the South Park phenomenon known also in the videogame sector, strengthening the television IP, after the two unsuccessful passages of the previous years.
All traces of South Park were lost in the videogame sector for 10 years: apart from three appearances on mobile of little importance, 2010 was the year in which it found new lifeblood, thanks to Microsoft and the acquisition of the rights to the series . If, however, Parker and Stone had accepted the disaster signed by Acclaim ten years earlier, this time they didn't want to give in even an inch: they asked to be involved in the making of what became South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! designed only for the Xbox Live Arcade digital platform.
The idea was to explore a new type of genre, to be precise a tower defense, trying to interpret real-time strategy in an original way: a sort of precursor of what would then happen more recently, with what is It was South Park's most courageous attempt in the gaming field.
The participation of the creative duo, in any case, managed to provide a narrative basis that served as a pretext for every type of action to be carried out: the assault on South Park by horrible creatures was the alarm that was supposed to push Cartman and Stan to slowly defend the various areas of the city, also with the support of Kyle and Kenny. Success did not arrive, but the ability to maintain that sense of humor that has always been the protagonist of the series was preserved, triumphing in the Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show category at the Spike Video Game Awards. The strengths were there and that could be the beginning of the climb.
The truth of Obsidian
In 2012 Other Ocean Interactive tried to ride the moment and, again under the Microsoft license, developed South Park: Tenorman's Revenge on Xbox 360. This time Scott's army had to be faced in a horizontally scrolling platform game, ready to recall the episodes of the series itself: with Parker and Stone writing the plot, the plot turned out to be the only functioning aspect of the entire video game. This time the motive – again linked to Microsoft – saw Scott Tenorman steal Cartman's Xbox 360, which needed to activate all his friends to immediately recover the console and not lose the saves of LA Noire and Batman: Arkham City.
You would have done the same too, confess. The problem is that the attempt to change genre and move towards a platformer did not find the consensus of the public and critics.
Another two years of waiting and here we are with that tandem of successes strung together by South Park. With development entrusted to Obsidian, South Park presented itself on the gaming market with The Stick of Truth, a concentration of excellent gameplay and plot proposals and with an irreverence never seen before. Remaining anchored to the aesthetics of the television series, with a 2.5D, third-person reproduction, the gameplay offered a class-based characterization, with the four archetypes of fantasy characters, ranging from warrior to thief, from wizard to Jew.
All with a particular ability. Yet the development of the title had been very complex, having gone through the bankruptcy of THQ and the rebirth of Obsidian through the intervention of Ubisoft, eager to complete that pipeline started 5 years ago.
If Let's Go Tower Defense Play! had won critical acclaim, The Stick of Truth conquered everyone, satisfying the needs of a videogame adaptation of an already strong license. GamesRadar declared that Stick of Truth was for South Park what Batman Arkham Asylum had been for Batman: a perfectly successful experiment, capable of offering not only gameplay suitable for South Park, but also the ability to create an open world to explore full of comedy and humor, typical of the series.
Then in 2017 Ubisoft decided to go even more all-in: at Gamescom in Cologne it decided to present itself with the Nosulus Rift, an object ready to make fun of the Oculus phenomenon. A mask capable of emitting odors and simulating an experience out of the ordinary, capable of replicating Cartman's flatulence, not only with the smell but also by releasing a sort of sensation of humidity capable of making us feel the effect of the fart of the protagonist of South Park.
An excellent way to anticipate the release of Scontri Di-retti: not as strong as the previous one, not as fresh as happened with The Stick of Truth, but still capable of keeping the bar of South Park's success high, also thanks to the two DLC published subsequently, capable of mimicking other genres, including horror. If you're wondering, Nosulus was never released on the market (a real shame!). And another piece is missing from this roundup: now it's Snow Day's turn! add a new chapter to the mosaic of the South Park video game series.