Viva Pinata: Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Viva Pinata is one of my favorite games ever. Partially because of how brilliant it is on its own, partially because it’s a Rare game that is proud of its heritage, but I think a big part of why I love it so much is that it’s unique. In a generation that has been overrun by desaturated, realistic, military shooters, the fact that Viva Pinata, an HD console game, exists at all is nothing short of a miracle. I don’t think it was really given the proper chance it really needed to become a cultural phenomenon because no one exactly knew what to do with it.

But before I continue, a history lesson…

Nah. Just kidding! If I gave a history lesson on console Rare game, it wouldn’t be a paragraph or two about it. It’d be pages and pages of irrelevant information. You ever listen to someone in a monotone voice ramble about stalagmites before? You know, those weird things in caves that are created by dripping water over long periods of times? It’d be worse than that. If you’d like to read about Viva Pinata’s history, may I suggest this Gamasutra article and this MundoRare article.

Right then, Viva Pinata: What is it? It’s an Xbox 360 gardening game (with elements stolen from the god-genre) where you make a garden, and based on the contents of your garden, different piñatas will come live in your garden. It’s Dr. Seuss meets Pokemon. It’s Animal Crossing meets capitalism. It’s Harvest Moon 64 meets the Sesame Street Muppets. It’s a playable dream.

I enjoyed its sequel, Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, but I don’t know if it was the design changes, or the aesthetic shift to technology, or the fact it felt less like Viva Pinata 2 and more like Viva Pinata: DLC Complete Edition, but the original Viva Pinata was a game that felt magical to me that no other game has really come close to recreating that emotional response from me.

It’s a game that boasts that it’s a Rare game every chance it gets: there’s colorful characters, there’s sexual innuendos coming out of every orifice (heh), it’s clever, it’s inspired, it’s laced with dark humor, it’s classic Rare. As every day goes by, with the exception of Nintendo, Media Molecule, and Double Fine, I believe less and less that a game like this could exist. A lot of…kids, or rather “family” games, end up neutered, lacking any sort of charm or bite, but Viva Pinata loves being able to get away with murder…sometimes literally.

Out of context, I can mate (“Romance Dance”) piñatas of the same species together to create new piñatas, and since it doesn’t keep track of genders or ancestry, I can have Pinata A and Pinata B to mate to create Pinata C and then have Pinata C mate with Pinata B. I can also break open a piñata with my shovel, causing candy to fall out, children to cheer, and the other piñatas devour the chocolately remains.

So, for a game supposedly for families/children, it has gotten away with incest, murder, and cannibalism. What other E games let me do that?

The game certainly had faults, though, like having extreme difficulty jumps. One moment, only a few piñatas are visiting your garden, but next thing you know, there’s a few elephant, bear, and crocodile piñatas visiting and then you’re trying to make a weird swamp/fir tree/jungle garden ecosystem. Another big design problem is that different piñatas require different things before they join your garden but the piñatas seem to decide if they want to stop by your garden, even though you have everything they “require.” Like how a Quackberry requires you to have at least 1 corn plant in your garden and have at least 4% of your garden be water for him to visit the garden. I’ve done that, and yet he decides not to visit. I added more water and corn, and still nothing. He’s just hanging outside my garden, staring in. At one point, my garden was basically nothing but water and corn, and then he finally fancied a stroll though my ecosystem of madness. It would have been nicer for piñatas to actually show up when I met their requirements instead of it just increasing the possibilities of them showing up.

The biggest problem with Viva Pinata is that Microsoft (or Rare to a much lesser extent) had no idea how to use it. Microsoft, at least initially, did try to push Viva Pinata. They made a deal with Burger King to distribute Viva Pinata meal toys, they had 4Kids make a TV show, what more could they do? They could have done good marketing, by which I mean not just throwing money at the problem, but actually understanding what it’s about. Burger King toys are fine, but originally, they had a lot more merchandise planned. A lot more. If you’re not making party supplies, like piñatas, with a franchise that’s all about piñatas and parties, you clearly have no idea what you’re doing. Like that damn Viva Pinata TV show. Pokemon had a TV show. So did Yugioh. Why did those work? Simple: the show’s actually about the game.

In the Pokemon game, you catch and train Pokemon. In the Pokemon TV show, the characters catch and train Pokemon.

In the Yugioh card game, people play a children’s card game. In the Yugioh TV show, the characters play a children’s card game.

In the Viva Pinata game, you build a garden and raise piñatas. In the Viva Pinata TV show…uh…talking versions of the game’s piñatas go on typical cartoon adventures.

If their goal was to make a mediocre TV show, they succeeded. If their goal was to make a TV show to act as a half-hour commercial for their toy, they failed spectacularly. Microsoft never really had experience marketing games to kids/families before, so I’m gonna assume 4Kids is also responsible for that disappointment of a TV show. And, keep in mind, this is coming from someone who wants to be exploited. If you can’t get me or little kids interested in a TV show that’s based off of a wonderful game that I love, then you probably should not be in advertising. Actually, oddly enough, the Microsoft employee who’s closest to understanding Viva Pinata is Bill Gates.

In some interview, Bill Gates famously described Viva Pinata as game for “young girls,” and this comment riled up Internet, but I actually agree with him, in a way. Microsoft kept pushing Viva Pinata as a game that’s in your face and ridiculous and energetic and basically a Nickelodeon show on coke. But Viva Pinata, though at times is ridiculous and energetic, isn’t what Microsoft thinks it is. Viva Pinata’s a pretty emotional game.

Here’s the intro theme to the TV show. Here’s the TV show end theme song.

Here’s some music from the game. Here’s another song from the game.

The TV show is perpetually happy, lacking any real emotional depth, whereas the game can be both happy and sad, but it always has an emotional component.

The game is pretty sad at times. Like one time, it was raining at night, and my Squazzil was sad. He was hiding under one of my garden’s trees, crying. I felt bad for the little guy, as I hadn’t built him a house yet because piñata houses are expensive and since I only had one Squazzil, I didn’t see the point in buying a house, who’s primary function would be allowing Squazzil’s to reproduce. But I made an exception for Little Conker and bought him a home. The summer I first played Viva Pinata was also the summer I first played Bioshock, but it was Viva Pinata that sold me on the idea of Emergent Gameplay/Storytelling.

From a business side, I don’t think they sold Viva Pinata properly. I don’t have an issue with it being released the same week as Gears of War, as the target audience with Viva Pinata were the people who weren’t likely to buy an Xbox 360 in the first place. My complaint is that Viva Pinata should have been Rare’s/Microsoft’s first Free-to-Play game on the Xbox 360. The game went from $60 to $20 dollars very quickly. Rare/Microsoft should have been releasing new outfits/accessories and possibly new piñatas through downloadable content (DLC). By doing this, though they still wouldn’t have control over the retail prices, they could keep the DLC prices constant. Once people became addicted to Viva Pinata, they could then nickel and dime them on the Xbox Live Marketplace. And sticking to the strategy of expanding the market, they could have used Viva Pinata as a way to get those people onto Xbox Live. The original game allowed you to mail piñatas and the sequel did allow for other players to work together in other gardens, but those Live uses never made new players explore the Marketplace and spend money.

Microsoft did try, though: they ported the original over to PC, they released a DS version and a sequel, but sometimes you can’t just make a product and throw a bunch of money at it and hope that quality + money = success. Sometimes, it’s about introducing the product properly and in a unique way. A good first impression goes a long way. And in an industry that doesn’t like its big games to be quirky, unique, or different, a little mistake could cost you everything.