Articles

Law & Order: The Mystery of Success

by James Saighman
October 6, 2004

“…These are their stories”

As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons for the success of the L&O TV series has been its writing.  Over its fourteen years, the show has been nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series eleven times, winning once.  It has also been recognized twice by the Writer’s Guild of America, received a prestigious Peabody Award, and won numerous Edgars, the award given out by the Mystery Writers of America.  In order to remain faithful to the television series, Legacy found itself faced with the daunting prospect of providing superior writing itself.  So they went to the source of the magic and hired L&O series writers Suzanne Oshry and Douglas Stark to script, respectively, the first two games.  While each writer had only a single episode each of L&O TV under their belt, both had other TV experience.  Oshry was a regular writer for the offbeat crime drama Wiseguy, while Stark has won several screenwriting contests.  With the success of the first two games, Legacy re-signed Oshry to script L&O3, which offers the longest and most intricate plot of the series thus far.

Similarly, in order to assure that the games truly capture the Law & Order essence, Legacy contracted stars from the TV show to reprise their characters for the games.  L&O1 and 2 feature the voices and likenesses of series veterans Jerry Orbach (Lenny Briscoe), S. Epatha Merkerson (Lt. Anita van Buren) and Elisabeth Rohm (Serena Southerlyn).  When Merkerson was unavailable for Justice is Served, Legacy producers got series star Jesse L. Martin to portray his Ed Green character instead.  The result has been a collection of voice acting that is literally light years better than the current industry norm.  The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the character modeling of the actors, which has had uneven success.  While the games’ Ed Green is dead-on perfect, Lenny Briscoe never seems to look quite right and the verisimilitude of D.A. Southerlyn ranges from great to poor, depending on the shot.  But these are minor technical quibbles.  The point is that Legacy has done an astounding job of making fans of the TV series feel right at home in their game world.  It’s like hanging out with a bunch of friends you’ve known forever.

Marketing Madness?

Finally, I’d like to take a look at what may be an easy to overlook reason for the success of the L&O games: their unorthodox marketing.  If you peruse any adventure game forum, you will find comment after comment about the poor marketing of adventure games.  While we are bombarded with TV commercials for the latest PS2 shoot-em-up, commercials for PC games are a rarity, and ads for adventure games are unheard of.  (You may recall that it was big news when Ubisoft ran a precious few commercials for URU last year.)  Legacy decided to adopt a whole new paradigm for the marketing of the L&O games.

First, it has become common practice for adventure game publishers to handle publicity and marketing for their games internally.  This protects their secrecy as well as being cheaper than farming out such projects.  Unfortunately, few adventure game companies have either the expertise or the capital to mount an effective marketing campaign on their own.  Realizing this, Legacy signed on the PR firm of Bender/Helper Impact, the company behind the PR campaigns of Crash Bandicoot, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Ghost Recon, as well as Jurassic Park, the Harry Potter films and The Simpsons.

Legacy also realized something that industry analysts have known for years: statistically, the people who play adventure games are the same middle- and upper-middle-class college-educated 30+-year-olds who watch TV shows like Law & Order. Thanks to the contract between Legacy Interactive, Universal Television and NBC, the L&O games are now advertised on selected Wednesday nights during the series’ weekly episodes on NBC as well as after some of the syndicated episodes on various cable networks. Thus by marketing the game to people who are already fans of the show, Legacy is also able to reach and attract people who may have never played an adventure game, but who come from the same core demographic group as adventure gamers. In other words, fans of the show are already potential adventure game fans, even if they don’t know it yet, as the two fan bases share the same core demographic. Legacy is “drawing newbies into the fold” of the whole adventure game genre with this TV ad campaign, even if that wasn’t their specific desired result.

The success of this campaign will hopefully encourage other adventure game publishers to try similar marketing schemes.  Selected TV campaigns placed in such shows as The West Wing and Monk or on such networks as Bravo, Sci-Fi or The History Channel would allow adventure game companies to reach their specific core demographic at a fraction of the cost of the widespread blitz campaign of, say, Splinter Cell.

Regardless of what reason you want to point to, the Law & Order games certainly qualify as a success story.  The old adage says that “nothing succeeds like success.”  For my part, I wish the folks at Legacy Interactive more and more of the same.

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