I went and saw Wicked relatively recently and it rocked. There’s a lot of small things I would change: why did they dress Elphaba in a way that made her look cool when she explicitly isn’t supposed to be, there’s a whole song about it and she looked like… a bit dour, but with well-fitted, clean clothes? I’m a big fan of the stage costume where she just looks a little shabby and sad - it compliments her ‘too good for all this’ attitude, but it gets buried under the raw, magical enthusiasm that powers the film adaptation.
Could they have done away with the opening song when it doesn’t at all pay off as a motif or as a framing device in Part 1? I know that ‘No One Mourns the Wicked’ is a bop but as far as storytelling goes it doesn’t really do anything until later. If this was the opening of Part 2 we’d have some stakes and we’d understand a little bit better how the world has changed, how attitudes have shifted in the interim.
Great film though, I had so much fun watching it and just basking in the emotional simplicity of it all; the joy, the enthusiastic performances, the great sets, the amazing songs. It took me back to a time long ago… when I was young and unafraid, and games were made and used and wasted as releases alongside every major family film no matter how flimsy the premise.
So I thought to myself: what would Wicked: The Game look like?
(Disclaimer - if you want any of these billion dollar genious ideas, take em’. I got more. In exchange you have to promise to name-drop me in interviews after you become super famous and rich.)
Wicked: The Mobile Game
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| 15,000 hours in photoshop |
Picture this: you’ve just come out of the hit film Wicked: Part 1. Siri has already scanned your calendar, bank account, messages, and phonecalls, so when your eyes adjust to the daylight (you saw a matinee performance) and your phone springs to life again you are greeted by 8 missed calls and an ad for Wicked: The Mobile Game.
You click it out of curiosity, but it looks… disturbingly familiar. A pixelated Elphaba flies on her broomstick between endless pipes as the player taps the screen in a janky rhythm to keep her airborne? This isn’t an original game: this is a reskin! Of Flappy Bird!
That’s right, the hit mobile sensation is back and it’s better than ever, packed to the brim with all the modern conveniences we know and love (pay to get more lives, ads, lots of low-level gambling, weirdly laggy) but with a refreshingly retro vibe - a direct rip-off with a brand on it, just like Grandma used to buy.
Is this a serious thought that required serious brain power to manifest? God no, absolutely fuckin’ not. But you gotta think that this exact thing would make at least 100x its production cost back on the app store. This or an Ozdust Ballroom-themed Just Dance or something, man. Literally free money.
Red Blood, Yellow Bricks: A Munchkinland Murder Story
In a dim and dusty corner of Munchkinland, crime is afoot. Davis Hippo, a low level bureaucrat at the census office and animal resident of the kingdom (? I actually don’t know if it’s a kingdom) has turned up dead near a worksite for the Wizard’s ambitious interconnected road project. Ruled a workplace accident by Munchkinland authorities, the grieving widow searches for an alternative for justice and finds… you, Champlin Kell, Private Detective.
Funnily enough I only watched The Long Goodbye yesterday
As you peel back the mysteries behind Mr. Hippos death and struggle with alcoholism™ (it’s a game mechanic), you’ll uncover a plot to systematically ignore or discount animal deaths, disappearances, and related disturbances. Mr. Hippo discovered something while working at the census office, something disturbing: a conspiracy that reaches all the way to the top of Munchkinland society and possibly…even higher than that.
Thrill! At discovering the seedy underbelly of Oz. Point! Your mouse cursor at elements on the screen that you want to investigate. Click! Around in a charming 90s-style adventure game where the emerald green reflects the greedy and jealous souls of a population willing to trade justice for profit.
Not sure how I feel about the Munchkinlander names, they seem to have really odd naming conventions in Oz overall and I’m not that bothered to get it right! The initial idea for this was maybe a Twine game where you are slowly pressured to comply with requests to list wrongful animal deaths as accidental, or to stop counting the number of non-talking animals publicly. You would maybe get dragged into a bunch of awful, awkward e-mail chains (or the Oz equivalent) with your superior if you did it correctly, or you would have a normal, easy, boring work week if you contributed to erasing animal problems in Oz? Felt a bit grim, but also felt like this is something I could just do instead of hypothesising a rip-off that definitely sounds a little like Discworld Noir.
Ozcarraldo
Four regions! Four deserts! Four sets of challenges!
Ever since you were a child, you always dreamed of going out past the sands to see what lies beyond Oz itself. Armed with designs for a revolutionary new train, capable of travelling for thousands of kil…o…. miles (not sure what system Oz uses for measurement), you have been given the (emerald) green light by the wizard himself to go forth and explore as far as your rails can take you.
Gather the materials needed to make your great journey across the sands in a survival/adventure/roguelike-FTL-ass hybrid where you’re building rail infrastructure, upgrading your train, and encountering towns and problems along the way. You need resources to cross the desert (maybe a fixed amount that sits as an end-goal), you need the rail network to reach the desert, and you need information. To build the rails you spend the resources - say you need four hundred wood to cross the desert, but you learn from a town that the sands corrode iron. You can’t begin your crossing because now you know that it will fail. Another town says one of the mountain villages have something interesting to say about the sands, you spend more resources and six months to build rails to the mountains, where you learn that jade shielding stops sand corrosion, now you need to find jade. You still need to deliver 400 marble to the emerald city by the end of the year, and you need to spend 200 more wood to maintain the rail tracks etc.
As you slowly build your rail network you find yourself indebted to others who require unique favours, the preparation for your journey contesting with the elements, the environment, and the sands of time. Maybe you get ambushed by Munchkinland union strikes, and you compromise your values by working with emerald city Pinkertons, maybe you try and convince a rural village that the train is a benevolent god who will reward them with riches if the tracks remain protected and the workers unhurt. Whatever you do, the more you build, the more you are distracted by favour and obligations, the more the criss-cross of tracks help to imprison you in Oz forever.
Your goal is always to move forwards, to reach the sands and, with the power of industry, conquer them. Your fate is always to become trapped, a cog in a machine that provides the Emerald City with quick access to unlimited resources, and in the end you are thrown away, your railways torn up, and your train - once a magnificent symbol of freedom - repurposed for a single fancy school.
Start in one of four areas (Munchkin, Gilliken, Quadling, or Winkie) with one of four great trains and FTL your way to your impassable desert of choice through the country of your choice, get stuck! Build relationships! Break relationships! Always travelling back and forth in endless preparation for your impossible journey! You’ll never make it!
I can see a version of this where you probably can make it to the edge with resources to spare for your desert crossing. Then, when you’ve finally conquered the impossible, when you’ve finally overcome a million small failures, you make it through and end up, improbably, right back in Oz. We definitely got a little too deep into this idea, really boring stuff, probably should end it now.
Emerald City start point DLC would work to expand it naturally, I think.
You can unlock Akuma as a playable character if you conquer all four deserts.
Weird that there was only a single train in Wicked. They really fucked up there. The People want more trains.
DUMB SCRAPS GO! RAPID FIRE ROUND BATTLE SHARK FEVER BEAM
One of the Harry Potter PS1 games that everyone loves but make it Wicked. Not sure it’d work because fuck all people learn magic and Shiz mostly seems like a finishing school. Enjoy learning teacup pattern tarot and the differences in etiquette between thanking a father-in-law and thanking a mid-level waiter.
The Wonderful Wiz-kid Of Oz: a children’s themed trivia game where the conceit is that you are taking part in a competition where the winner gets to meet the wizard. Eh!
Farm With Your Dad Simulator: Play as Dorothy taking care of the farm. As the days pass and the farming gets more routine the characters around you start dropping these really odd, on-the-nose hints about the Wizard of Oz, “Winds picking up… soon it’ll be strong enough to blow away a house! Maybe even to another country and/or place!” or “You know what I always say: tin is for the shameless, straw is for the brainless, and lions exist!”. You just keep on farming until the big storm hits, at which point it is revealed that you were the wrong Dorothy on the wrong farm, game over.
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