Fighting is Magic and Video Game History · 7:07am Mar 16th, 2013
So today, I learned something that surprised me greatly. I’m sure many of you know about this already, but I didn’t.
The whole thing with the Mane6 adapting their work to have original characters has happened before with other games. That’s not the surprise in of itself—after all, lots of us have heard of Freedom Planet, which was originally a Sonic fangame. But that is not the only example... or the most impressive.
Back around 1980, a company which had recently entered the video game marked wanted to make a Popeye game. They got the game made, but couldn’t acquire the rights to use Popeye. So they did what Mane6 is doing now: they remade the game with original characters. The characters themselves were interesting, but the names weren’t the most original: they replaced Popeye with a guy named "Jumpman" and Olive Oyl with a lady named "Lady". (Yes, I’m sure some of you recognize those names. Just humor me here.)
Jumpman? Lady? 
Sounds really dumb, right? Yes, yes it does—but it worked. The game became incredibly successful.
And now let me pull back the proverbial curtain:
The company was Nintendo.
The game was Donkey Kong.
Jumpman was renamed Mario.
Lady was renamed Pauline... who kinda-sorta became Princess Peach.
And so that little incident, that inability of Nintendo to get a license for Popeye, is what led to the creation of the Mario franchise. A franchise which is now worth around $10 billion.
Of course, things were a bit different in that scenario—Nintendo was a relatively large company, and so they had capital to sink into a franchise to help it grow, and all that fancy business stuff. Mane6 doesn’t have that, but they do have some major power in their corner. They’ve got Faust on their team, and now it looks like they might get to use the Skullgirls engine. True, No Ponies is a bad thing, but the good news is they’re not under Hasbro’s thumb. They can do whatever they want... like sell merchandise!
Now I’ll bring up another successful franchise: Angry Birds. It started out as a simple smartphone game, and now it’s huge. It’s worth around $1.2 billion, and a lot of that is probably due to merchandising. There’s Angry Birds pajamas, Angry Birds plushies, Angry Birds cookbooks, etc. And now that (the game formerly known as) Fighting is Magic is a fully independent project, no one can stop Mane6 from doing the same thing.
(They could even make toys for little girls! Ya know, just to see how Hasbro reacts.)
Okay, that’s pretty much all I got. Just wanted to share my little find about Mario and stuff.
And then, they'd have grown men buying them, and it would be bronies all over again