It was recently announced that the animated series South Park would receive another video game, developed in-house by South Park Studios. Remembered most fondly for its more recent entries, South Park video games first appeared in 1998, giving players the chance to explore the little mountain town and their strange adventures. While The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole reached critical acclaim with their strong turn-based RPG elements, it was quite an interesting path the boys took to get there.
The South Park games have all encapsulated the crass, satirical nature of the show with its social commentary and vulgar antics from the viewpoint of the four children; Kyle, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny. Over the years these games experimented with different genres before striking gold with the turn-based RPG format. Offering character customization, side quests, unlockable powers, and the usual role-playing options, it was a strange journey to reach this point. From first-person shooters to kart racing, South Park dabbled in a little bit of everything before finding what worked.
The first game, simply titled South Park, best captured the show's peculiarity and quirkiness. A first-person shooter, players would choose from their favorite of the four main children and explore the town while using everything from snowballs, plungers, and even a cow launcher to defeat hordes of angry turkeys, mutated clones of Big Gay Al, and the classic grey aliens.
It offered all the classic inappropriate South Park jokes like urinating on a snowball for extra power, but still surprisingly had a competent multiplayer mode with a large roster of playable characters. The game was dwarfed by more polished and functional shooters of the time like Goldeneye 007, but it created an engaging experience and was a good starting point for the series.
Taking a chance one year later, South Park abandoned the first-person shooter in favor of South Park: Chef's Luv Shack. This was a very unexpected departure from the formula which had worked fairly well. Instead of exploring the town of South Park in 3D, players were now part of a trivia game show with mini-games. The concept may have worked for a single episode of the long-running show, but it was lacking as a full-blown South Park video game. Luv Shack was exclusively designed as a multiplayer game. Players could play it alone, but the game did not offer AI opponents, instead making the player compete alone, which meant they always won - even with a negative score.
A few months later saw the release of South Park Rally, a kart racing game that had returned to the original game's 3D roots. Offering a Championship mode which unlocked additional tracks, Arcade mode for quick races, and Multiplayer, it even had a South Park-quality narrative about the Mayor wanting to stage races through the city. While all three South Park games so far had been published by Acclaim Entertainment, this was the first game ever developed by Tantalus Media, which would go on to mostly port existing games rather than creating original ones. The game was panned for its controls, level design, repetitive audio, and more. At this point, Acclaim had tried three different genres to get South Park off the ground to no avail. Despite the first game's moderate success, another South Park game would not be produced for 10 years.
Released to the Xbox Live Arcade and now published by Microsoft Studios, Doublesix Studios teamed with South Park Digital Studios and Xbox Live Productions to make a brand new game in the South Park franchise, this time making South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! A strange choice to turn South Park into a tower defense game, but this was the first title in which South Park Studios themselves were involved in the production. This game performed well, combining tower defense with real-time action while telling a story like only South Park can. The boys are shuffled off from place to place around town and forced to fend off against the same cows, 6th graders, and demonic entities the series is known for.
Three years later, Other Ocean Interactive teamed up with South Park Digital Studios for their next title launching on Xbox Live Arcade; South Park: Tenorman's Revenge. This would be the fifth game in the franchise and once again, a new genre. Scott Tenorman is the long-time rival of Eric Cartman, a feud which became so bitter that Cartman had fed Scott his own parents in chili and made him cry in front of his favorite band to humiliate him.
Tenorman's Revenge is a side-scrolling multiplayer platformer in which the titular villain breaks into Cartman's house and steals his Xbox 360 hard drive. In pursuit of their precious save data, Tenorman flees through a portal and the boys follow. This begins a chase through multiple time periods as the kids fight to get their save-game data back. Tenorman's Revenge was a serviceable single and multiplayer game for fans of the series, but many felt it was flat in terms of gameplay and writing.
It wouldn't be until 2014 with the release of South Park: The Stick of Truth that the series would finally strike gold in video games. Obsidian Entertainment joined South Park Digital Studios to develop the turn-based RPG with an epic high-fantasy tale, and fans were generally thrilled. Published by Ubisoft, Stick of Truth set the benchmark for what a South Park game could be. It had all the right elements of comedy and the show's classic writing style while offering creativity, side quests, and customization, all while portraying the game as if it were just another episode of the show.
Launching the same year was South Park Pinball as part of Zen Studios' Zen Pinball 2 and Pinball FX platforms, and this ultimately consisted of two tables, including South Park: Super Sweet Pinball and another based on Butters. Both were well received, with the former receiving particular praise for its inspired use of elements from the original Sega pinball machine from 1999.
This success would continue with Ubisoft's sequel, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, taking the high-fantasy format from Stick of Truth and turning it into the popular superhero trend. Fractured But Whole enhanced the turn-based combat of Stick of Truth, now including tactical positioning and variable attacks with stackable status effects. The game did hint at the tie-in mobile game Phone Destroyer, which would release on mobile devices a month later, but straying from the now tried-and-true method into a card-battling game lead to poor reception.
South Park has covered a number of popular genres but was at its most successful as a turn-based RPG. With South Park recently deciding their next title will be self-published and developed in-house, the question is whether or not they will stick to what made them popular or go back to creative experimentation to see what works for this not-so-quiet mountain town.
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