How do the deals for licensed games happen?

License to Kill is my relatively informal column about licensed games. It’s an exploratory exercise and will have more questions than answers, more quick references than deep dives. To get a sense of where I’m starting from, read the opening entry.

“For 18 months I took it to all the publishers I could find and each one… were like, whatever, it's a one note thing, it's a one monster encounter… The fact is that they all said no.” This is Andrew E C Gaska on the Ship of the Dead podcast talking about the idea for the Alien RPG. Or rather, the license for a potential Alien RPG. 

Gaska trained as an artist and initially worked in comics publishing. Comics, as an industry, has a longer history with big entertainment names and licensing rights compared to tabletop games, both as a constant source of intellectual property to be plundered as well as a place to develop intellectual property (IP) from other mediums at a relatively low cost. Around 2005-2006, Gaska pitched a Planet of the Apes comic to the executives at 20th Century Fox but couldn’t make that happen because a previous comics deal had gone awry and Fox were reluctant to do another one. So, he pitched (and was approved to do) an official Planet of the Apes novel. This led to one project and then another until eventually he was working on the world bible for the Predator series under 20th Century Fox. 

A world bible is the kind of document that emerges from the system of intellectual property that we now live in. It’s a (potentially exhaustive) catalogue of all the information that has been canonized about a world across its various instances, sequels, adaptations, spin-offs, and so on. It’s like a fan wiki, except, you know, official. 

After he completed that task, Gaska found himself at a loose end. 20th Century Fox was being taken over by Disney, and his contacts there didn’t have any new projects for him. Instead, they opened a different kind of door. “They're like, we love everything you've done for us so if you can find a publisher who wants to put out something in something that's not already taken… you bring the deal to us and we will recommend you as the writer because we want somebody who knows what they're doing,” said Gaska in the same podcast.

Looking down their list of licenses and deals, Gaska noticed that there was no Alien RPG. Which is when he started pitching it around. As stated at the top of this article, he had no luck finding interest for 18 months. Eventually, he reached out to Joe LeFavi, who runs media franchising and licensing company, Genuine Entertainment. LeFavi had just met with Free League Publishing, and it turned out they were interested in two specific Hollywood franchises.