Yooka-Laylee left an awfully bad taste in our mouths, but it did get us thinking about the collect-a-thon genre, and how it eventually came to a phenomenally
successful Kickstarter project. How did the collect-a-thon come to be,
and why did it die off in the early aughts? Or really, did it die off at all? Did the collect-a-thon platformer just
become the collect-a-thon sandbox game? Turns out the answers are a wild
romp through video game history! We'll have a short shout-out for all the games
we weren't able to cover at the end of the video, so don't worry if your game isn't here. From Mario to Banjo, all the way to Yooka,
this is a brief history of the collect-a-thon. Or is it the collect-em-up? Nah, collect-em-up, that's just nonsense! C'mon. First off, there's a difference between
"platformer" and "collect-a-thon". Usually when people say "collect-a-thon",
they actually just mean "platformer". In other words: collecting stuff
as a core gameplay mechanic to simultaneously gate progression
as well as to incentivize exploration, versus games with lots of jumping and coins. Though early in the timeline, this
distinction can be difficult to parse. The reason collect-a-thons were popular in the
mid-to-late nineties was the advent of 3D itself. It was a difficult task back then
just to create large 3D worlds, much less give players engaging things to do in them. Sprinkling in items to collect was a win-win
because it's a relatively easy thing to program, and one of humanity's greatest pleasures
is watching numbers and bars fill up. Collecting things as a gameplay mechanic has
existed for about as long as jumping and shooting. But the game that really kickstarted
the collect-a-thon genre, and where our journey begins, is with 1996's Mario 64. Released a full year after THE best early
3D platformer - Jumping Flash, by the way - Mario 64 helped birth the collect-a-thon,
but almost by accident! Mario 64 created 3D worlds with a revolutionary
level of control and graphical variety, but the true game-changing aspect of Mario 64
is the sheer amount of stuff to do in each level. The game's 15 levels hold seven stars,
five of which have their own specific objective. However, the sixth and seventh stars are always
achieved by collecting eight red coins and 100 yellow coins. This completely changed the dynamic of coins! Before Mario 64, 100 coins was an extra life. Now it's a star, the main collectible of the game! I don't think Nintendo ever realized
what this did for Mario 64, in fact, the 100 coin star always felt like an afterthought, a quick way to beef up the game's
total number of objectives. But they were basically writing the book
on the third dimension for video games, so you know what, Nintendo? Don't sweat it. Because Mario 64 so emphasized level design, tight, actobatic movement and raw
platforming over rote collecting, I'd argue that it's merely an honorary
member of the collect-a-thon club. It's kinda how Pavlov is one of the fathers of psychology despite the fact that he was a biologist and discovered
classical conditioning totally by accident. Yeah that's right, Psych Degree Knowledge Bomb!! Woo! The appeal of an added incentive for collectibles
was not lost on Nintendo's competitors. Sony's flagship, Crash Bandicoot, which was
released alongside Mario 64 in North America, isn't necessarily a straight-up collect-a-thon either. It misses a lot of what would
become typical for the genre, like open world exploration and unlocking of movesets. Just like Mario 64, Crash made
completing a level the main objective, but it expanded the collection element a little
further by occasionally awarding colored gems that would act as platforms in later levels. Yes, unless you had the special gem, you would
not be able to destroy every box on some levels. Raw collectibles in Crash don't
prevent you from progressing, but they prevent you from getting other raw collectibles. The emphasis on collecting deepened in the sequel
by giving each level its own special purple gem, allowing the player to see how
many boxes are left to break, and removing the requirement that players
must not ever die in order to get the gems. Collecting stuff begins to become
a bigger part of the game. Our next game you might remember from an
unnecessarily harsh joke in Yooka-Laylee: Croc: The Legend of the Gobbos. G'bos, Go-boes, G'boss, Go-boss... eh, whatever. Released just before Crash 2 in September 1997, Croc is a step closer to a canonical collect-a-thon. While the main task in each level is to simply
get to the goal, in this instance a gong, there are two tiers of collectibles:
colored gems and these little fuzzballs. The catch is that some of the
critters are behind a locked door that can only be opened with each level's colored gems. We are now seeing multiple tiers of collectibles
interacting with each other in each level, similar to Crash's colored gems, but turned up a notch. Not to get too far off-topic, but this game totally has
better Resident Evil-style tank controls than Resident Evil, and is claimed to have been the progenitor of Mario 64! Croc's history is actually pretty wild,
and deserves its own video! Now, we've already established that Nintendo may have
accidentally invented the collect-a-thon genre with Mario 64, but a quick glance at Sunshine,
Galaxy, the New and 3D games (for fuck's sake Nintendo, get better at branding) shows that they never seriously pursued
the collect-a-thon, except for one game: 1998's Yoshi's Story. This is a fascinating game for many reasons, the main ones being that it's 2D, and
that it's just about collecting things. No exits, no time limits, no Baby Mario, you ain't leavin' until you find and gobble up 30 fruits. The real challenge of the game, besides the controls (Ugh, hurry up Yoshi...) (Wait, whoa, slow down Yoshi!) was to hold out and hunt down the melons
exclusively, which is tougher than you'd think. (Easy, easy... d-- damn it! Damn it. Okay, fine.) (Wait, I only get one shot? Really?) This game beat Banjo to the punch by many months, but it's hard not to think Nintendo saw
what Rare was working on and thought: "Hm, that's interesting, let's give that the ol' college try!" The results were mixed, and the
game is divisive to this very day. It's enough to make you wanna yell... "Help me Marina!!" But as they say, it's not who
did it first, it's who did it best, and no game before it refined the act of
collecting a bunch of stuff in a platformer like Banjo-Kazooie, released in June of '98. Notes to unlock doors, puzzle pieces to open levels, skulls to unlock transformations, blue eggs, red feathers and gold feathers
for various attacks and moves, golden honeycombs for life upgrades...
Holy crap, did I get everything? Nope! Because each level has five Jinjos to find,
and Gruntilda's sister is skulking around the castle, and the private stuff she tells you about
her sister is literally a test later in the game! Most levels have at least one new move
to unlock, and that's basically a collectible... I mean geez, "Banjo-Kazooie"?
More like "Klepto-Kagimme", am I right? Am I right?! And unlike most before it, the
goal of each level was to collect! There's no flagpole, no gong, no warp pad... Collecting absolutely everything isn't required
unless you wanted the super-secret ending, but progress in the game is tied solely
to the amount of stuff you've collected. On paper it sounds like a list of chores, and it did give the game a much more rigid
structure than the more free-wheelin' Mario 64, but there's a fantastic steady-handed
emphasis on the game's pace. This is probably Rare at its absolute peak. It's a great response to Mario 64, and
did a good job tiding over Nintendo fans until Ocarina of Time dropped
later in the holiday months. But success of course breeds competition. The next game in our timeline functions as
the PlayStation's follow-up to Crash Bandicoot: Spyro the Dragon came out a few
months after Banjo-Kazooie, but emphasized speed and didn't sweat
the small stuff when it came to movement. In a pretty brilliant move, Spyro doesn't do the collecting: his swift, computer-controlled
dragonfly buddy Sparx does. And in doing so, it limits the amount of fighting
the player might have to do with the camera. It's a minor thing, sure, but a pretty ingenious
solution to what plagued many 3D games. It was further tightened and iterated on for
Spyro 2, which came out about a year later. While Crash's levels were more corridor-based, Spyro was more similar to Banjo and Mario 64,
with worlds that were relatively large and open, but locked portals and doors, as well as new
moves requiring gems, gated progression. But while Crash and Spyro are racking up sales for Sony, Rare bounced back hard with what could
only be called Collect-a-thon Gone Berserk! Donkey Kong 64 featured a few
more collectibles than Banjo, but you were now expected to run through
each level five times with each Kong. 100 notes? Try 500 bananas per level! On top of that, add in character-specific
coins for buying new moves, character-specific switches for manipulating levels, and character-specific barrels for minigames! It's... overall, not too different from Banjo,
just completely out of control with collectibles! It is the sprawling multi-disc RPG of its ilk, a product of a time when games
were judged by their run time, not pacing or level of genuine
engagement and simulation. It was so frickin' big they had to invent the
Expansion Pak just so the N64 could play it! And it doesn't even run that great! But all this being said, playing
this game again for this video, I was shocked at how much I didn't hate DK64,
but I only played into the third level. Despite critical and commercial acclaim at the time, Rare's next two platformers suggest that
DK64 was the Shark Jump moment, and you begin to sense that the torch-bearers of the
collect-a-thon genre were beginning to lose confidence in the idea that collecting stuff in games
was the best gameplay mechanic. First there's Banjo-Tooie,
the proper sequel to Banjo-Kazooie. It houses an overall bigger, more open world with
levels that interconnect, emphasizing backtracking, (something that Yooka-Laylee
absolutely doubled down on) but scaled WAY back on the collecting. Each level still has 100 notes to collect, but shockingly they are now bunched together in sets of five and 20. There are actually only 17 note
clumps to collect, think about that: We've gone from 100, to 500, to now 17! Feathers and eggs are in clumps too, overall there's just less floating objects
lining walls and paths in these levels. Instead we now have two different
transformations, first-person segments, even multiplayer modes, there's WAY more game here, but it's interesting how these advancements seem to
push collectibles to the far end of the Cool Kids' Table. But the viability of the collect-a-thon never
looked worse than with Rare's final N64 game: 2001's Conker's Bad Fur Day. Conker is a fascinating relic of its time, and
an important part of the collect-a-thon œuvre, because it is a rejection of the
very genre Rare had popularized. The game is basically devoid of collecting,
it's more an adventure game/platformer hybrid where you just walk and jump around
areas and talk to people who need help. Style-wise it's also a rejection of the jaunty family-
friendly fare found in most of their games thus far, which is crazy, because before they went back to
the drawing board to make this a Mature-rated game, it was going to be basically a
par-for-the-course Banjo clone. It's actually a gorgeous-looking game for the system, but Bad Fur Day lives and dies
by how funny you think it is, and personally, a giant singing
pile of poop never did much for me. Wait a minute, Earthbound had a giant
pile of puke and a character named Poo... Oh, you son of a bitch! If you ask me, it's that Beach multiplayer
or bust! That mode is SO good! Back in the day could no-one get past my rockets! But it's crazy to think that in just
four games spanning four years, Rare themselves basically threw
in the towel on collect-a-thons. After Conker, or I guess really after Tooie, Rare
didn't seriously attempt the genre ever again. Grabbed by the Ghoulies, a remake of Conker but without
the Beach multiplayer so who cares, Banjo: Nuts and Bolts... But the death kneel of the platform collect-a-thon
did not come from Rare, but one of their competitors: Naughty Dog's 2003 release, Jak II. The original Jak and Daxter, released
in 2001, was a fantastic game, full of clever platforming but
also tons of stuff to collect. But the sequel is suddenly an open-world game, where
you can steal cars and drive around getting missions? Doing timed hoop checkpoint side missions...
wait, what happened?! You all know what happened: Grand Theft Auto III. Released just about the time as the first Jak & Daxter, GTA 3 brought a meteoric shift
to gaming no-one saw coming! But think about it: Hidden packages,
rampages, taxi missions, ambulance missions, vigilante missions, car
collection missions, these are all collectibles! They're just spread over an entire game,
over an entire world, over an entire campaign, but you could go the whole game
avoiding them if you wanted to! There was incentive to complete them though, like
weapons, armor and bribe tokens at safehouses, but instead of being the main focus of the
game, they became completely optional! Gameplay was quickly evolving past collecting things, developers were beginning to do far
more interesting things in a 3D space. People like to say that collect-a-thons died with the N64, but really, it's just the stream of
platformers slowed down a bit, and collecting stuff became an activity found in the explosion
of open world sandbox games that came in GTA 3's wake. And as crime-themed copycats dominated
the PS2, GameCube and Xbox era, the PS3 and 360 libraries saw collecting
appear in all sorts of games: COG tags in Gears of War, artifacts in Uncharted, I don't think we need to tell you that the
Assassin's Creed and Batman Arkham games are certified collect-a-thons,
just without the cute animals, we've spent hours in Crackdown and Saints Row IV just bouncing around the city
collecting hundreds of agility orbs! How about hunting pelts in Far Cry, the ID tags in
Alien: Isolation, bobbleheads in Resident Evil 7, all the various upgrades in the fantastic Doom reboot... How about the Souls games, where you LOSE
your precious collectibles, your souls, if you die? Wait a minute... holy crap, is
Banjo-Kazooie the first true Souls game?! Another thing collect-a-thons inspired: Achievements! I mean really, how different is wasting
time collecting crap in a game versus wasting time doing things you'd normally
never bother to do, just to get that Platinum? How many games have you finished, but kept playing
because you just had to get them cheevos? And this brings us back to Yooka-Laylee. Playtonic maybe convinced people they
were going to bring back the collect-a-thon, but it never really went anywhere! Its DNA has permeated deep into modern gaming
to the point where it's just an accepted norm, in a similar way that Call of Duty still has
Quake 3 Arena tech buried deep, deep in its code. But it's not like Playtonic lied to people: In
complete fairness, they only promised a "Rare-vival". They were only trying to bring back the
cartoony mascot platform collect-a-thon, which we still stand that they did
a very poor job of even doing that. And platformers didn't die either: Nintendo has kept
a steady stream of Mario games over the last decade, Ratchet & Clank have been
holdin' it down since the PS2... What about Rayman? What about
Donkey Kong Country Returns? And hey, don't forget about A Hat in Time, another
Kickstarter game that's just around the bend! The point we're trying to get here, folks, is neither
platfomers nor collect-a-thons needed saving, because they've been with us all along. They never left. And before we wrap, like we promised at the top, here are the games we wished we could have
included in this video, but just didn't have time for. Thanks for watching! Don't forget
to like, comment and subscribe, also, rep the Skeleton Crew with our awesome
Stop Skeletons From Fighting t-shirts, now available at Fangamer! If you wanna help us make more videos, go click on
over to our Patreon and kick us a couple of bucks, like all these fine, wonderful, radical folks
here, we are a Patreon-supported show, and would not be possible without the
generosity of every one of these people here. If you wanna watch the video that inspired
our trip down collect-a-thon lane, check out our Yooka-Laylee review over here. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you again real soon.
