Remember that awful Disney show written by an amazing woman, but rendered marketing stew by the ghoulish, gnawing teeth of the mouse from Hell? Yes, I mean “Once Upon A Time,” which won all sorts of awards but was really garbage. You know why it was garbage? The story was always sacrificed to indoctrinate a new generation of media consumers to past Disney characters they might have missed while they were busy during fetal development.

Why the @#$% is Mulan in Cabbot Cove?

It all became about marketing every Disney character ever, casting a wide net in front of a captive audience to up-sell videos, merchandise…. and that most holy of opportunities: a visit to the divine kingdom itself. Where some poor minimum wage employee wearing staff underwear will kill your wife with a salad, and the mouse and his lawyers will drag you into a private room until you confess the entire situation, all Dick Cheney-like, was really your fault.

Maybe not that last bit, but the rest is definitely true. I had to accept two Disney arbitration disclaimers just to launch “Marvel’s Midnight Suns” since the last launcher update. They are serious about that flippin’ salad, people.

At any rate, this is the exact same problem that beset Marvel’s Midnight Suns: a fairly enjoyable strategic deck-building turn-based rpg by Firaxis turned into a marketing and indoctrination vehicle by agents of Voldemouse. In this case, a group of people who – perhaps more than any other professional group in the entire world – has entirely lost the plot.

Other than the combat, which is great, almost all of Marvel’s Midnight Suns involves getting to know the backstories of a number of Marvel super heroes. What groups they were part of before the Midnight Suns. What’s going on in their corner of the Marvelverse at the time the game was released. And all while encouraging players to curry the favor of these our noble heroes by buying them gift after gift, and taking them on outings, which the hero then rates on how well the player has matched their interests and moods.

It’s a loyalty test.

Everything is buy, buy, buy. Unlock the outfits? Buy them! (with in-game currency. It’s just a mental thing. Except for when it’s not.) Want different colors for the outfits? Buy those too! Each separate one. Everything a micro-transaction. Want to print out a photo to hang? 50 coins to convert your photomode snapshot to a picture you can hang on the wall of your virtual mansion. In frames that don’t fit it.

Want the Marvel Superheroes to think you’re swell? You better get out that fat wallet now, and then go read The Runaways, and catch up with the Spider-Man movies. Just to make sure you get who these people really are. Haven’t heard of The Runaways? No problem. There’s a show… might be available on Disney+ with a cheap subscription.

Say… want a salad?

IT’S A CRAP GAME UNWORTHY OF A SEQUEL because it’s almost all marketing material and skinnerian-level repetitive behavior conditioning. Spend money: do well. Your Marvel friends will like you. Buy them outfits. Buy them presents. Take them fishing. Learn their desires. Know them. Buy them. Know them. Buy them. Know them. Buy them…

As it’s all in-game currency, it isn’t even pay-to-win. It’s pay-to-feel-like-you’re-winning.

Absolutely nobody at Marvel or the APA was trying to create a more engaging and fun to play game. They were trying to teach you that you’ll have more fun if you buy their other products. Watch the movies. Visit the stores. Buy the merchandise. There’s a new ride in Orlando just as soon as you sign this legal disclaimer…

The worst part is: take away all the BS and you’d have most of a really good game. Nobody made me want to know more about Nico than interacting with Nico. Not asking her to verbalize a character FAQ. Not knowing the name of her fellow Runaways, or how the game differed from the series. What made me want to see a new chapter for the Hunter was a combination of being able to just be a hero along with other heroes and a compelling story.

But everyone had to muddy it all up with a stupid collection-based mentality. Might as well have been Marvel’s Hush Hush in some respects.

Disney’s marketing folks might know a thing or two about drawing in the general consumer with a lot of merchandising possibilities, but they know jack squat about what compels a gamer to buy merchandise, or even the next in a series of games as Marvel’s Midnight Suns will never see a chapter two.

Why? Because they don’t like you.

They refuse to understand that the art that creates the storefront, not the other way around. It’s compelling and innovative gameplay that invokes strong memories and fan loyalty. I still have a DOOM poster hanging above my computer desk. I paid $20 at the time for the ultimate edition after spending a couple of years playing the freely-distributed demo available on every BBS system in the world back in the day. Why? Because it was a really fun game and I wanted more more more. I wanted to brand myself as a DOOM player, not have that decision be made for me by a squeak toy with an accountant’s hand up his wow hole.

I wanted that poster. I wanted it because it represented something that meant something to me. It didn’t come to mean something to me because a pysch grad-turned-marketer (M-i-c….k-e-y…. ) told me I should, or kept incentivizing me to literally buy into that character’s existence.

People who spend a huge chunk of time playing video games don’t care about stores or your theme parks. WE DON’T WANT TO LEAVE THE HOUSE, especially if there’s a chance we’ll DIE and our loved ones left unable to do anything about it because reasons. People coaxed into playing your video games based on movies or toys or whatnot are already sold. The game, for them, is the upsell.

It’s too bad. There was some really good story in Midnight Suns, if you could stand the market and the grind to get at it. Some excellent strategy, and a fun combination of deck-building and action I never appreciated before Midnight Suns. Great, if extremely unoptimized, digital art. Excellent voice acting. They had to ruin it with incessant headology, and now the fully customizable new Marvel hero Deadpool promised we’d be so thrilled to accessorize is DOA.

And his mom.

Because I had to accept those stupid disclaimers to play the game in the first place, there is now ZERO chance I will ever set foot on a Disney-owned property, or even go to see a Marvel release in the theaters. I mean, I already have a Disney+ subscription and I’ve come to terms with my likely fate (arbitration is just the Christian Scientist word for purgatory). But I know how to protect my soul. It’s my ass I’m worried about. No way I’m getting Richard Geere-d from Burbank.

Maybe Disney will learn from the relative failure of Midnight Suns at the sales counter and let video game developers go back to the unthinkable task of actually developing video games. Of Espenson-level writers delivering stories that compel us to want more, rather than trying to train us into it by dropping little breadcrumbs that only lead deeper into the fores…

Hey! Wait a minute. Didn’t I learn that trick from them? Or was it Nancy Pavlov over at the APA?

Take a chance on The Hunter. Let some willing studio do what Disney loves to do second-best: give it a re-boot. Give us a Midnight Suns that makes us want to seek out Agatha Harkness and find out why she’s a sheriff. Because she’s a great character in the game, not because there’s a doll. If you’re going to make a game, give us a game that earns praise from people that hate your movies, not just the people that love them.

Sorry, Mickey. But this is one part of the maze where a mouse still needs to hunt for his cheese. Marvel Comics developed its own set of fans over the decades doing what they do best: not being Disney. Spider-Man was indeed amazing. They know how to bring their characters to life and engage the people who are there for the web-slinging, not the suggestive sell.

Give Midnight Suns the “treading the thin line between creation and destruction” you promised us. Take out the gimmicks. Throw in a romantic option or two (it doesn’t have to be at all explicit). Let the characters be who they are, and stop trying to control how they are perceived.

We already liked Spider-Man. That’s why you bought him. We loved The Hunter, in spite of all the grindy upsell. If you’d just have let them be, and let the game be good to more than just a mass-appeals market, gamers would have shown up in droves to buy the merchandise.

Those not afraid of death by arbitration, that is.