There's a very good reason Disney ends every movie with an explicit or symbolic Happily ever after (they lived happily ever after), and that's because what comes after the final credits is pure hell! And we don't even need to reflect on our own romantic experiences to realize it; with this collection of disturbing (often terrifying) unlicensed children's games (that is, developed without the authorization of their original creators), it's enough to see the horrors of the day after each idyllic love story and, incidentally, learn about the bootleg universe of online mini-games.
A bootleg is a creation that uses trademarks and characters from a third-party work protected by copyright, without any authorization whatsoever, and generally for commercial purposes. For instance, if you take a wallet, draw a Sonic from Sega on it, and sell it at a comic or video game convention, you are selling a bootleg. Because these creations lack the filter of their respective owners, who aim to protect their franchises from any mishap, they often end up being very low quality or, as in the case at hand, too delirious!
On the other hand, we have the world of online Flash games. Casual games, mostly mass-produced, to feed the myriad of web portals that need fresh content every day. These games use advertising to make money, often showing it during their load times. So the algorithm is quite simple: the more visits the game gets, the more money its creator can earn (and the site hosting the game, in perfect symbiosis).
That's why many developers choose to "pirate" the copyrights of famous works with a good following (and therefore searches) and create their bootleg editions, hoping to attract more visits. When it comes to search volumes and good "keywords", for instance, it's not the same for a game to be called "Maxi Ferzzola Freak Show", which nobody cares about and is even a bit gross, than "Frozen: Elsa has a baby". With this strategy in mind, those pirate games are almost immediately scooped up by the owners of thousands of online game portals that swarm the web, because it also suits them, and that's how these bootlegs end up going viral in no time. Pure brute force!
The implausible situations to which Disney characters are subjected in these bootleg games (Elsa Frozen's brain surgery? WTF!?) also have a super simple explanation: many of the tools used to develop them come with predefined game templates with the programming already solved, and you only have to change the graphics (assets) and move this a bit there and that a bit here to make everything "perfect". That's also why there are so many surgery games, dental exams, secret kisses, costume changes, makeup, etc. They're using templates!
To illustrate this article, we chose to include only some of the thousands of Frozen bootleg games. But if you investigate on your own, you'll find that almost every known children's character has some interactive "parody" born from the bowels of some predefined template, possibly produced from places like India, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and hosted on servers in countries "flexible" regarding copyright. My Little Pony, Minions, Monster High, Dora the Explorer, Adventure Time, among many other known cartoons, have been innocent and unconscious victims of these picturesque wrongdoers. What do you think?
If you want to know more about bootleg games, you can check out "The Pirate NES Games" and "Angry Birds for Famicom", two previous articles written by yours truly here at NeoTeo. Enjoy them, I suppose...
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