For almost 20 years, games fed eagerly on the scraps from Hollywood's table. Games based on films, and to a lesser extent sports and TV programmes were the best way to guarantee success. There were brave exceptions, such as Nintendo’s Mario series, but for the most part games took their cues, creatively and commercially, from the cinema.

In the past decade, the worm has turned. Video games creators have grown in confidence, wielding the brush of this new medium with increasingly bold strokes and learning how to engage and delight audiences with franchises of their own. It’s now more likely that a blockbuster game will inspire a movie spin-off than the reverse. And rather than leaning on films and TV for their content, games are creating their own franchises with their own iconic stories, characters and imagery.

In a sense, these franchises are proof of a healthy creative medium. The fact that endless sequels can find an audience demonstrates the devotion of that audience and its willingness to engage. If people didn’t love games such as Metal Gear Solid or Grand Theft Auto, they wouldn’t queue up to buy the next in the series. Any industry that inspires such devotion is definitely doing something right.

Moreover, game creators have learned that their franchises don’t have to play by Hollywood’s rules. Where Hollywood franchises typically fall victim to the law of diminishing returns - becoming weaker and less popular as the series progresses - game series such as Microsoft’s Halo and Nintendo’s Mario have gone from strength to strength, diversifying their appeal and innovating upon core ideas.

Halo Wars, for instance, is set in the familiar world of the multi-million selling Halo games - but where its predecessors were fast-paced action games, Halo Wars is a cerebral game of strategy. Far from suffocating creativity, videogame franchises have become incubators for original ideas - not a necessary commercial evil, but a welcome part of the landscape.

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