Spiritual successor

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A spiritual successor, sometimes called a spiritual sequel, is a successor to a computer or video game, movie, novel, comic, stage play, or television mini-series. A spiritual successor consists of the same genre, themes, or high-concept, and is often created by the same developer, producer, director, or writer, but without being a sequel that continues a previous story.

Since creative teams often change employers but do not retain the rights to their intellectual property, they will often create a new product that follows the same themes of their previous works but is not set in the exact same universe. Other times another company or individual will strive to create an official sequel but will be unable to secure the rights from the original author, artist, or company. Therefore, it is not an official sequel, but it is the sequel "in spirit" that does not legally violate any copyrights or trademarks. In some cases, the spiritual sequels are introduced many years before the "official" successors. Often, homages and references to other media will occur in spiritual sequels. Sometimes, they can be games using the same engine made by the same company.

One example of a spiritual successor is the Fallout series of post-apocalyptic personal computer roleplaying games. Interplay originally produced an RPG called Wasteland in 1988 under license for Electronic Arts, but EA forewent Interplay's involvement in future work and produced a very poorly regarded sequel (Fountain of Dreams) themselves in 1990. Interplay tried to get the rights to Wasteland back from EA for a true sequel, eventually giving up and making Fallout instead almost a decade later in 1997.^[1]

This sequence of events very nearly repeated itself after the Fallout series was sabotaged by Interplay, resulting in the cancelation of the third game and the mass-resignation of its creators: some of them formed another company (Troika) whose fourth project was to have been a post-apocolyptic RPG^[2]. Troika, however, shut down before the project got very far, just a short while after Interplay decided to sell the rights to the next Fallout game and spurned Troika's offer in favor of an unrelated company (Bethesda_Softworks). Aside from all this, Wasteland director Brian Fargo finally acquired the rights to the original Wasteland from EA in 2003^[3], opening up the possibility of a true sequel to Wasteland itself.

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