The Clique: Diss and Make-Up

The Clique: Diss and Make-Up is a 2009 release from Gorilla Systems, based on a book series aimed at teenage readers. The card files it under the PC, although titles of this kind were routinely published for handheld consoles in 2009, so the platform field may diverge from the original edition.

The content is a licensed game about the social environment of a school: relationships between characters, clothing, planning, and short mini-games that break the situations apart. This format spread widely in the late 2000s, once publishers recognised an audience the industry had barely addressed until then.

As a piece of construction, games like this are a string of brief tasks tied together by a simple story. They need no demanding controls, they assume short sittings, and they rely on the player already knowing the source material. That is also their central limitation: without a connection to the books, what remains is a fairly generic collection of mini-games.

2009 is the peak of this wave. Within a few years the same audience had moved to mobile phones and social networks, where comparable content could be produced far more cheaply and without shipping a box at all. Licensed games based on fiction for young readers effectively vanished from consoles after that, which makes surviving examples worth cataloguing.

Publishers were testing in this period whether book series for young readers worked as game licences the way films did. The difference lay in budget: books have no advertising campaign behind a premiere, so the games were made faster and cheaper.

This licensed title is recorded on OldGame.cz with its year, its developing studio and images.