An article like Flickering Lights is bound to raise questions and (better still) attract new information, so I've created this page as a storehouse for expansions and corrections, leaving the article in its original state. This can be considered a kind of article-specific extension to the growing Blue Room FAQ.

Questions of Focus

Several correspondents have written to ask what boils down to the same question: Why didn't the article include [Insert title of an RPG based on television, comics, etc]. The answer, of course, is that Flickering Lights is focused entirely on silver-screen licenses: games based on feature films. The James Bond 007 game is included because it's explicitly based on the films rather than the novels (see page 6 of the game itself, and on the series of adventures written very clearly to adapt the film versions of Bond's adventures). Other multimedia licenses (like the different RPG adaptions of Conan) are ignored because they (wisely, I daresay) treat the Conan films as footnotes, or as secondary influences at best.

If I had written the article much longer, I would have still stuck to purely cinema-gaming, since it's a big subject, and I feel that I glossed over a lot of interesting stories as it is! Someday, for example, I'd like to write a companion article exploring the history of cinema-inspired approaches to non-licensed game design.

Mission: Impossible

That WEG had the Mission: Impossible license turns out to be an unfounded rumor, apparently based in the truth that some parties at WEG wanted it, but never got it. Former WEG Staffer Eric Trautmann, who provided the article's amusing "corvette" tale, had this additional story to share about what happened when the creative staff asked the Powers that Were for a chance to license the spy film: