Twilight RPG? Sure, why not.

I was talking with some friends online and couple of topics came up that were not-quite but sorta-related.  The first was the rash of vampire fiction and the "changes" happening to it.  Namely that vampires are no longer terrible monsters but super powerful, but dangerous, boyfriends.  They do things now like fall in love with women several decades their younger or move about in sunlight.

To this I simply say.

When was this new?  Cause I seem to recall reading similar things in "Interview with a Vampire" and "Dracula".

We are in the midst of another "Vampire Craze" that seems to pop up every so often.  The last one was of course Anne Rice, Lost Boys and Vampire the Masquerade.  Now it is Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and even True Blood.   I am going to focus on Twilight a bit since it is the most contentious of the lot.
Honestly, I have no big issue with Twilight's vampires (except they are not really vampires are they) or even the fact that a 100+ year old is in love with a High School Girl.  I tend to believe that if a person becomes a vampire that regardless of the chronological age their body is stuck at a certain physical age and mental age.  They might learn more, but in a sense their mentality is stuck, frozen in time.  My biggest issue with the books is the vapid empty dialog,  Mary-Sue characters, and thinly veiled personal sermons.  But I will grant this.  The success of those books has lead to an entire publishing craze of "Modern Supernatural Romance" or "Chick Lit" that has been a huge success in their own right.
Laurel K. Hamilton may have been one of the first, but it took Stephenie Meyer and her "Sparkly Vampires" to make it cross-over.

Which leads me to my next thought.
Should there be a Twilight RPG?

There are a lot of compelling reasons to do so.
Let's start with the obvious, Twilight sold nearly 30 million books in 2008 and 27M in 2009.  There have been two movies of her books, which have made close to $1.2 Billion (that's a "B").   That's a lot of money.  A licensed RPG would be make money if only for the Twilight fans wanting more of this world.

Other obvious reasons.
There is the werwolf/vampire back-story that, and lets be honest here, seems totally cribbed from White Wolf, but it is more of a turf war ala "West Side Story" than the bloody wars of "Underworld".  Though now the mental image of vampires and werewolves singing while fighting is certain to haunt me for days.  But it does make for a good game.

Lets talk marketing.  Who loves "Twilight" besides Kelly Clarkson and President Obama? Pre-teen and teenage girls.
What market have RPGs not done particularly well in?  Yeah.
"Twilight the RPG" could be the gateway drug to RPGs for this market.  Look, this is 2010, we have dropped the stereotypes.  We know girls like and play RPGs. Maybe we have White Wolf to thank for that as well. But we also know that it is still a very territory for marketing.  AND I should point out it is not just young girls and women.  It is "older" women (and by that I mean older than the protagonist Bella, so 20+) that buy and enjoy these books.  What do we know about women in the marketplace?  Well how about this (from Neilsen Media) Women make the buying choices in the family, women have more money now than they ever did, and while men are being laid off at double-digit rates, women are keeping their jobs.

And the game companies know all of this.

We have products out now that are specifically try to appeal to young girls.  Games like Bella Sara are a perfect example of this.

A Twilight game would need to focus on the things that made the books so popular.  Interpersonal relationships, destiny, fated-loves and so on.  As a game it would need to have mechanics that were simple so they do what they need to do and then get out of the way (for the newbie gamers) and powerful enough to keep the narrative flowing (for the more experienced ones).  Blue Rose I think tried to do this to some degree, and I think design-wise they mostly got it right.  It does all the things I mentioned above, but I think ultimately Blue Rose was hampered more by what people thought it was rather than what it really was.
By putting the Twilight label on the game you eliminate that and everyone knows what you are getting up front.  Plus we all know I am convinced that Blue Rose would be fantastic as a horror game.
Combat would be minimal, but it would still occur.  Afterall these vampires and werewolves have to attack something sometime.

Of course I could see this using White Wolf's World of Darkness games too or even Cinematic Unisystem.  Though in both cases somethings might need to be tweaked or redesigned.

The downsides though are numerous as well.  Gamers, it seems to person, hate Twilight.  Or at least I never met one that likes it.  I don't even like it.  The vampires of Twilight are mocked and rightfully so. Gamers would not buy a Twilight RPG unless it had something so mind wracking cool about it that getting it was more of a lure than anything else.
So lets pretend for a second there is a Twilight game out there and people pick it up for whatever their personal reasons are.  Who is going to play this game? and how?

The trouble with the RPG biz is there is shit all nothing in terms of market research.
Companies rarely know what people wan't and they rarely can provide it when they do know.  There are exceptions of course. Paizo and Green Ronin take a lot of customer feedback for example.  But I bet you that if there was a demand out there for a particular game, no company would know about it in any systematic way.  We rely a lot on word of mouth.  Maybe this is fine, but it is very reaction-based and sometimes companies move too slow to do anything about it.

Twilight the Role-Playing Game is not coming to a FLGS near you anytime soon.  But part of me still wonders that maybe it should.