One and Done

That short is Boundin’, a fable-like story set to banjo music, with a low, gravelly voice speak-singing a rhyming yarn about a proud little lamb with a pristine white coat. Every day, the spunky critter dances for an audience of delighted desert animals, but their celebrations end when the sheep is shorn for the first time. When he’s dumped back in the desert, the skinny, bare, pink-skinned lamb has lost all his confidence.

“Then a-boundin’ up the slope came a great American jackalope,” continues the story, as a floppy bunny with antlers arrives over a hill. The jackalope asks the lamb what’s wrong, and the lamb tearily recounts his woes. The wise jackalope gives him a philosophical pep talk, and teaches him a spectacular new dance technique called “boundin’,” involving jumping to great heights to represent rebounding from adversity.

Between 1902 and 1903, Elizabeth Magie designed and playtested a board game called The Landlord’s Game in Arden, Delaware as a means to educate the masses about Georgism — an economic philosophy that argued land ownership should benefit everyone, not just the few who control it. (Yes, she was a rather passionate leftist!) Rather than celebrate and weaponize the ruthless accumulation of wealth, The Landlord’s Game was meant to expose how the endgame of capitalism essentially disenfranchises the masses by putting the vast majority of wealth into the hands of a select few. Magie even created two separate sets of rules: one is cooperative and allows players to share in the wealth they accumulate. In the other competitive ruleset, players build up their monopolies and try to crush each other. Sound familiar?

Magie eventually sold her second patent to Parker Brothers in 1935 for $500, the equivalent of $11,742 in 2025.

Imagine that SquareSoft tried to make a Yakuza game five years before Sega — a beat ‘em up with role-playing elements and tons of splashy cinematics. Imagine that project was helmed by some of the industry’s most impressive creative talent. Now imagine that the resulting game was far less than the sum of its parts. That game is The Bouncer, developed by DreamFactory and published by Square Electronic Arts in North America in March 2001, shortly after the launch of the PlayStation 2.

(Yes, Square and Electronic Arts had a brief strategic partnership in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. No, I don’t like thinking about it either. It’s like finding out your Mom used to date your boss.)

Thanks to the success of the Star Wars franchise, George Lucas has fame, notoriety, and a net worth of $5.1 billion. But there was a second, early in his career where Lucas looked like a classic “one and done” misunderstood artist who retreated from Hollywood after directing one well-received low-budget film. To imagine “What if?,” Polygon traveled to an alternate plane of the multiverse to interview the man himself.

THX 1138 was a financial flop that earned mixed reviews and disappeared from the public consciousness before it could even catch on as a cult classic. As for Lucas, who broke out after producing more experimental films at USC, he was essentially banished from Hollywood soon after its release for stealing the film reel and refusing to let the studio suits make any changes. (They still managed to cut four minutes after his producer, legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, returned the reel.)

Video game history is littered with great games that never received a follow-up, no matter how well-received they were or how much fans wanted more. Some had great ideas but needed further entries to work out some kinks and refine those ideas — entries that never came. This weekend, Polygon is all about the one-and-done: ideas that were only executed once, failures that were precursors to others' successes, an alternate reality interview with a one-hit-wonder director.

This week's Xbox Game Pass recommendations put a spotlight on games and studios that we wish we got more of. (Maybe in alternate reality, we did.)

Polio swept through the United States in the ‘40s. By 1948, it was a full-on epidemic that led to 42,173 cases and 2,720 deaths in 1949 alone — and young children were the most vulnerable. Eleanor Abbott was around 38 years old when she contracted polio. At the time, she’d worked repairing watches for a jewelry store. While recovering in a San Diego hospital, she was struck by the number of children impacted by the disease. They were lonely, bored, and in pain.

Image: Margaret Muirhead (Instagram)

That isn’t to say the shows below — our personal nominees for series that should have stopped with season 1 — never had a single good episode or storyline in subsequent seasons. Plenty of them had great storylines or scattered flashes of brilliance later in their run. But none of them lived up to the potential of their opening seasons, and we felt like we lost something powerful and enjoyable when they moved into season 2 and beyond.

Heroes

I think it has only ever happened twice. You can’t even put the achievements of, say, Shigeru Miyamoto in the same bracket. The creator of Mario was working collaboratively, with Takashi Tezuka and many others, as a salaried employee making products, however divinely inspired.

The first time it happened was in Russia in the 1980s, when Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris. The second time was in Sweden in the late 2000s, when Markus “Notch” Persson created Minecraft. One or other of these is the best-selling game of all time, depending on whether you aggregate the sales of all of Tetris’ different versions or not. Nothing else can touch them.

The opening credits of the 2009 film Push are packed with so much exposition and terminology it feels like director Paul McGuigan and writer David Bourla are introducing viewers to an entire superhero universe. Instead, it ended with a single film. Push was part of the trend of cape-free superhero stories led by the 2006 premiere of Heroes that was quickly eclipsed by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Push stands on its own thanks to an excellent cast and rich setting, and it’s definitely worth watching for fans of Stranger Things, Sense8, and X-Men.

The world of Push is filled with psychics, who are neatly categorized into power sets with names like Movers (telekinetics), Watchers (precognitives), and Pushers (people with mind control). There are also Bleeders (people with the power to blow things up by screaming).

Evolution has been a staple of Pokémon since the franchise’s beginnings. From raising your little Charmander into a Charizard to using a team of all different Eeveelutions, evolving Pokémon goes hand-in-hand with the series’ other gameplay pillars, like catching wild Pokémon and battling trainers. Because of that, you’d think every Pokémon would belong to an evolution line, but plenty don’t.

30 years in, dozens of Pokémon are mere one-off Pokémon who don’t evolve. Few things are more fun than pitting Pokémon against one another, so let’s sit back and rank the 10 best one-and-done Pokémon. This ranking is, of course, the product of one Poké Fan’s mind — unlike Polygon’s ranking of the top 100 Pokémon that dared to be democratic and capture the wide-ranging opinions of our team.

Mere weeks before the Dark Universe notoriously failed to launch with the 2017 release of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, another announced franchise arguably face-planted even harder: Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. After all, The Mummy eked out $400 million worldwide based on Cruise’s star power, and though plans to go forward with a series of interconnected Universal Monster movies were scotched, those characters are powerful enough that they can’t really be killed. (In fact, you can visit the Dark Universe right this minute, if you’re so inclined.) King Arthur, on the other hand, made less than half of The Mummy’s box-office take, and was planned with just as much hubris. It was intended as the first in a six-movie cycle of Arthurian legend stories, culminating in a full Knights of the Round Table team-up. Legend of the Sword didn’t just tease a sequel that never got made; it was a full-scale medieval Avengers knockoff that couldn’t even fully assemble its furniture. (Literally. The movie’s last scene features an incomplete Round Table.)

Ritchie’s King Arthur is his most expensive failed franchise-starter, but far from his only one. The movie he made immediately before it was a long-gestating adaptation of the old TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., an origin-story team up between an American spy (Henry Cavill) and a Russian (Armie Hammer). It attracted a cult audience and still has plenty of fans, in spite of Hammer’s off-screen disgrace. But Warner Bros. wasn’t looking to make a franchise from a cult appreciation, and technically, U.N.C.L.E. made even less than King Arthur. (Though it didn’t have the attendant embarrassment of a six-movie plan attached to it.) While it built enough of a fandom for a sequel script to be written, an ongoing series failed to materialize.

The movie is 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, an extraordinary collision of horror, Southern Gothic story, suspense thriller, and dreamlike fable. The actor who directed it is Charles Laughton, a stoop-shouldered, round-faced English performer, who hit a peak of fame in Hollywood in the 1930s with roles like Henry VIII in The Private Life of Henry VIII, Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

By the ’50s, Laughton was taking smaller roles and concentrating on directing stage plays when the opportunity to make a movie fell into his lap. But unlike his peer Laurence Olivier, he didn’t fall back on staging an adaptation of a Shakespeare classic. Instead, he adapted a brand-new semi-pulp novel into a visionary, phantasmagoric movie steeped in silent-cinema tradition.

Long before Final Fantasy 16 launched to middling reviews, there's been ongoing talk about the future of Final Fantasy, from Square Enix and long-time followers of the series alike. And every time I see it, I wonder why that future seems so uncertain when Square Enix already came close to getting it right back in 2011. Final Fantasy Type-0, a spinoff set in the world of Final Fantasy 13, struck an almost perfect balance of following trends and innovating without losing sight of itself. It was an ideal pattern for the future, yet Square Enix never used it again.

Square Enix reinvents what Final Fantasy is with every new game, but there was a shift after Final Fantasy 13 (and Type-0). The series went from incorporating something popular, like sci-fi in Final Fantasy 8 or medieval tropes in earlier Final Fantasies, to making a trend its central focus. Final Fantasy 15 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth aren't Final Fantasies with open worlds. They're open-world games with bits and pieces of Final Fantasy wrapped around them. Final Fantasy 16 isn't a dark fantasy RPG. It's a game trying to be prestige TV like Game of Thrones in interactive media form. In recent installments, Square Enix has overrelied on these elements to be the main part of the games' identities, which is a futile hope. When that identity is shared with so much else already, it needs more than just a set change and some Final Fantasy flavoring to feel special.

The 80-minute movie barely has enough plot to make up a short story. Prospective bridegroom Zsolt Mohai gets cold feet on the day of his marriage, and runs to hide in the apartment where Annika Parádi, a nurse studying to enter medical school, is looking after an elderly widow. Zsolt has never met Anni, but knows she’s a good friend of his fiancée, socialite Klárika Horváth, and hopes she’ll intervene for him with Klári, breaking the news that he isn’t going to show up for the wedding. That process is complicated both by Anni’s attraction to Zsolt, and by Klári obliviously arriving at the apartment to pick Anni up for the ceremony, with a belligerent prize-fighter in tow.

For American animation fans, the closest touchstones to what Kovásznai is doing in this movie might be early Ralph Bakshi movies like Heavy Traffic and Street Fight. The looseness of the narrative and the animation feels like a meeting point between the “underground comix” scene of the ’60s and ’70s and the constant dreamy shape-shifting of Max Fleischer's early work. Fans of Central European animation from this era will have a bit more familiarity with Kovásznai's visual style — Heinz Edelmann’s art direction and character design for the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine feels like a possible inspiration, both for the characters and for the film’s psychedelia. Bruno Bozzetto (Allegro Non Troppo) and surrealists like René Laloux (Fantastic Planet) might also be touchstones.

Labels are rarely as useful as they pretend to be, but mentioning Planescape: Torment to any RPG or video game expert as “one of the best RPGs of all time” is more likely to be met with a “you know what you’re talking about” smile than a “get out of here” scoff. In 1999, developer Black Isles Studios took the vast Dungeons & Dragons setting known as Planescape and used it to build a revolutionary genre-defining masterpiece that is still studied and discussed today. Despite that, Planescape: Torment never got a sequel, and it remains, to this day, the only D&D video game to take place in that setting.

Other D&D games made brief forays into Sigil — the city at the center of the setting, where most of the story of Planescape: Torment takes place — or into the many planes that exist in the D&D multiverse structure, but none made this bizarre, highly imaginative setting its focus. And it’s not just video games. Dungeons & Dragons has also been surprisingly shy of returning to Planescape in its TTRPG products, despite the success of 1994’s Planescape Campaign Setting, the boxed set that started it all. Except for a brief return to Sigil in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide 2, D&D fans had to wait until 2023 to get a three-volume box set titled Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the experience of playing Fez for the first time. It was 2012 and I was still fairly fresh out of college, having moved to New York City in 2011. Since I didn’t have much disposable income at the time, it was the rare period of my life where I was completely out of touch with gaming for a few years. I didn’t own a modern console or a handheld. Thankfully, one of my roommates had an Xbox 360, which gave me a chance to keep up with blockbusters like Borderlands 2 and Assassin’s Creed 3. One day, he called me into the living room to check out a weird little game called Fez he’d found on Xbox Live Arcade.

It completely blew my mind. It was my first real exposure to the rapidly-growing independent game scene of the era, and it felt like a revelation because of it. The perspective-shifting game was unlike anything I had ever played. It was an impossible magic trick that impressed me more than any big-budget game chasing flashy realism at the time. Looking back on it, I’m comfortable saying that it built the framework for my taste in games and changed how I thought about gaming as a medium. I just wanted more.

There’s an understated beauty to immersing yourself in a sprawling anime series. A thousand-episode-plus saga like One Piece might feel daunting, but investing in such an epic character journey is extremely rewarding — especially when the creators of a beloved franchise reinvent their narrative in progress midway, as JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure does with the Netflix adaptation of Steel Ball Run.

That said, committing to a lengthy anime series over multiple seasons demands a significant amount of time, and it can be overwhelming to choose between all the excellent options. Sometimes you just need a one-season anime series, a dozen episodes that can be binged over a weekend, without the need to invest beyond the immediate premise.

To the rest of the world, the story of 38 Studios is an oft-forgotten blip. To those of us that live in Rhode Island, it’s a quiet ghost, the kind of thing you don’t think about until you’re walking downtown and remember that, for a time, one of the most ambitious fantasy worlds in gaming was being built just a few blocks away.

I was fresh out of college in the summer of 2011, living at my parents’ house in northern RI. I picked up Dragon Age 2 on a whim. But I was enticed by the demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that came with it.