Category: games

The E.T. Dig

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Yesterday, in a landfill in New Mexico, copies of E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial for Atari 2600 were unearthed, apparently confirming rumors of their mass burial in 1983.

I recalled hearing this story at some point, many years ago, but I don’t recall exactly when. It’s been repeated often enough. A number of Atari employees said that it was true, but as I recall the company officially denied it, leading to speculation as to whether it was really true or not. Likely the denials were to avoid admitting that the business was in trouble.

While the find confirms that Atari product was buried in the landfill, it’s still unclear how accurate the rumors really were. Over the years, I heard many things about the burial:

  • Supposedly, according to some, the games were crushed (whether by a compactor, or a steam roller or other heavy vehicle, it’s unclear) before burial, in order to take up less room in the landfill, or to prevent their being dug up and salvaged. This appears not to be true, as intact cartridges apparently have been recovered in what appears to be nearly pristine condition (unless of course the recovery story is a fabrication).
  • I also heard that the games were covered over with a layer of cement. This seems likely an embellishment. To my knowledge, landfills do not typically use cement to cover over layers of deposited waste, although they do sometimes use earth to bury waste in order to reduce pests such as rats and seagulls, reduce the odor, and prevent winds from blowing the waste away. Cement is expensive, and there’s really no reason for it, since this isn’t radioactive waste, but I always thought that it suggested a deep shame on Atari’s part, that they wanted to hide the fact so much that they would cover it up with cement, like a murderer burying a victim in the basement under a cement floor.
  • Supposedly, something like 5 million copies of E.T. were manufactured, and most were unsold, so the number of games buried in the landfill is supposedly a vast number. So far what I’ve read of what’s been reported has said that a few hundred copies have been recovered. So it remains to be seen whether more will be found at the site.
  • E.T. is remembered as one of the worst games of all time, but this is actually a somewhat unfair label to pin on the game. It sold quite well, 1.5 million copies, which is an unqualified hit, but for the fact that it was greatly overproduced. Selling well isn’t quite the same thing as being a good game, and the game did have a fair share of negative reviews. The complaints for the most part had to do with the difficulty of avoiding falling into pits that exist nearly in nearly every screen of the game, and play a prominent part in the game, but which don’t exist at all in the movie. Movie adaptation games often suffer from poor treatment, and failing to faithfully follow the plot of the movie story. Of course, the same can also be said of film adaptations of books. Apart from the pits, the game does actually include a lot of plot elements from the film, and somewhat reasonably follows the plot. What’s more important is not that the game re-tell the movie, but that it be a good game. E.T. may or may not be a good game, that’s a subjective judgement. But from a technical standpoint it was relatively well executed, including numerous innovations and technical feats that were impressive considering the hardware limitations. Apart from the pits, the game also suffered from a strange zone-based mechanic that was difficult to understand without referencing the manual. At the time E.T. was released, most games were simple arcade action style games involving shooting and dodging. E.T. involved a complex quest for pieces of the phone he uses to call home to arrange to be picked up by his people’s space ship, and many players likely simply weren’t ready for a complex game like this, and disliked it more for that reason than anything.
  • E.T. is often blamed for causing the Crash of 1983. It’s more accurate to say that the Crash of 1983 contributed to E.T.’s sales falling far below expectations, resulting in huge losses due to overproduction. As such, it was more a victim of the Crash than a cause of it. It was certainly a high profile commercial failure, but the real cause was a lack of quality control among the dozens of fly-by-night companies that sprung up to capitalize on the immense success of the Atari 2600. Atari could not control third parties through licensing, and the market was flooded with poor games, many of which were far worse than E.T.

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Making a Configuration System in Game Maker, part 3: Where’s Part 3?

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A while ago, I started a series of articles that I never finished, on creating a configuration system for GameMaker games. I posted Part 2 almost 2 years ago, and had intended to follow up in just a couple weeks with Part 3, but it stalled and never came out.

A few readers have asked, so I figure an explanation is owed.

The series I had started on creating a configuration system has been on hold since the second article. As I got into designing the system, I kept running into problems with making my system platform-independent and universal.

I had intended to write a universal configuration management engine for handling things like monitor resolution switching, master volume, music volume, and sound fx volume, and a customizable set of configuration widgets for whatever your game might need (essentially, a set of generic, reusable buttons, sliders, checkboxes, and other UI controls). Ideally, I had hoped to write a set of scripts that would use GML functions to define rooms and objects that would constitute the configuration system. Ultimately, I wanted to create a GML script config_system_create() that would set up the entire system — rooms, objects, and functionality, so that you could simply import a GEX extension, call one function, and have a full-featured system generated at runtime, without having to spend any time designing and implementing all the resources yourself. But in GM:S, YYG obsoleted the functions that allowed me to define objects at runtime, execute strings as GML code, and a number of other functions relating to how Windows handles video and audio.

My goal was to enable a developer to drop in my finished configuration system as a GameMaker extension, and invoke its default implementation with a single function call, and use other function calls in the extension to build custom features, but use most of the features without modification, beyond turning features on or off, and to also have the capability of adding customized settings specific to their game. I wanted to write my system one time, and have it be re-usable so that I could save myself from having to spend a lot of time re-creating the system in each new project.

Most difficult of all, it requires that I design a system that anticipates every need a game developer might possibly have, for any type of game they might dream up. Doing it one time and never having to touch it again would be great, but it’s probably not realistic.

This was an overly-ambitious goal. I’m laughing at myself a bit, now, thinking about it.

Still, there were a lot of achievable ideas that I had for the tutorial, and a demonstration of how to implement them would be a worthwhile exercise.

It won’t be drop-in, single-function system, and it’ll be specific to the Windows build target, but the design should be adaptable to your project with a little work.

I don’t want to make a promise for when I expect to deliver this, but I will complete the series and a reference implementation before I publish the first article.

Product Review: Scirra Construct2

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Construct2 is available for download at www.scirra.com.

I’ve known about Construct2 for a few years now, and had downloaded it quite some time ago, intending to compare it with GameMaker in order to see which I liked better. I kept getting deeper and deeper into GameMaker, though, and since I was enjoying that, I wanted to stick with one thing until I knew it very well, rather than dabble in a lot of things that I knew only passingly.

One of my Cleveland Game Developers friends, Jarryd, likes Construct2 and I’ve seen him give a few talks about it, and so I’ve had a general impression of what it’s about for a while now. This weekend, I finally sat down with it and started to give it a serious look.

Initial impressions

So far, it feels very different from what I’m used to with GameMaker: Studio and other development environments that I’ve used… but I think there’s a lot of potential for getting stuff up and working faster than with GameMaker.

Two of Construct2’s areas of strength are the built-in project templates and object behaviors. They take a lot of the tedium out of developing your own engine and having to program everything from scratch, which means you’re freed up to focus in design and gameplay more. Creating a new project from a template sets up a lot of “boilerplate” that is common to every game of that type, saving you a ton of work and problem solving. And adding a behavior to an object does in one or two clicks what many programming numerous events and scripts consisting of innumerable lines of code would accomplish in a GameMaker project. And it all works and doesn’t need debugging, although there’ll still be a lot of customization yet to do, and that customization will require plenty of problem solving and debugging. But it still gets you into the juicier parts of game development quicker, and allows you to build on a more featureful foundation than GameMaker does.

On the other hand, what I like about GameMaker is that by leaving these low hanging fruits un-plucked, it gives a newbie programmer some relatively easy things to develop, which affords many learning opportunities. Learning how to attack a problem and break it up into simple, manageable steps that you can solve is an important skill to have in programming, and GM provides such opportunities.

The C2 documentation is very well written, and there are a ton of example projects that come with the IDE, so you can learn by playing around with a project.

It feels different from traditional programming in that there’s no traditional text editor, and not much syntax to learn, for about 90% of it, from what I see so far. If *feeling* like a “real” programmer is important to you, Construct2 may not satisfy, but if you don’t care about coding as much as the ability to quickly make working games, it might be just the trick. I feel like “real” programming is more like designing shapes of pieces to make a jigsaw puzzle, and then assembling the puzzle, and using Construct2 is more like taking a bunch of ready-made jigsaw puzzle pieces out of a bin and putting them together *just so* in order to make a picture that you have in your head. But I don’t consider criticisms that amount to bias toward text editing and syntax as the only true programming to have much legitimacy to them. Surely, if you never understand the circuits of the machine, you’ll never be able to call yourself a Real Programmer, and most modern programming languages abstract the machine entirely. So too, with programming environments that replace linguistic syntax with visual paradigms. Still, learning Construct2 may not be as good a good first step if you’re interested in getting into other types of programming, the vast majority of which do involve coding in a programming language.

Discovering Construct2 through example

One of the first things I did with C2 was to play the Asteroids example project. Labeled as an “Intermediate” project, I quickly noted that while the Player wrapped around at the edges of the screen, the Bullets did not. This bothered me, so without really knowing what I was doing, I looked at the Player’s behaviors, and saw how to modify the Bullets. It took almost no time at all.

But now, the bullets just traveled around the room forever, so in short order I figured out how to add a timer to them so that they would be destroyed after a short time. This took a bit longer, but in maybe 10 minutes I had it figured out. Next, I created a new Sprite (which seems semi-analogous to what GameMaker calls an Object) and added it to the game, defined some behaviors and before too long I had asteroids floating about, that destroyed the ship when they collide with it, are destroyed by bullets, and wrap around the room. I even figured out how to create two smaller asteroids when destroying the large ones.

That’s when I discovered that, if you don’t add an object to the Layout, even if it won’t exist in the initial state of the game, the game won’t run properly. I noticed a previously overlooked bullet sitting in the Layout window, outside the game view, and, thinking I’d somehow accidentally placed it there by mistake, deleted it, only to find that the game no longer worked properly. And then I got an error message about the smaller asteroids not being defined. So then I figured out that in order to have these types of objects available to the game at runtime, they needed to be placed in the Layout, but outside of the visible area, what in GameMaker would be considered “inside the Room”. This confused me, because coming from GameMaker, I expected that objects placed outside of the rooms boundaries are instantiated and run in the game. But in C2, apparently they are just available to the game, to be created when called upon by the program. It’s a bit strange, and I wonder how C2 handles objects that walk “offstage” or need to begin life offstage.

Cost

Construct2 is one of the cheapest options out there right now for fledgling developers. Comparing Construct2 to GameMaker, at $119 C2 is cheaper for a license than GameMaker: Studio is, if you want anything more out of GM:S than the base “Professional” package. The free edition of C2 also has fewer limitations than the free edition of GM:S. There’s also a $400 “business” license, which is for professionals and businesses that have made $5000 or more from game development, but doesn’t seem to give the user any additional new features. I suppose the idea there is that businesses that make that much money from game development can afford to subsidize development for the rest of the customer base.

Performance

I haven’t benchmarked the two side by side, but I understand that C2 builds everything as an HTML5 app and (if you’re not targeting a web browser) wraps it in a native application for whatever platform it builds to. By contrast, GM:S has the option to build native code, depending on how you build it and what platform you’re targeting, so may potentially have performance advantages over Construct2. I don’t want to speculate, and for now it’s merely a hypothesis that I have not myself tested, but it seems plausible that GM:S would the equivalent game as well or better than C2 on most platforms.

On the other hand, C2 is probably more consistent across platform, since on every platform it is essentially running the same code, unlike GameMaker:Studio, which currently has numerous problems with supporting features and getting to work exactly the same, regardless of build target.

Final thoughts (for now…)

I still haven’t gotten very deep into Construct2, and have just barely begun to grasp what it is capable of, but so far I like it quite a bit. Whether I like it as well as GameMaker: Studio, or less, or better, I can’t say yet, but I like the fact that it exists,and and it provides another option for an easy to use tool for game development. I still am much more versed and comfortable with what I know in GameMaker, but I’m impressed with how quickly I was able to pick up Construct2 and do something useful with it.

Verdict: Worth checking out.

Game Review: Busy Busy Beaver by Daniel Linssen

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A close shave resulted from a precision fall in Busy Busy Beaver

TL;DR: A fun, quick puzzle platformer, Busy Busy Beaver isn’t as difficult as Linssen’s previous game, the amazing Javel-ein, and is perhaps just a bit less engaging, but it’s charming sense of humor makes up for it. If you’re up for an hour’s worth of platform puzzles, try it out. Built in just 40 hours of marathon game jamming over a weekend, it’s remarkably polished for a game produced so quickly.

Download Busy Busy Beaver here.

You’re a beaver. You need wood to build up your house. Collect the wood, until you have enough, but make sure you don’t touch spikes or eat so much wood that you have no platforms left to get back home.

Simple, yes? The challenge is mild to moderate until the last few levels, but it’s a relaxing kind of intellectual challenge, where you don’t have to think too much, but just enough to make the game interesting without being frustrating.

I got stuck on the very first level, until I learned this tip: Press Down+Z to eat wood that you’re standing on. (I actually tried this early on, and couldn’t get it to work, which left me confused as to how to beat the first level, until I learned the secret: To eat down, you have to be in the center of a grid block. The level is laid out over an invisible grid, and if you’re standing on a grid line, you won’t be able to eat down, even if you’re standing on a grid line between two blocks of wood. As a player, I would have expected to eat both blocks when straddling a boundary, rather than neither.)

Game review: Javel-ein by Daniel Linssen

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I loved Javel-ein when it was first released as a Ludum Dare 28 Jam entry. It’s been expanded into a “Full Game” — I put this in quotes because, other than perhaps a lack of background music, there wasn’t anything about the Jam entry that felt incomplete or less than “full” to me. TL;DR: it’s a great game, it’s free, and if you run Windows, you can play it.

Get Javel-ein.

Game Play

You’re a guy armed with a Javelin, jumping and running through a 2D platform world of caves and lava pits. There are dangerous creatures, which you’ll need to kill with your Javelin. Once all the creatures are destroyed, you need to find the door to take you to the next level. The twist is that you only get one Javelin, and you have to retrieve it each time you throw it, leaving you temporarily defenseless. (more…)

Updated Javel-ein released

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One of my favorite games to come out of Ludum Dare 28, Javel-ein, has been developed into a full game by its creator, Daniel Linssen. I was amazed with how polished and balanced the original version of the game was, so this expanded version should be a real treat to play.

I’ll probably post an update with a full review once I’ve had a chance to play it. Review here.

Prior Art

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Proof that I invented the idea of it first :-P

prior art

The Flappy Bird Flap

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Flappy Bird: the Justin Bieber of indie mobile games?

The game development community has been buzzing with controversy over a game called Flappy Bird since the weekend, in an incident that has even gotten headlines in the mainstream media.

As of Sunday, the game has been taken down by its creator, Dong Nguyen, in response to harassment and even death threats, due to all the negative attention the game has received in the wake of inexplicable sudden popularity of the game.

Allegedly the game had been earning $50,000/day in ad revenue in recent weeks, since becoming the most popular download in the iOS and Android stores. There’s a certain amount of professional jealousy about this success, considering how undeserving the game is. As well, there is a great deal of resentment that the game’s art style appears to be borrowed from Super Mario Bros, and seems to ride the coattails of Angry Birds, and directly rips off the play mechanics of a variety of similar, earlier games, none of which has been anywhere near this successful. Since the takedown a slew of imitators have flooded the app stores with play-alike games, some of them parodies, some seemingly earnest ripoffs. Even crazier, a few people have put their iOS and Android devices with Flappy Bird installed on eBay for a ridiculous markup.

The combination of the game’s popularity, and lack of originality or quality makes a Justin Bieber analogy seem apt.

After hearing about the game for the first time on Friday night, I had to try it if I was going to have an opinion on it, and my impression is that the game is indeed not very good, yet it does undeniably have an addictive quality to it. Flappy Bird is starkly simple, lacks depth, and brutally difficult. In terms of “finish”, it is only rudimentary in it’s polish — there is a (apparently broken) leader board, and the graphics have a few color scheme variations, but beyond that there’s nothing. It has the feel of the first or second project of a newbie game developer, and tried to build a game imitating another game, without originality or polish, using ripped art assets and a derivative title that rides the coattails of both Super Mario Bros. and Angry Birds. No wonder the game development community is howling. Yet, apparently this minimalism has struck a chord with many players who appear to genuinely like the game.

Success is an enigma… an aggravating, annoying enigma

It’s seemingly inexplicable that this game should be super popular, and therefore curious. I suspect that the popularity is not accidental, but rather arose out of a perfect storm of factors.

First, it seems likely that the Mario pipe graphics account in part for some popularity, as it makes players curious about the relationship between this game and the Mario world. This might serve to entice would-be players to download the game and try it out. As well, the word “Bird” in the title probably contributes to curiosity as well, due to the popularity of Angry Birds.

Further, I speculate that the game inspires people to talk about it, either about how bad the game is, or how aggravatingly difficult it is. Some players may play it for the sake of irony, or to laugh at it. I downloaded and played it just to see what all the fuss was about, and to develop an informed opinion so I could write about it, and to see if there just might be something there that I could learn from to make my own games more popular.

Even so, for the game to have so many downloads, it must have some genuine appeal that keeps players interested after trying it. It seems unlikely that the game could generate the type of advertisement revenue we’ve heard it has if people were only downloading it to play it a few times and laugh at it. It seems that a substantial number of players actually like the game, or perhaps play it out of a sort of perverse masochism, hating the game’s rage-inducing difficulty as they try again to beat their high score, while hating the entire experience for being so utterly basic, so unvarying, so stupidly hard and unforgiving.

The simplicity combined with the difficulty probably accounts for the game’s appeal, whether people genuinely like it or hate it with a passion. And the controversy over the rip-off aspects of the game probably only added fuel to the publicity fire, resulting in this weekend’s climax. The game had been out for several months before suddenly catching on, though. What was the event that triggered the sudden spike? I’m sure every game developer is dying to know. Was it “organic” or engineered? Was it an accident or is there genuine merit to the design, hidden to critics and game developers, despite their scorn?

The fact that Nguyen has taken the game down, walking away from a $50,000/day paycheck may be the most remarkable development in this story. The pressures of all the attention, so much of it negative, must be incredible for him to shut down such an income stream. Of course, he may already have enough money in the bank that he’ll never have to work again. And there may be a few battles over that revenue to come from the various IP holders who feel wronged. But it seems like Nguyen may have been most sensitive to the criticism of the quality of the game itself. This is a most un-Bieber-like plot twist.

Flappy, we hardly knew ye

I don’t yet know what to make of all this, but it seems to point to a business strategy of making very simple, unoriginal games, rather than auteurs striving to craft high quality, original games that innovate. I guess it depends on what motivates you as a developer. But if I had even 1/100th the success of Flappy Bird with my games, I’d be set up to quit my day job. One tenth, and I could be free to make whatever games pleased me, to whatever standard of quality I wanted, for the rest of my life, regardless of whether any more of them were popular. It seems worth pursuing, then, to explore this apparently untapped “shitty games” market to see if setting my sights lower could bring greater rewards. The risk involved in a game that can be developed in 2-3 days, compared to the potential reward, seems far more attractive, compared to spending months or years building a labor of love that may or may not have an audience beyond the author.

Topology of Metropolis in Superman (Atari 2600)

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One of my favorite games on the Atari 2600 is Superman (1979), designed by John Dunn, and based on the program code from Adventure by Warren Robinett. This game has stayed with me to this day as one of my favorite games. I started playing it again recently, and began thinking about the different aspects of it that make it such an enjoyable game to play again, even 35 years after its release.

While it might appear to be a very basic game to a modern eye, in its day Superman had many innovative features. I won’t give it a full review here, but the one that I find most interesting is the game map. The world of Superman is much larger than most contemporary games of the era, most of which took place on a single, non-scrolling screen. The way the Superman’s map is laid out is confusing and non-intuitive, making the game very difficult for a new player, but once you start to gain a sense of how the different screens that make up the city are variously interconnected, it becomes possible to navigate very quickly through a number of methods which can be memorized with some effort and repetition. First-time players can take 15, even 30 minutes and up to win, while an experienced player who is familiar with navigation can often beat the game in under 2 minutes.

(more…)

Great Artists Steal (and so do shitty companies)

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Last week I became aware of a controversy surrounding King.com Ltd, makers of Candy Crush Saga and other games, and an independent developer, Matthew Cox, aka JunkYardSam, his game Scamperghost, and a blatant ripoff called Pac Avoid, which King has since pulled from the market.

King’s actions with regard to this situation are particularly distressing. According to JunkYardSam’s version of the story, he had been in negotiations with King about licensing his game, and after another company (MaxGames) offered him better terms, he broke off negotiations with King, at which point King approached a third-party developer, Matt Porter (who appears to have been innocently manipulated by King), to commission a blatant ripoff of the game and attempted to bring it to market before JunkYardSam’s game was released.

I’d never heard of Scamperghost until this story broke, and I still have not played it, nor have I played Pac Avoid (and I guess it’s likely I never will). In the wake of JunkYardSam’s revelatory blog post about what went down, the blogosphere and twitterverse exploded, and enough has been said about the specific incident that I can’t hope to add anything of value at this point.

It’s obvious that King know how to market popular, addictive games with polish, as the success of Candy Crush Saga demonstrates. It’s also obvious that King doesn’t concern itself with making original games. Candy Crush Saga is the umpteenth variation in the match-3 genre, a ripoff of PopCap Games’s mega-successful Bejeweled series, which started in 2001, and was itself not an original concept, having been inspired by a 1988 game called Shariki, and directly descends from games like Shariki (1988), Columns (1999) and Dr. Mario (1990).  Zoo Keeper (2003) is another notable title in the genre.. The match-3 genre is a sub-genre of the “falling block” genre, which was created by the 1984 classic Tetris, which itself has a famous history of its creator Alexey Pajitnov’s original creation being stolen and sold by various corporations without compensation.

I’m not going to rag on King too much, because even their business model of ripping off other game designs isn’t original. Everyone knows they were in the wrong, they know it themselves, and their lame open letter on their approach to IP really doesn’t read to me like an apology at all. Although they admit that they were wrong to produce Pac-Avoid, taking it down doesn’t go far enough — rather than take it down, they should have left Pac-Avoid up, provided a link to the real Scamperghost game, and promised to provide JunkYardSam with all the profits the game had ever earned. That would have served them right. I’d like to think that if JunkYardSam could afford a good enough lawyer, that’s exactly what he’d be entitled to. And attempting to trademark common words like “Candy” and “Saga” would stop happening. And King would not infringe on Namco’s Pac Man trademark by creating a ripoff game called Pac-Avoid. If I read their Open Letter right, King hasn’t quite understood their position in the market, doesn’t value originality in terms of crediting and compensating its sources, and is just another money-grubbing corporation. They clearly have the resources to create solid, fun-to-play games; they just choose to do so based on established successes and other people’s ideas that they wish they’d thought up, but didn’t. And that means that they can make enough money to pay rent and salary, perhaps, and not expose themselves to risk by developing truly original products or innovating.

Meanwhile those who do strive to innovate and create original games often struggle in the market, only to watch established “me too” shops like King who know how to polish an idea and bring it to market effectively take home all the bread. It’s an efficient business model. Why pay full time developers, when they can buy ready-to-market games that look promising from starving people who make games, for far less than a full time salary would cost? Or when they can’t, just commission someone else to make a knockoff of the game for you.

Update: Apparently, King also ripped off another game, CandySwipe, which came out a full 2 years before Candy Crush Saga.

Enough said about King.com, Ltd.

I thought it would be a good idea to talk about creativity, freedom, ownership, and standing on the shoulders of giants. Because, like it or not, creativity and success depends on being able to use ideas that someone else came up with.

Here’s some terms we should all be familiar with:

Rip Off

A rip off happens when a creator’s work is appropriated and exploited by another without compensation, usually by imitation, occasionally through unscrupulous contracts or outright theft of IP.

Clone

Clones are games which blatantly copy the play mechanics of another game, while adding no or almost no. What changes there are are often negligible cosmetic differences only. Often the graphics are made nearly identical as well, but not always.

Counterfeit

A counterfeit is an exact clone, attempting to be passed off as an authentic copy of the original game. The player thinks they are playing the real game, but they aren’t, and any revenue generated by it never reaches the creator. The counterfeiter deliberately deceives the player into thinking that they are the author.

Homage

An homage may be a fan game, using the graphics and game engine to create an unofficial sequel, or it may be an original game which is strongly influenced by an earlier game. Homages almost by definition must happen long after the peak popularity of the original, and are a nostalgic look back at a forgotten style of game, and the best offer a re-examination and deeper exploration of the play mechanics and features that made the original successful, or in some cases explore unofficial/alternative storylines, or mashups with other games.

Extension

Some games are made to be extendable, while others are reverse engineered to be extendable by fans who have the necessary skills. Plenty of FPS games, and others, are open to modding, and invite enthusiasts to extend the game in some way, creating a community, or sometimes a small industry, around the title. Modding is a gift the developers give to the community that is created by the market around a game. And modders return the gift to the original developers by keeping interest in the original game alive. Most modded games require the original game to be purchased in order to make the modifications to it, so they help sales. Some extensions are the result of the game engine being officially licensed by a third party developer, who may make wholesale changes to the rest of the game, and sell it as a new title. Many mods are simple graphics and sound replacements, or new levels, enemies, or weapons. But sometimes mods result in an entirely new game.

Sequel

In game development, a sequel is when a creator re-uses its own IP. The resulting game may or may not be better than the original. Quite often, a game is first rushed to market in a “minimum viable product” state, and the sequel is the version that matches the full original concept, with features that were planned for the original but had to be dropped, or implements technologies that were not yet ripe during the development of the first title. Companies with a successful IP will ride it as long as they can, creating sequels and ports of a popular game to make it available to as many markets as they can.

Genre game

A genre game is considered “original” enough to stand on its own, even though it bears strong similarity to many other games that belong to its genre. Nearly always a genre is inspired by a wholly original game that was a big enough hit to establish the genre. As time goes onward, genres tend to become more refined, then more stale, and new genres become increasingly rare and unlikely. Occasionally a grenre is reinvigorated by an inspired new variation that puts a new spin on what for a while was though to be tired and played out. A genre-founding game is both original and nearly always close to perfect. Later games may exceed the genre founder in some or even many capacities, yet may not attain the aura of the founder, and tend to be judged on how well they are executed and how well they innovate new features. Genre games that simply offer more of the same must be well polished, or risk being derided as derivative, and a lot of genre games are sequels or earlier examples from the genre and may get by as much on expanding the world or plot as by improved graphics or innovative features and game play mechanics. But genre games are generally considered legitimate games (if they tend to bore critics after a while) as long as they are of a high quality and try to offer at least something new, even if it’s an experimental feature that doesn’t end up getting picked up by future examples in the genre, and represents a dead end in the family tree.

As well, there are many examples within a genre of clones, or simply uninspired “me too” games produced by lesser studios that aren’t as well designed or polished as the industry leaders, and do nothing as well as the original or the current leader, being cheaply made imitations put together by people of lesser talent and vision who don’t understand the game design elements that made the original great.

That said, there are certain ripoffs that have been equal or even superior to the original. For example, Grid Wars, a blatant clone of Geometry Wars, is an excellent game, if a slavish imitation of the original. Space Invaders spawned a galaxy of imitators, many of which were clones or unoriginal derivatives, but it also spawned the entire shooter genre, and even games like Galaxian which was a very popular game in its own right, might be considered a knockoff.

Conclusions

In short, there is good and bad copying when it comes to creative endeavors. Good copying takes a good idea and does something new and better. Bad copying is a lame attempt to cash in on someone else’s good idea, and can be detrimental to the original, paradoxically especially if the bad copying results in something that is, in its own right, pretty good.

If you’re going to copy… ha ha, “if.” We all copy. But when you copy, unless you’re merely copying solely for your own edification, to learn how to do something you haven’t done before by imitating something in your world, don’t just do the same thing you’ve seen. If you’re creating something with the intent that it be consumed by others, take things from all around you, transform transform somehow, and make it something worth the effort of copying.