Resurrection: Mining Old Games For Successful New Ideas

Let's say you want to make money with the minimum in creative effort in this industry... we'll just pretend. You copy someone else's popular game, right down to the UI, and sell it as your own with a few minor gameplay tweaks. Problem: the other game was popular and yours is not as popular, despite being very similar. Now imagine that this happens all the time in the industry... it might stretch your imagination a bit. How can we improve upon this dire situation?

Now first we have to examine the reasons for the problem. Maybe your minor gameplay tweaks weren't very good ones. Maybe the other game has a marketing budget bigger than yours, or maybe just straight up twice your budget. Or maybe the problem is with the choice of game copied. Copying something that just happened may not be as profitable as one might think. The consumer might be tired of the thing that just happened and not want more of it. But we can keep the same approach and bring something a little fresher to the table if we resurrect the corpse of a dead ancient king-game. We can copy and get away with it. Heck, if we copy a forgotten ancient king-game, people might even hail our company as innovative and creative. Problem 1: how do we know which game to copy? Problem 2: what new kinds of clothes should the resurrected king wear?

The answer to Problem 1 is to look for outliers in gaming history. Games that were popular but whose designs were never followed up on by sequels or genrefication. Games that were never popular, but if only the user interface hadn't sucked or the graphics been so ugly, would've been stars. Games that did one thing well and everything else terribly. Games that are cult classics. Games that were cult classics but everyone has forgotten about because they are so damn old. Indie student projects that noone ever downloaded but were fun. Games that went through production hell and never made it past the Cyberdemons, but you can find feature lists in old PC Gamer articles or maybe Bob the shader programmer used to work on. Games that were just never marketed. Games on the Home of the Underdogs most played/downloaded list. Games that have a megathread in some tiny gaming forum that nobody reads.

The answer to Problem 2 depends on the game, of course. How closely you copy and what you steal should always be open to negotiation. Sometimes it's a single mechanic. It depends on the source of course. If you are stealing closer to the present day, you may want to limit yourself to that. If you need to make something 2D into something 3D you will find yourself with all sorts of interesting adaptation problems, like making a play into a movie. Or, you could always send off the ROM file to your buddies over in the mobile division and have them "port" it to iPhone. If it's a student project, you could do what Valve did and hire the team, celebrating the acquisition of the idea and rewarding its creators, but that isn't as cheap as just reskinning their idea.

Asking around always helps. If you asked a room full of game designers which corpse they would reanimate I bet you'd have around 25 good candidates for resurrection. In some cases you might even be able to grab the IP on the cheap if you think it'd help market your game.

Here's my list of 10, feel obligated to submit your own in the comments:

Chip's Challenge (great puzzle game)

Flightmare (got halfway done on this one)

DigDug

SkiFree (this one has instant name recognition)

Deathworm (great little gamemaker game, make it 3D)

Oni

Sword of the Samurai

Planetside (wrote my senior thesis about this one)

Dr. Brain series

MDK series