The Casual Game Clone Wars

Casual games are ever more financially lucrative in the new world of everyday games. With money to be made, clones of successful games can be launched in a very short period of time, resulting in the original title vying for financial success with its johnny-come-lately play-alike. From the article: "But, while PopCap's James Gwertzman comments in a recent interview of Zuma's success in 2004: 'We were all very excited about it, but it's 2005 and there have been a ton of very obvious Zuma clones', we have to ask - how about Mitchell's 1998 title Puzzloop for arcades, also known as Ballistic for PSX in the States? The game's basic design seems identical to Zuma. There was even some talk of Mitchell, which has released a PC version of Puzzloop, taking PopCap to court over the issue, though neither company has ever made public statements about it."

Comments

Hey, did you see how black kettle was?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Meh, Not going to bother to install their browser component just to see what game they ripped off, but I strongly doubt anything popcap offers is original. Fun maybe, good implentations, I'll accept, but not originals. They have a bunch of old puzzle games that have been around since the win3.11 shareware days, just because they port them to a web browser plugin and give them a pretty name doesnt mean people copy them when they do the same.

That was my first thought, actually

[cgenman]

Someone sent a link to Zuma a little while back. My first thought upon playing it was "this is a PC version of Puzzloop."

Now, if you want to trace it back further, Puzzloop was based somewhat more loosely on a linear version of Bust a Move, which in turn was a hexagonal interpretation of Columns. Columns was Sega's attempt to get in on the success of Tetris.

Of course, the difference between stealing is how much interpretation goes on between the steps, and how honest the developers are about the originality. Puzzle Pirates has a swordfighting system with is clearly based upon Puzzle Fighter. Puzzle Fighter in turn was based upon Waku Waku Animal, which was an attempt to rip off Puyo Pop, which was a somewhat more successful attempt to rip off columns, who was going for tetris. However, if you look at the Swordfighting in Puzzle Pirates and Tetris, there is a huge delta between the two. Likewise, you can trace fighting games from Soul Calibur III -> Soul Calibur -> Tekken -> Mortal Kombat -> Street Fighter II -> Street Fighter I -> Karate Champ, and back up from Karate Champ -> Kung Fu -> Double Dragon -> Ninja Gaiden -> Strider -> Sonic the Hedgehog -> Sonic Adventures.

My point is that fundamental game mechanics flow between games, in the same way that camera movements flow between movies and bad acting flows between TV shows. The mechanics are building blocks from which games emerge, but they are not the games themselves. It isn't the individual mechanics per-say, but the execution that matters.

Re:That was my first thought, actually

[fondue]

Nice theory, the problem is that Zuma is a direct copy of Puzzloop. It's identical in all but name and graphic theme.

None of the other games you compare are direct copies of each other. A game being in the same genre as another game does not make it a 'rip off' of the original game.

Re:That was my first thought, actually

[MilenCent]

But when you're talking about games which are based on simplified, yet ingenious, play mechanics, a good number of which I count among my favorites, your argument breaks down. There is actually a world of difference, for example, between Bust-A-Move, aka Puzzle Bobble, and Columns, far more than your dismissive statement suggests. Columns has quite a bit more in common with Tetris, but there's substantial differences even in that. But if you want to look at it broadly enough, all these games have a similar, "continual play until successive mistakes end the game" structure. I still wouldn't say they're similar enough to be functionally identical, indeed each of these games' variations on the rules are sufficent to mark them as separate games, and playing 30 minutes of Tetris would not satisfy any particular Puzzle Bobble jones I might have.

BUT, there has long been a cottage industry of shareware games, upon the foundation of which this Flash game industry has been built, that exists mostly as a series of clones of prior games. How many versions of Breakout have we seen? Unlike the differences between Puzzle Bobble and Columns, different board designs, special blocks and the addition of sporadic powerups do not mark it as a separate game. Now, how many versions of Tetris have we seen in which gameplay was not sufficently varied? Okay, how many versions of Asteroids has there been? How about Shanghai (which most places misname Mahjonng)? Sokoban? SameGame?

It's possible to make games sufficently different from each of these things that retain the same basic mechanic, but most of the developers behind them care more about the dollars they can make copying someone else's idea than the game themselves. This usually takes the form of adding powerups and different boards into it (especially with the many Breakout and Asteroids cloners). Sometimes they're not even aware of the true origin of a game, but are themselves copying a copy (see: Arkanoid). Usually the quality of their implementation betrays their real motivation, but that's beside the point. There is still an important difference here between these shareware knockoff artists and people who actually try to make something different.