Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Snood's the same way. It's a clone of an 80s game. Gotta hand it to the developer tho, started off as a one-man operation, and it's made him millions.
The real problem is that some of these outfits have gotten so big, that if a small-time developer comes out with a new game gets any kind of good response, the big guys swoop in, draw some pretty graphics, and whammo, the little guy has just had his market taken away.
Even with that, I hope that this doesn't turn into a legal battle. The only people that win those things are the lawyers, and lawyers have ruined (or nearly ruined) enough industries already.
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.
The ______ Agenda
Unless you want to market games on a really unique and proprietary platform, casual gaming and commercial gaming are two things that are difficult to mix. This article shows the most obvious reason why: cloning. The reason for this is that most casual games are so simple that most programmers are able to whip out their own version, possibly making modifications to suit their personal needs.
The bright side of this is that these are ideal free software projects. When I delved into the world of free software, I could not help but notice that the majority of games available were small, casual games. Some of them were quite clever, many were unusually addictive, and the vast majority were clones of something.
If you ask me, casual games ought to be free software because, among other reasons, it A) helps to ensure the longevity of your game and B) helps others to not have to reinvent the wheel. Why rewrite your game as a clone when they can just port it to a new platform or create their own skins? If they think they can make it better, they already have your code to start off with, so they can extend it or examine it while writing their own engine.
I like to think of casual gaming as "generic gaming", and I find it to be healthy that there is a lot of borrowing going on.