Worst of the Retro Rip-Offs

1up has a piece looking at some of the worst blatant rip-offs of classic games. By retooling old ideas and putting new labels on them, a developer can make a pretty penny at the cost of our childhood memories. From the article: "Space Invaders, right? Nope -- it's actually Space Fever, one of the first arcade games produced by Nintendo. Lest certain internet forums break out into a rash of OMG TAITO COPIED NINTENDO threads, I'll be very clear: it was Space Fever that was the ripoff. Much like how America was taken over by Pong and clones in the 1970s, a few years later, you couldn't swing a dead neko in Japan without hitting a Space Invaders machine. The fad was so prevalent that all sorts of imitation machines sprouted up."

Comments

Rainbow Arts

[Perseid]

I'm sure nobody cares, but the company that made Giana Sisters was not a "tiny shareware outfit." They were a moderately sized, commercial game company in the early 90s, making mostly C-64 and Amiga games.

http://www.the-underdogs.org/company.php?name=Rain bow+Arts/

Re:Angband - Diablo

[gpw213]

And Angband, of course, was a rip-off of rogue, which is about 10 years older. In fact, hack, nethack, moria, angband, etc are collectively referred to as "roguelikes".

You might take a look at Wikipedia's article

Re:Rip-offs in the Casual Game space

[bVork]

I find it rather amusing that you mention Zuma, which is itself a direct clone (gameplay-wise) of Puzz Loop, which already had home ports on Playstation and Nuon(!) as Ballistic, and a PC port under the original name.