Slashdot Mirror
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."
If someone was to copy/redo that, I'd just die!
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
How about a list of the best video game rip-offs ? Some ripoffs improved on the original considerably. For example, Tengen's unlicensed NES Tetris is much better than the official Nintendo version. Pole Position was copied endlessly, eventually spawning an entire genre of games. There were various ripoffs of Pac-Man, some inspired by the "Pac-Man is drugs craze", where Power pellets and "fruit" (now mostly mushrooms) produced strange side-effects in Pac-Man. Last but not least are all those hacked Street Fighter 2 arcade machines. Eventually you started seeing entirely new graphics added to the ROM, with bizarre new characters and moves, and many of these were way more fun to play than the original because you never knew what the hell was going to happen.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Everyone in the art and fashion world seems to run around with their hair on fire whenever someone's work resembles someone else's. The game world seems to work similarly. Here's my two cents:
First of all, EVERYTHING is based on EVERYTHING ELSE. Each of us creates new things by assimilating and processing all the old things that surround us. Our culture is a huge collaborative thing, and anyone who tries to tell you they've come up with something entirely new with no basis in anything that exists already is lying to you (or to themselves).
Second, THIS IS A GOOD THING. I don't want every new first person shooter that comes out to have some new and unusual control scheme. I don't want grenades to work totally differently in every game. I don't want to have to read a fucking book before I can start playing. I WANT and EXPECT my games to follow some sort of reasonable conventions. This goes for storyline elements, too. I want a plot with a beginning, middle, and end. I want a game that places me in the middle of some sort of interesting situation and allows me to be, for at least a little while, right in the middle of things. In other words, I want game companies to figure out what is fun, and what works well, and produce it dependably. This means studying what already works, which means duplicating to some extent the gameplay of other games. AND THIS IS GOOD.
Third, since when did everything have to be brand new and different to be valid? We don't suddenly decide that cars are "so last century" and begin driving 10 foot hamster wheels, do we? NO. We stick with the tried and true, with old reliable. Cars haven't been new and different for a hundred years; every car is totally derivative, a "ripoff" of the very first car. SO WHAT? It drives, it's nice, I like it.
Anyway, that's my piece. People who use the term "ripoff" as though it's some kind of sin need to get over themselves.
Most of that article, however, is about Nintendo getting ripped off, way bigger than Space Invaders. In its early days in the video game business, Nintendo did indeed make clones of Space Invaders (Nintendo's had COLOR!) and Joust. However, after Shigeru Miyamoto joined the Big N, they became the company to rip off: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Super Metroid, and Donkey Kong are all mentioned.
You might take a look at Wikipedia's article
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill