Follow the Leader/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Well bugger my bumblebee's breadbin! First weeks of Twenty-Ten are going to be fun, aren't they? Darksiders, Bayonetta, Dante's Inferno, and God of War III...God of War clone, God of War clone,[1] God of War clone, and...Well, God of War.
—Yahtzee, Zero Punctuation

Examples of Follow the Leader in Video Games include:

  • The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 can be blamed almost entirely on this, with a gamut of companies tripping over each other to make crappy cash-in games or their own consoles during the heyday of the Atari 2600. In fact, Nintendo of America's infamous "lock-out chip" and corresponding "seal of quality" licensing scheme were designed especially to prevent the former, and thus keep away another crash.
  • The popular mobile physics game Angry Birds is rather similar to many other physics-based projectile games, most notably Armor Games' Crush The Castle, inevitably leading to some fans of the latter to become detractors of the former.
  • Doom is generally considered the progenitor of the First-Person Shooter genre, and Halo unleashed a flood of the genre on set-tops.
    • This has in a strange way become somewhat of a Discredited Trope, as the first-person shooter has shed the "Doom Clone" image it had during the mid-90's and become possibly the most popular genre in all of video games, thanks in no small part to the way games like Halo, Half Life and Goldeneye 007 refined and improved upon the classic Doom formula. Thus, the "first person shooter" has lost the Doom Stigma and is now its very own unique genre.
  • Myst sparked a slew of point-and-click CD-ROM adventure-puzzle games, arguably hastening the death of the older LucasArts/Sierra Online adventure genre.
  • Although there were Real Time Strategy games before Dune II, it was the one responsible for making it a genre.
  • In spite of MUDs and GMUDs languishing in obscurity for ages, their day would only really come in the rechristened form of MMORPGs. The entire MMO craze was started with Ultima Online, refined with EverQuest and Lineage, then given a further kickstart by the massive success of World of Warcraft.
    • World of Warcraft in particular has spawned a number of imitators, Tabula Rasa and Age of Conan among them, that copy not only its gameplay style, but major chunks of its interface (right down to yellow exclamation points over the heads of quest-givers.)
      • In defense of the poor MMOs that don't have eleven million subscribers, one of the things Blizzard is known for is taking existing formula and refining them into a highly polished product. World of Warcraft, at least in its original release, had very little that was actually new to the genre, rather it took existing aspects of MMORPGs, fleshed them out and made them more accessible. It's not surprising that these refinements have propagated themselves to later games in the genre.
    • Guild Wars is one of the other successful RPGs. It got that way by aggressively not imitating WOW; the original development team was made up of former Blizzard employees. Everything from its design to its classes to its pricing (free after purchase) seeks to differentiate itself from its big brother as much as possible. Guild Wars 2 seems to be trying to go even farther, with such things as completely eliminating a class for The Medic; every class has some sort of healing ability.
    • EverQuest in particular had so many features in common with DikuMUD that they were often challenged by hackers and developers familiar with the MUD libraries to show their code.
  • After taking note of the success of Mario Party, Sega came out with the Alternate Company Equivalent Sonic Shuffle. Funilly enough, Hudson Soft developed both games.
    • Recently a lot of "Party games" rather similar to Mario Party have begun to pop up both online and on consoles.
  • Cabal, a third-person arcade shooter spawned many "Cabal clones", such as Blood Bros. and Wild Guns. Sin and Punishment also used a similar format to Cabal.
  • City of Heroes. When Marvel Comics realized they couldn't sue the MMORPG to oblivion, they hired the developers to make a Marvel Comics-based MMO. Then Microsoft got involved and demanded it run on the Xbox 360. There was lots of hype, but the game never materialized. Then DC Comics announced they would make an MMO for the Sony Playstation 3. Er, maybe the Champions-based MMO will be good? The guy leading it was president of the City of Heroes development team...
  • Grand Theft Auto 3 is credited with starting not one, but two threads of Follow the Leader: gritty urban crime games and "sandbox games."
  • The massive success of Capcom's Street Fighter II resulted in a massive glut of fighting games that continued well into the PlayStation years and switch to 3-D gaming. Indeed, SNK made itself a major player in the arcade market by imitating and refining the formula.
    • Once Mortal Kombat made the scene, many of these knockoff fighters began featuring over-the-top gore and/or digitized graphics (including, somewhat ironically, Street Fighter: The Movie in the latter group). Some of the lowlights of this trend included Time Killers, Kasumi Ninja and Tattoo Assassins.
    • Capcom actually sued Data East, the makers of the copycat Fighters History. Data East won on scènes à faire: the copied elements were already commonplace in the genre.
      • Which in itself was more original than most other fighters released in SFII's wake, thanks to the Clothing Damage gameplay gimmick.
    • The Guilty Gear series is seen by many to have paved the way for a whole subgenre of Doujinshi fighting games with similar mechanics.
  • Tokimeki Memorial pioneered the Dating Sim genre with a clean but lovable game, showing that these games weren't just for the Hentai. This trend continued with Kanon (ironically, itself an H-game), which spawned many other H and non-H romance games that focused on the story and characters.
    • This still happens with the ero-ren'ai game market -- a game will come out with an interesting UI enhancement, gameplay trick, or oddball fetish, and upon being successful, will be mimicked by dozens of companies.
  • Nintendo's Mario Kart spawned the Kart Racer, and Super Smash Bros.. popularized the Mascot Fighter, bringing forth cute cartoony variants of two previously popular genres.
    • Sony recently revealed PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. So far, it looks a lot like Super Smash Bros.. with Sony characters.
      • A staff member commented that the game wasn't like SSB because gameplay wasn't based on knocking your opponent off a platform. You have to use something that's suspiciously similar to a Final Smash.
  • Tetris inspired the entire Falling Blocks genre of video games.
  • The success of the Sonic the Hedgehog games (which themselves were created to compete with the Super Mario Bros. games) led to a slew of similar "animals with attitude" games on the Genesis/Mega Drive and SNES. Some of these are considered classics but were sadly overlooked, such as Rocket Knight Adventures and its sequel Sparkster, but others were simply overhyped, unimaginative tripe such as the unfortunately titled, Anviliciously environmental Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt, and the infamous Bubsy. The testament to Bubsy's complete failure is no doubt their attempt to reintroduce him to the gaming world: Bubsy 3D, no doubt one of the worst games ever made, which killed the franchise.
  • The surprise of Final Fantasy VII becoming a Killer App and introducing Role Playing Games to a more general audience resulted in a slew of games starring blond, spiky-haired, moody young men who turn out to be the Tomato in the Mirror. Legend of Dragoon was probably the most notorious of those.
  • The PlayStation's other killer app, Metal Gear Solid, spawned a lot of stealth-game imitators that failed to realise that the glory was as much the story as the sneaking.
    • Bizarre aversion: Syphon Filter was widely derided prior to its release as a MGS clone and a blatant attempt to capitalize on its success...then turned out to be an entirely different type of action game (that actually began development before the release of MGS), being a action shooter with the stealth elements being a really minor aspect for most of the game.
    • A more accurate example of this would be Winback, a stealth-based Nintendo 64 game hyped as the system's answer to Metal Gear Solid. While the game actually received fairly positive reviews upon release (which probably had more to do with the slim selection of "mature" N64 games than the quality of the game itself), it was a commercial failure and immediately forgotten (barring a silent rerelease on the Playstation 2).
  • You can thank the mega-success of Nintendo's Brain Age and Big Brain Academy games for the endless stream of portable Edutainment Games coming to a DS near you. We're still waiting for another company to make something comparably decent.
    • This trope could have been as well called Birdman Syndrome. In short, Wii Sports was done by many of Nintendo's best developers and is a game which is easy to pick up and play but offers five completely different disciplines which have relatively deep physics and has the amount of polish you usually expect from a Nintendo game. After its rampant success many third parties only saw the pick-up-and-play nature of it and made shallow and unpolished minigame collections done by the companies' cheapest development teams. Nintendo's Wii in general seems to have caused many developers to try and cheaply cash in on its success by haphazardly using motion controls whenever they get the chance.
      • On top of this, because Nintendo has shown that powerful graphics isn't what makes a game sell, many 3rd party developers seeking a quick cash in will hardly put any effort in the graphics, causing many people to say the games are N64 quality in graphics.
      • Due to the popularity of the Wii's Mii avatar system, many games have tried to copy off of its concept and design. Even Microsoft tried to cash in on the popularity of Miis with its own avatar system for the Xbox 360 last year that looked suspiciously similar to Miis, but with more customization.
      • Even Sega managed to rip off the Wii with their upcoming Sega Zone. Don't get too excited, Sega fans, it's just a Genesis with some games saved into a hard drive and a pair of black Wii remote-like controllers. They even marketed the system by announcing that it controls just like the Wii. Kind of makes those old "Genesis does what Nintendon't" commercials Hilarious in Hindsight.
        • That was actually made by another company with Sega's license.
    • A recent interview with Satoru Iwata that provides the page quote stated that this is actually the reason Nintendo's keeping quiet on the Wii's successor. They're afraid that if they announce things too soon, Sony and Microsoft will inevitably try and steal them. And given how both companies have recently done their own take on motion controls, this fear may be justified.
    • Did anyone here ever the see the original designs for the PSP? It looked like just like the GBA SP, only with a disc slot.
  • You thought this trope was bad in video games? Well, it's even worse with Casual Games! Seriously, just try and count how many Time Management/Match Three/Hidden Object Games there are on the Internet! The games made by PopCap did this for the entire casual game genre.
  • After the Tamagotchi fad (itself strongly reminiscent of the Pet Rock) and the virtual pet craze it inspired swept the world, hoards of Gotta Catch Them All video games, Collectible Card Games and Mons Of The Week anime were spawned in its wake, and have been a popular market segment to this day.
  • Certain technologies and gameplay features became popular in video games as tacked on features for brief periods;
  • The Full Motion Video "Interactive Movie" genre. While it had existed in more basic form using analog video controlled by a computer (I.E.: Dragon's Lair,) it wasn't until the fully digital Cinepak-based CD-ROM format that it became practical as a consumer format. While it was also used to add cutscenes to existing genres, nearly all early CD titles consisted of immensely similar crosses between a B-Movie and a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Occupying somewhere around So Bad It's Good or unplayable depending on the cheesiness of the invariably low production values, the genre has only managed to live on in the form of the Visual Novel, and there often only thanks to overlap with adult games.
  • Tomb Raider and Lara Croft herself spawned many copycat attempts.
    • Which is pretty funny considering that its road to success can be described as Indiana Jones meets Prince of Persia… IN 3D. When the Prince and Indy made the jump to 3D, they were both seen as shameless ripoffs of Ms. Croft's efforts.
    • To be fair, the first POP and Indy games in 3D did take a lot from the Tomb Raider formula However, the later games for both series went some way to changing that (not that that stopped the comparisons), to the point that when that when Tomb Raider was revived with Legend many mechanics felt like they'd been raided from the tombs of a certain Persian royal family.
  • Diablo, which created its own genre called "Diablo clones" (Torchlight, Dungeon Siege, Untold Legends, etc.), was itself a graphical spin on another fine tradition in Follow The Leader, Roguelike games, of which Nethack is the most popular. As Diablo is the model of many MMORPGs open-world game that followed inn of MMOs and Diablo clones often incites accusations of Diablo killing the western RPG genre from fans.
  • To elaborate on the previous entry- Rogue, the Genre Popularizer for the appropriately named Roguelike genre, inspired a number of games, most notably Nethack and Angband. Both of which were essentially more advanced versions of their predecessors, which were in turn, descended from Rogue. Nethack went on to create a line of "hack-likes," while Angband created "band-likes", games that were heavily similar to their respective ancestors.
  • Also, the Might and Magic series started a new trend of Group Based RPGs in the late '80s and '90s, including the excellent Baldur's Gate. Ironically, it died off with the same series, in Might and Magic IX, thanks to the less than kind time and development constraints given by its Publisher, 3DO. Sure, some came before it, but it was MM that popularized it. It shows signs of coming back with Neverwinter 2, but more than a few wishes Ubisoft puts a X in the front of the franchise they bought.
    • Speaking of bought franchises, the series Heroes of Might and Magic spin-off of the Might and Magic series also gave the kick to both Turn Based Strategy games that aren't incredibly boring and nerdy Electronic Tabletop Wargames AND to Hero-Based Strategy games, being the first strategy game to put "generals" into the equation (other than the player himself as an order giver). Warcraft 3, Age of Mythology and listless others owe to the franchise. Strangely, many players weren't very understanding when Heroes IV reminded their audience of the Sci-Fi background of the MM franchise (mostly because a large portion of the Heroes fanbase didn't even know there was a Might and Magic RPG franchise that it was spun off from). Still, what really killed it was the same 3DO that killed MMIX.
  • X-COM gave birth to a large follow-up of Squad Based Tactical games. Some were doomed because most of X-Com's appeal (that had been just a minor title at UK) was because it came down in the middle of the X-Files hype (the game even had its title changed from UFO: Enemy Unknown to the more X-Files-like name of the anti-alien corporation you play with in the game). Honorable clones include Commandos and Jagged Alliance.
    • Jagged Alliance was actually developed parallel to X-Com and did not copy it.
  • Halo is a good example, as almost every FPS these days has copied the 'recharging health bar' thing (to varying degrees of success). It also eliminated the Hyperspace Arsenal concept that most FPSs had and limited it to a primary and secondary weapon only.
    • Two often-overlooked mechanics that Halo brought to the table were melee and grenades always being available and having a dedicated button to use them. Many previous games like Half Life had grenades and melee, but only as specific weapons in the character's Hyperspace Arsenal (for example, Gordon Freeman only hits enemies with his crowbar, while Master Chief can club someone with anything he can pick up). Most newer FPSs incorporate a dedicated melee and grenade button whether they have a traditional Hyperspace Arsenal or modern primary/secondary weapon layout. Some games (like F.E.A.R., Gears of War, and Darkwatch) have built explicit melee options or even enitre combo systems based on a dedicated melee button.
      • Worth noting is that Duke Nukem 3D had a dedicated melee button years before Halo, though it was nowhere near as useful.
    • Halo itself was remarkable for bringing many earlier concepts into a single game. (Vehicles, Recharging Health, adhesive grenades, there's probably a few more.)
    • Rise of the Triad did away with Hammerspace arsenals well before Halo did, albeit to a lesser degree (pistol, dual pistols, an MP40, one heavy weapon that's usually a missile launcher, and one magic superweapon like the baseball bat).
  • This has been around for a long time. Back when the C64 was still kicking around, the arcade conversion of Gauntlet (1985 video game) resulted in a larger number of Gauntlet clones to appear. Some of these were actually better as they had an objective while Gauntlet was mainly aimed at making players want to keep inserting more coins.
  • Want a headache? Try following the evolution of the Guitar Rock game genre:
  • Konami's Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times/Little Magician's Magic Adventure can essentially be summed up as: Animal Crossing, but at Wizarding School!
    • Not a style of game but Animal Crossing has helped popularize chibi-style casual games.
  • Rare, in their SNES/N64 times, had great success imitating popular Nintendo series. Diddy Kong Racing for example built on the success of Mario Kart, but adding an adventure mode and more vehicles. Prior to that, Donkey Kong Country was Super Mario World in the jungle. They eventually got tired of doing that, though, birthing Conker's Bad Fur Day, originally another cutesy platformer.
    • They've done it again. The Xbox 360's Avatars, which were developed by Rare, look suspiciously similar to Nintendo's Miis.
  • Although not the first spaceflight "simulator", Wing Commander spawned a lot of them, from good ones like the Star Wars: X-Wing and Free Space series, to... well, others.
  • The use of isometric projection. Nobody's sure whether Q Bert, Zaxxon or Ant Attack got there first (Ant Attack might have been the first to actually use the word "isometric"), but what people are certainly sure of is that Knight Lore is the one that blew it apart into the behemoth it became, inspiring a slew of similar games from the crud (Molecule Man) to the self-recycling (Alien 8, Pentagram) to the sublime (Head Over Heels) to the just plain weird (Movie).
  • Gears of War didn't introduce the concept of duck and cover shooters but they are the most famous for making such a game enjoyable. Now it seems like there are two ways to do a shooter game, traditional FPS or Gears of War style.
  • Platform Hell, while first started by Jinsei Owata no Daibouken and Super Mario Forever, was codified by Kaizo Mario World, leading to a huge flood of imitators made purely for either the difficulty or to annoy people on Youtube and other video sharing websites (and half the examples on Platform Hell did this, complete with the exact same traps as Kaizo itself).
  • Mario's Picross helped speed up the amount of nonogram games to soon follow, mostly in Flash form.
  • Many urban-themed Beat'Em Up were made to ride on the success of Final Fight. Just look at Burning Fight and Riot City.
    • History repeated itself when Capcom tried to revive the Urban Beat'Em Up with Final Fight: Streetwise. Namco tried to take the wind out of Capcom's sails by making and releasing Urban Reign around the same time. Both games flopped.
  • Flat Out is often nicknamed Burnout's redneck cousin. Instead of crashes with cars only, they focus on cars crashing with the drivers being ejected.
  • God of War, as well as popularising Action Commands, seems to have spawned a genre of violent, gory third-person beat-em-ups with Sociopathic Hero protagonists. Better examples include God Hand, No More Heroes and MadWorld, but even the Wolverine movie based game is made in the style... which turned out surprisingly good.
  • The Mario Party games inspired a bunch of similar multiplayer "party" games like Shrek Party and Monopoly party.
    • Nickelodeon even has their own free, online version called Block Party.
  • Resident Evil may not have invented the Survival Horror genre, but it did invent the name, and it proved the concept could sell. Cue Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Capcom's own Dino Crisis, and so on.
    • The guy who came up with Dino Crisis is the same guy who came up with Resident Evil. So would that be considered chasing his tail?
  • There is a natural law that goes something like this: "Given continued development and infinite time, all open-source FPSes will eventually turn into Counter-Strike."
  • Shortly after Fallout 3's success, several RPG/FPS hybrids with a wasteland setting were announced.
  • Defense of the Ancients, an incredibly popular homemade custom map (bordering on Game Mod) for Warcraft 3, has spawned a commercial imitator in Demigod, with more titles on the horizon. League of Legends is the product of the original creator of the map making a game out of it.
  • Call of Duty fans are instigating the future Medal of Honor game is doing this, although technically it's the other way around, Infinity Ward being formed from people who worked on the early MoH's. Go figure.
    • And besides that, MoH is set in the War on Terror, in Afghanistan, while CoD 4 is set in Ultranationalist Russia.
    • Battlefield: Bad Company 2 does take a few plot elements from Modern Warfare 2, but for the most part it's for the purpose of parodying them.
  • Countless shmups in the '90s imitated Raiden... which itself was inspired by Twin Cobra and other Toaplan shmups, as was Konami's Trigon / Lightning Fighters, which came out the same year as the first Raiden.
  • Ever 17 is a popular Visual Novel. Soul Link is a less popular visual novel. Ever17 is about a group of people trapped in an underwater theme park. Soul Link is about a group of people trapped in a hotel IN SPACE.
  • Wizard 101 is Toontown Online in a magical school setting.
  • First Person Shooters and RPGs have been a Takahashi Couple for a while now, but it was Mass Effect that really woke up developers to the potential money involved. Ironically, while Alpha Protocol is often billed as Mass Effect IN A SPY SETTING, and was launched on the wave that Mass Effect started, it's actually more of a Spiritual Successor to Deus Ex.
  • Ever since StarCraft numerous games seem to have followed their theme on formation of factions. Balanced Terrans, bio-tech Zergs, and high-tech Protoss.
  • LittleBigPlanet seems to have spawned a wave of co-op Platform Games, as well as a run of console games with level editors.
  • Nintendogs was popular enough to spawn a wave of virtual pet series. An especially tragic example is Ubisoft's Catz and Dogz titles: the game, by PF.Magic, pre-dated Nintendogs and was more comedic (such as being able to paint your cat or spritz it with water repeatedly). After the Learning Company/Mindscape/Brøderbund sales, Ubisoft owned the franchise and reinvented it except as an extremely girly knock-off of Nintendogs.
  • Although Railroad Tycoon started the "tycoon" brand, Rollercoaster Tycoon started a wave of games, each with "Tycoon" in its name. By the time it died circa 2006, games like Fairy Godmother Tycoon were on the market.
  • Young Merlin tries very much to be a Zelda game with some new twists.
  • Gameloft's method of making games is copying a currently popular title's graphics, gameplay, and frequently even name, and releasing it onto a platform that doesn't have a version of the game they copied. In a way, they're the video game version of The Aslyum. Gameloft does at least try to make fun games and acknowledge that they're not exactly being original, and a lot of their products have received critical acclaim. Examples include:
  • On the same vein as Gameloft, Triniti Interactive has made their fair share of blatant clones of popular games for the iPhone, which they sell individually and in their GAMEBOX compilations. To be fair, they have made some decent original stuff and sometimes acknowledge their sources of inspiration. Examples include:
  • Professor Layton seems to be inspiring a subgenre of "cinematic game with quaint anime cutscenes and gameplay divided up into small, brainteaser-based chunks." One follower, Zack And Ombras Amusment Park Of Illusions, took a more mini-game based approach. And one recently revealed DS title, Professor Lautrec And The Forgotten Knights features similar puzzles and anime cutscenes, but with a more traditional Gentleman Adventurer (with a Badass Mustache, though the top hat is still Layton-esque) and more Thick Line Animation.
  • Thanks to Touhou, all modern Shoot Em Ups have to feature little girls and magic. Faux Symbolism is also common, thanks to Touhou's use of mythology. The few that don't bite pretty close to Gradius, Raiden, or Geometry Wars.
  • Katamari Damacy, believe it or not. After the unexpected success of the game, Namco tried to follow up on it by creating other quirky, colorful games with a "growing" game mechanic, which resulted in Noby Noby Boy for the Play Station 3 and The Munchables for the Wii.
  • Steve Ballmer's claims that the Xbox 360 is not a games console, but a "family entertainment center", along with his insistence that it was "the only console" with a variety of features, were systematically and viscerally debunked by the MachineCAST:

"'It's the only system where you are the controller.' To be honest, that last one's just weak. That's like me trying to sell you a bicycle by saying it's the 'only vehicle where you are the engine'! Leaving aside the fact, of course, that the Wii and PlayStation Move...well, exist."

  • Ever since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare introduced the at-the-time new and innovative class customization multiplayer ideology to the mainstream, many games have copied it exactly, including the experience points and ranking system. Most of them have also copied the "perks" that the Call of Duty games are known for. Examples include:
  • The rather innovative destructible environment system of Infiniminer, after it was made open-source, spawned dozens of clones, most of which weren't that successful. There were exceptions though, one of them being Minecraft.
    • Minecraft, in turn, brought the genre into the mainstream, and it too inspired a wave of imitators. The most successful of these was Terraria, which shifted the concept from a fully 3D environment to a 2D side-scrolling one, and added Metroidvania elements.
  • Super Mario Bros 3 had many clones/imitations, including Mc Kids, Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout, Armadillo(Japan only), etc.
  • Contra imitations included Data East's Midnight Resistance, SNK's Cyber Lip, Treasure's Gunstar Heroes (although it was made by former Konami employees who worked on Contra III), and Irem's Gunforce, which in turn was the spiritual precursor to Metal Slug.
  • Espial and HAL 21 were both carbon copies of Xevious, as was Data East's Zaviga. Alphos for the PC-88 was apparently developed as a clone but released under license from Namco because this early Enix game resembled Xevious too much. The original MSX versions of Zanac also look a lot like Xevious.
  • Copying R-Type was quite the thing for a long time (e.g. Pulstar, Konami's XEXEX), to the point that Irem ended up suing a company called Factor 5 for making Katakis, a crass ripoff even by the very low standards of video game thievery.
  • Love Plus made money in Japan, and attracted media attention (perhaps because of obsessive fans). In May 2011, the company Teatime created an adults-only game called Renai+H with similar gameplay.
  • After Just Dance became a surprise hit, several similar dance games were made, for the Wii, Xbox 360 Kinect, and Play Station 3 Move, including Dance Central, Dance Masters, Dance Paradise, Singstar Dance, Country Dance.
  • Square's NES games 3D World Runner and Rad Racer were clones/imitations of Sega's Space Harrier and Out Run, respectively. Square's still earlier King's Knight borrows a lot of elements from Konami's MSX game Knightmare.
    • Other Space Harrier derivatives/ripoffs included Rocket Ranger, Cosmic Epsilon, Attack Animal Gakuen and Jimmu Densho Yaksa.
  • Nichibitsu's Terra Force follows in the footsteps of Konami's Salamander (Life Force), alternating between vertical and horizontal scrolling, and featuring similar weaponry and attack drones.
  • Castlevania was copied a lot, most blatantly with the Sega Master System game Vampire: Master of Darkness and the PC 98 game Rusty.
  • Ninja Gaiden (NES) inspired Wrath of the Black Manta(which also has elements of Shinobi), Vice: Project Doom, Shatterhand, Shadow of the Ninja (which ironically was dolled up as Ninja Gaiden Shadow on the GB) et al.
    • Speaking of ninjas, Irem's Ninja Spirit followed Legend of Kage, but was far superior, although it was mostly overlooked.
  • Rolling Thunder was imitated by E-SWAT Cyber Police, the aforementioned Shinobi, Crime City, Rough Ranger, Code Name Viper, etc.
  • In the late 1970s to early 1980s, a large number of video game companies rushed to release their own Space Invaders-like games. Some of these were hardly distinguishable from the original, e.g. Leijac's Space King and IPM's IPM Invader by two companies now better known as Konami and Irem, respectively. Of all the early imitators, Namco's Galaxian is probably the best remembered, while Nintendo's Space Fever and Sega's Invinco! may be regarded as mere footnotes to history. TI Invaders for the TI-99, Avenger for the VIC 20, and Space Assault for the TRS-80 Color Computer were first-party Space Invaders clones for systems that never received authorized ports.
  • Pong Tennis and other clones were extremely common in the 1970s despite technology allowing to make different games. These came out with most of the first-generation video game consoles after the success of Pong, which was released in 1972. Atari even published an ad in May 1973 mocking the band-wagon behavior of their competitors.
  • Ace Combat inspired a few jet fighter simulations combining a somewhat realistic flight model with over-the-top scenarios and some less realistic elements. Examples include Airforce Delta, Lethal Skies and more recently, HAWX.
  • Quake ended up being the leader in a different way - there are a whole slew of games running on its engines (particularly Quake III Arena‍'‍s) or derivatives of them (such as Call of Duty‍'‍s IW Engine or Valve Corporation's GoldSrc and Source), in comparison to the competing Unreal engine.
  • Metal Slug lead to an handful of fast-paced run and gunners with a cartoony yet intricate art style. Examples include Demon Front, CT Special Forces and Commando: Steel Disaster.
  • Pac-Man gave rise to such a wave of unauthorized clones that the arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man and the Apple II version of Pac-Man were originally developed as such. K.C. Munchkin for the Odyssey² was close enough to get sued, though it became something a bit different. Munch Man for the TI-99 was almost too much like Pac-Man in its prototype version; the final release had a different maze and the superficial substitution of laying chains for eating dots. Some developers of dot-collecting Maze Games were a bit more inventive, and Lady Bug, Lock 'n' Chase and Mouse Trap were respectable enough games in their own right to see release on multiple platforms.
  • Living Books inspired a whole slew of clones, done in a very similar format (Almost all of them had the option to read the story automatically, or read a page and click on everything). The most notable of these is the Disney Animated Storybook series, although several others had given it a shot too.
  • The great wave of "Breakout clones" actually followed the release of Arkanoid, in whose wake Sega released Gigas and Namco released Quester.
    • One game, Sorcerer's Maze, is a Breakout clone made for the PS 1. It was given a misleading title in order to fool gamers because it's just another Breakout clone. The game is actually fairly decent, and it has bosses.
  • Pokémon spawned its share of imitators, like: Spectrobes, which gets lampshaded in Game Informer's review of the first game. Gotta Dig Up Fossilized Remains Of 'Em All!
  • Mini Robot Wars seems like a clone of Plants vs. Zombies, except that the game is in a horizontal view with platforms you have to place your units on.
  • Singles: Flirt Up Your Life is essentially a mature copy of The Sims 2.
  • Activision quite obviously copied the Cooking Mama concept to a T and made it into Science papa.
  • Super Mario 64 started the "Collect-a-thon" genre of platform games, spawning games like Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Kazooie, the latter two Gex games, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and the first Jak and Daxter. As with most instances of this trope, the quality varies wildly.
  • Kung-Fu Master led to other single-plane Beat Em Ups starring Bruce Lee Clones: Dragon Wang for the SG-1000 and China Warrior for the TurboGrafx-16.
    • Splatterhouse 1 and 2 somewhat count in this regard. Both games are single plane beat'em ups recycled in a horror video game. But in those two games, you can wield weapons unlike most Kung Fu Master clones. Splatterhouse 3 on the other hand, plays more like Final Fight.
  • Farmville is an interesting case. The game was inspired by Chinese web game called Happy Farm, which itself is inspired by Harvest Moon. Now with the popularity of social network farming games, Natsume decided to follow the leader that was following Natsume...
  • The early Enix Adventure Game Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (The Portopia Serial Murder Case), especially its menu-based Famicom port, led to an enormous wave of murder mystery adventure games from other Japanese video game publishers in the 1980s. However, almost none of these games were ever exported.
  • Once again with the Beat'Em Up genre, Konami also started something with it. This version of follow the leader went into three different directions:
    • 1.) The success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the Arcade Game lead to the rise of the company itself doing arcade adaptions of popular cartoons/cartoons based on comic books, with up to 4 (6 for X-men) player co-op. Titles such as X-Men, The Simpsons, and Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars during the 90s.
    • 2.) This also lead a couple of "me too's" on Ninjas with weapons and 4 player co-op. Taito's The Ninja Kids (most of them wield bladed weapons) and Irem's Ninja Baseball Bat Man (all fight with baseball bats, duh). One of the stages in Ninja Kids looks like April's burning apartment. The final stage in Ninja Baseball Batman takes place on top of a scaffold in New York, at night, just like the first stage of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Turtles in Time. Both games failed in arcades not because they were bad, but due to poor advertisement and being over shadowed by other, and more popular beat'em ups and fighting games. In fact they had decent (Ninja Kids) and excellent (Ninja Baseball Batman) game play respectively.
    • 3.) There were games that hitched on the Teenage Mutant Samurai Wombats craze. Mainly the Battletoads franchise is guilty of this, but it started on the home consoles and worked its way up to the arcades. The console versions used lots of Nintendo Hard platforming to differentiate itself from other brawlers, but the arcade game is just a more straight foward brawler and plays more like Double Dragon with gory finishers. Wow. Now that's a doozy!
  • Jaleco's Ninja Jajamaru-kun series, after the first two games, abandoned its original style of gameplay in the later Famicom installments, which instead imitated Dragon Quest (Jajamaru Ninpou Chou), The Legend of Zelda (Jajamaru Gekimaden) and Super Mario Bros 3 (Ginga Daisakusen).
  • The Monster Hunter series is huge in Japan, and has already inspired a handful of multiplayer-party-vs.-giant-monster successors, namely Square Enix's Lord of Arcana, Namco Bandai's Gods Eater Burst, and now Game Arts' Ragnarok Online Odyssey.
  • The great success of Nintendo's NES Mini and SNES Mini inspired Sony to try their own hand at a micro-console. The resulting PlayStation classic had almost no effort put into it and bombed horribly, going on sale for 40% off within a month. Among the many issues
    • Terrible game selection in the western release. Including incredibly illogical "gems" like the original "translation" of the first Persona and the PlayStation 1 port of the first Rainbow Six.
    • Controller is based on the original PlayStation controller, not the Dual Shock. In addition to losing features for several games (and meaning Ape Escape could never be on it) this means the USB controller isn't much use as a PC controller either.
    • Uses open source emulator with quite a few emulation issues instead of an in-house solution.
      • Unlike the original emulator, each game has its own unique memory card and there's no way to manage memory cards short of deleting the contents. You can't have multiple saves per game.
    • Uses the PAL versions of several games in the North American release, meaning they run at only 50 FPS. Presumably to avoid Quebec's language requirements since these are the only French versions.
    • No AC adapter included. While it's a common type, this comes off as very stingy.
    • The UI has minimal effort put into.
    • Absolutely no attention was paid to security: The "private" key is plainly visible. The only thing here that increased sales.
    • Performance was poor for several games. A hacked SNES Mini actually runs PS1 games better.
  1. ↑ A case of Did Not Do Research. Bayonetta is a Spiritual Successor to Devil May Cry. He later rectifies this in his review.
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