What Influences Creators?

Last week I talked about my enjoyment for the roundabout way that TombRaider and Uncharted both benefited from influencing each other. It really got me thinking about how games can share common influences. Sometimes this influence is obvious or even stated by the developers, as is the case with Tomb Raider and Uncharted. Other times people try to make comparisons that are valid but never thought about our even intended by the developers.

Dark worlds

A number of weeks ago Sean mentioned how similar the game he was currently playing, Vagrant Story, was to the Demon's and Dark Souls games. Both share disturbingly dark worlds with all manner of monstrosities to combat.

The way each game approaches combat is different, but the feeling is largely the same. Not necessarily one of hopelessness, but sort of this foreboding feeling that doom is around every corner.

The real question is: was Demon's/Dark souls actually influenced by Vagrant Story, or was this just a mere coincidence? I don't really know how well known Vagrant Story is. It was a pretty obscure game for Squaresoft to release and this was pre 2000. And considering it didn't have the words "Final Fantasy" in the title, many people could have easily skipped over it without a second thought.

Cold-Blooded

Taking some personal experience into account, I feel that a lot people put a little too much effort into seeing things that aren't actually there. Having worked on the most Canadian game in existence—Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves—so many people on the forum were like "Wow, this game remind me so much of (insert title here), did you know/do that on purpose?". As a developer (and an ex video game store lackey) I do know my fair share of game, but I don't know every game.

The one influence we had when making Sang-Froid was tower defense/strategy games. We didn't look into older games because we were dead set on making our own game the way we wanted it. The funniest game to come up was an old DOS game called The Horde. None of us on the team had ever even heard of the game before it was brought up in the forum. I have to admit though the similarities were pretty crazy.

Final thoughts

It's hard to tell what really influenced a group of developers when designing a game. You can make a guess, but unless you can read minds or they flat out tell you what it was, you're pretty much just blowing smoke out your ass.