9. Golden Axe Warrior
Golden Axe Warrior is one of those head-smackingly incredulous rip-offs that just makes you sit back and ask, “Why?”. Despite boasting the likeness of the famed Golden Axe series on the front cover, it bares little-to-no semblance to this namesake in-game, and is actually best recognised, as you can easily see above, as a gigantic rip-off of The Legend of Zelda. From pretty much the first second you start playing, all of the main environments are exactly the same, and the real main difference is that the protagonist has been re-skinned, an unimaginable stretch for the developers but one which apparently was enough to dupe plenty of gamers into buying it.
The developers even had the gaul to copy the same music and even the events that take place, yet its crassness ensures that it’s regarded by most retro enthusiasts as one of the most shameless rip-offs in gaming history, and rightly so. When a developer is this lazy and appears to think so little of its audience – that they’re dumb enough to fall for these sorts of tactics – we want them to fail, and Golden Axe Warrior is absolutely a fail. Thankfully, we’d like to think we’ve moved on from this, and devs wouldn’t dare try to pull these sorts of tricks.
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5 Comments
How about League of Legends?
I was really disappoint not to see it at #1.
Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn’t a rip-off. They were both developed by Nintendo. You can’t really rip-off of your own game. It was changed to sell better in America and replace the “lost levels” presumably.
I love it when people talk about something they know nothing about. Sure, Fighters History is “kind of” a rip off, but to say Ryoko, who is a grab character, is a rip off of Ryu, who is NO WHERE close to being one, is just misinformed. Honestly, there are many other games that are much closer to being rip offs, but this isn’t one of them. But its people talking about things they don’t know or understand…
I was expecting Playstation All-Stars to be mentioned….
This list is flawed. Like the one claiming a game to be a rip off of Ratchet and Clank and Jak and Daxter, so what, we can’t have 3D platformers anymore?
Saints Row 1 had the same theme as GTA:SA, but it always distinguished itself as being over the top and arcadey. SMB2 being a clone is ridiculous, the other game was made by Nintendo.
The one at number 1 looked like a cookie-cutter oblivion scene though.