8 Great Video Games That Inspired EVEN BETTER Ones

2. SimCity 4 Inspired Cities: Skylines

Though the SimCity series flamed out in disgrace with 2013's deeply disappointing reboot, prior to that the franchise seemed in tip-top shape, with 2003's SimCity 4 being arguably the city-building game to rule them all.

Well, until SimCity 2013 bombed spectacularly and Paradox Interactive realised that there was a gap in the market that desperately needed filling.

Enter Cities: Skylines - a city-builder that's quite shamelessly built off the success of SimCity 4, but also made a concerted effort to modernise and streamline its gameplay loop to be more accessible to new players.

The learning curve is decidedly kinder than SimCity 4's, the modding integration is frictionless, and overall it's basically exactly what you'd want a modernisation of that game to be.

Sadly Paradox didn't quite stay the course with the more polarising Cities: Skylines II, but even so, they produced a magnificent first game which ably picked up from where SimCity crashed and burned.