8 Video Game Rip-Offs Better Than The Original
Often imitated, occasionally duplicated.
The video game clone wars have been going on as long as the industry has existed. No sooner was Pong gobbling quarters in bars across America than Atari was batting back a whole slew of suspiciously similar television tennis sims, the inevitable money-chasing volleys to their lucrative serve. Eventually, the market became so over-saturated with home Pong-likes that the bottom fell out entirely, resulting in the lesser known crash of 1977.
Every manufacturer wanted a piece of the disgusting sounding Pong pie, but consumers weren't prepared to pay for the same game over and over again. It wasn't until Space Invaders - the first truly fresh idea in six years - that the video game industry kickstarted back into life.
On the whole then, and with apologies to Dolly the sheep, clones are a bad thing - but not always. Did you know, for example, that Pong itself was a clone? And by clone, we mean outright rip-off. Who knows where the game industry would be without it though? Maybe Magnavox would have been the Atari of their day, before Ralph Baer let success get to his head, tanked the company, and opened a chain of (literally) cheesy theme restaurants.
Even before VHS recorders were a thing, Pong broke the rule that copies are inferior. Its highly successful form of flattery has been imitated repeatedly throughout gaming history - and occasionally, duplicated.
8. Angry Birds (Crush The Castle)
Angry Birds, Finland's greatest export since Jean Sibelius, Nokia, and the sauna, had at least one Flash developer steaming, so suspiciously similar was it to one of their browser games.
In Armor's trebuchet-em-up Crush the Castle, the player launches projectiles from a ballista on the left of the screen at a ramshackle tower on the right, with the aim of squashing the knights stationed within. If that sounds a lot like Angry Birds, albeit with a medieval spin, it's because it's the same. Released just eight months later, Rovio's fowl-flinging mobile hit recreated Crush the Castle's gameplay almost one-for-one - up to and including the projectile variants - only swapping incendiaries for incensed chickens, and soldiers for egg-swindling swine. Thieving pigs!
It's as blatant a knock-off as they come, but Angry Birds' infinitely more appealing characters and accessible mobile format made it a superior - and incredibly successful - one. No doubt Armor had some angry words about Angry Birds.