Genre Cloning?

Recently I had the opportunity to play “Scarface : The World is Yours” on the PC.

I was less than an hour in before I started to get bored. Not because this is a particularly bad game, but because I’d seen it all before.

I was playing Grand Theft Auto : Vice city, with Tony Montana cut and paste into place. Is that what I paid for? A game I’d already played, but with Al Pacino’s likeness?

I persevered a little, and then realized I was being totally unfair. Why was I judging this game poorly, simply because it had the same game mechanics as another game?

To often today, people dismiss good games because they’re judged as“clones” of previous games. It’s unreasonable and impossible to expect every new game that comes out to be totally original and a whole new genre.

In fact, if we look back, there hasn’t been a truly original new genre since the birth of gaming, and all games that are judged to be new genres are simply expansions of existing genres brought on by new technologies.

If we look at the pattern forming, we see it works as follows:

New Genre – Multiple small ‘baby step’ improvements – New technology arrives that takes a much larger step – New improvement is hailed as a new genre.

The Beginning

Let’s go way back to the dawn of gaming and a little game called space invaders.

This was a new genre. It was the first mainstream, popular shoot ‘em up.

Then, as everyone knows, it was “cloned” a few million times. The gameplay mechanic, (player controlled sprite at the bottom of the screen, enemy sprites across the top, and you shot at them), was duplicated so many times, it was difficult to tell the original Space Invaders from it's offshoots.

So let’s look at the improvements that where added as time went on.

1) Enemy sprites moved in a more random pattern.

2) Animated background, giving the impression the player’s ‘craft’ was moving.

3) Interactive backgrounds that allowed “two levels” of shooting (air to air and air to ground)

4) Multiplayer (two players at once on the same screen)

5) Side scrolling.

6) Multiple weapon types

7) Boss fights.

The list could go on. The point I’m trying to illustrate is that while you’d hardly call ‘Space Invaders’ and a game like ‘Contra’ the same game, we got from one to the other by a series of very small steps, with each new game being essentially a clone of the preceding game with a few minor improvements. The player is controlling a sprite with a joystick, and shoots at waves of other sprites. That last sentence could be used to describe every single shooter of the 80's and early 90's.

In short, if we ignore the technological improvements (such as graphics, etc), and stick to gameplay mechanics, it could plausibly be said that Space Invaders and a game like “Afterburner” are essentially the “same game”. If we move to other genres, we don't call Sonic the Hedgehog a Mario clone...despite the fact they have identical gameplay mechanics.

Did all the 80's shooter games have almost identical gameplay mechanics? Yes. Are they the “same game”? No.

Getting Closer to the Present

While it’s hard to really picture such different games as Space Invaders and Afterburner as being identical, it becomes much easier to understand the closer we get to the present.

When PC’s became cheap enough to be a viable gaming platform, their processing power allowed much more technically advanced games, the most notable of which was “Wolfenstein 3D”, followed later by it’s big brother “Doom”.

These were groundbreaking games because they where the first (semi) true 3D first person shooters. (Semi-3D in that these games where still 2D sprites in a three dimensional environment.)

Shortly after Doom was released, I remember asking a friend of mine if he’d played it. He said “No, but I’ve played Cyclones (another First Person Shooter) and it’s the same thing.”

Starting to see the thinking here? ‘I’ve played one game in this genre, so why would I want to play a ‘clone’ of it?’

Again, we have the “base” game, which spawned hundreds of thousands of clones, each with a small improvement over the previous game:

1) The ability to change the viewpoint with the mouse, allowing “vertical” aiming.

2) Character sprites are replaced with true 3D models.

3) Multiple steps forward in graphics.

4) Introduction of scripted scenes.

5) Introduction of physics.

There are two main points to make here.

The first is that we’ve become so used to the First Person Shooter, that we no longer consider FPS games to be clones of each other. You can play Half-Life and shoot aliens in a research complex, or play Call of Duty and shoot Nazi’s in various World War II environments. Gameplay wise you’re doing exactly the same thing in both games, but we don’t consider these games to be clones of each other.

Basically, when we get used to a genre, we concentrate more on the story, environment and characters than the gameplay.

The second is a very simple concept to grasp. There’s nothing in current FPS’s that wouldn’t have been in the first FPS if the technology allowed it.

Coming Full Circle

So what does this mean to today’s “GTA Clones”?

It means just one thing.

The genre “created” by GTA is still too new.

Because originality (or at least perceived originality) is so rare, that when something comes along that gives us a “new” and “different” experience, later games based on that same gameplay mechanic are dismissed as clones, at least until enough ‘clones’ are released, and that style of gameplay becomes “generic”.

In fact, the GTA “sandbox” style of gameplay isn’t even a new genre, it’s simply an amalgamation of multiple genres that was allowed by new technologies.

You have the free roaming and Roleplay elements from Roleplaying Games. Shooting (obviously) from the world of First Person Shooters and Driving from Driving Games.

There’s nothing in GTA that I haven’t done in other games. I’ve shot people in Doom, I’ve driven in Outrun, and I’ve roleplayed in “The Elder Scrolls” series.

Conclusion

Back in 1995, after playing “Star Wars : Dark Forces” for the first time, I remember talking to friends about how cool it could be if you could mix up the gameplay mechanics of Dark Forces and X-wing. As this conversation took place during our weekly Doom Deathmatch (our computers linked by a serial cable), we decided that being able to play it online with a group of people would be awesome.

We had that idea (probably along with millions of other gamers) in 1995. It was nine years before hardware had advanced far enough to allow “Star Wars : Battlefront” to be created.

What this all boils down to is that true “clones” in videogames are exceedingly rare. Scarface is no more a “clone’ of GTA than Half Life is a Doom clone.

Think about this. I can play Half Life 2, run around a 3D environment and shoot enemies with a series of weapons. Then I can play Call of Duty 2, and do exactly the same thing, but I don't consider one to be a clone of the other. How can they be the "same game"? They look different, have different weapons, enemies and environments.

However, when people play one of the GTA series, then play 'True Crime : Streets of LA', 'Scarface' or Saints Row', they dismiss these games as "Just another GTA clone".

So what does the future hold? Well, as the pattern repeats, "GTA Clones" will become widespread enough to where they'll become a genre instead of 'clones' of a single game. Then, the next step forward in technology will create a pseudo-new genre, and the 'clone' cycle will repeat again.