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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

Every creative work is a copy of a copy; that’s just culture. The commons of ideas is a collective work, until someone pulls them out of the air, reworks them into something “original”, and plops them onto a page.

Ulysses is a copy of the Odyssey, Minecraft was a copy of Infiniminer, Stardew Valley copied Harvest Moon, Fortnite copied PUBG, film directors copy and spread each others’ techniques and storylines all the time. George Lucas even admits that Star Wars was heavily based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, while Kurosawa’s film was derived from historical plays and John Ford’s westerns.

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I wasn't there for Stardew, but Fortnite definitely does not start out copying PUBG, the transformation is arguably more damning - Fortnite was a different and much less interesting game (now "Save The World" mode), and it got the "Battle Royale" mode everybody knows about today because PUBG popularized this idea of "battle royale" shooters and Epic could see how to do that with their existing IP very quickly and clean up.

True, it was more of a pivot that involved copying PUBG’s successful format.

Ok and what did Infiniminer copy? What about games like Papers Please or Obra Dinn, or Blue Prince. Yes, games can have different influences, but the idea that everything is a copy is totally incorrect. Some stuff is way more unique and original than others.

You seem to be taking "copy" much too literally.

"Blue Prince" is heavily inspired by earlier works, those works just aren't video games. You could say the same all the way back to ADVENT, the Colossal Cave Adventure of the 1970s being inspired by adventures in an actual cave.

Of course good games do something we haven't seen before or do it better, but they are also invariably products of a wider culture. A big part of why Animal Well doesn't need to explain itself is that a modern video game player knows how this sort of game works and so when they get Slink or B Wand or similar they realise they can explore places they couldn't reach before.

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