Salnax said:
Not necessarily. The earliest makers of electronic games like OXO and Tennis for Two don't seem to have necessarily known about one anothers' work. Early popular FPS's like Wolfenstein 3D do not seem to have drawn any inspiration from 1973's Maze. The NES adaptation of Friday the 13th published by LJN was one of the first games that can be considered survival horror, but there is no sign that the creators of Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil had ever heard of it. And although The Outfoxies predates Super Smash Bros by a few years, we again have no evidence that the latter was inspired by the former obscure arcade exclusive. Genres are funny things, and it's entirely possible for separate creators to end up making the same kind of experience without direct influence. |
I agree with this sentiment. To push it further even in cases where there are prior games made by the same developers (King's Field and Demon's Souls by Fromsoft) those first games might not be what truly started a genre. What starts a genre is imitation to the point that one can think of it as a genre. For the Souls-like games I think you could argue that Dark Souls was the true start of the genre. Demon's Souls was a crazy cult classic and I loved it but it wasn't until Dark Souls that this became a genre unto itself.
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