In my quest to discover why certain “original” games get the limelight while other “original” games gets lost in recesses of the web, I stumbled upon the answer.

It happened while I was watching my favourite show, Heroes. If you do not know, Heroes is all about seemingly normal people trying to cope with their special powers in their everyday lives. The narrator of the show speaks about the concept of evolution a lot. So being the person that I am, I wiki’ed Heroes and Evolution. I discovered an interesting and true phenomenon in evolution.

When there is a huge number of a species (like humans), any new mutation will be literally drowned out by sheer number of people who simply do not have that mutation. The chances that this new mutation will be carried to new generations are incredibly small. A new mutation will have a higher chance to get carried on to new generations in small closed societies.

I immediately drew a comparison to games… What are the chances that an original game gets noticed and accepted as something “great”? Very small, because of the fact that there are simply so many other games out there that is not like that.

I can hear you asking, “But if a game is original, doesn’t it then stand out among the masses?”

Yes it does, but again we draw a comparison to genetics. If someone with a new mutation occurs, we would be instinctively wary. An extreme example is the case that someone mutates a 3^rd arm. Look at all the possibilities and advantages of a 3^rd arm, but let’s be serious here. Who would go out with someone who has a 3^rd arm?

So I come back to my original question… Why do some original games fare better than others?

I’ll explain it by another example. If Super-man (who has awesome powers) gets tired of Lois-Lane, he will have plenty of girls willing to have his babies. It is instinctively viable.

Now how do we distinguish between 3^rd-arm-games and Superman-games? Is my original game 3^rd-arm or Superman? If you have a Superman-game you wouldn’t be reading this, and you would be taking a Sunday drive in your Ferrari.

But I seriously do not know the answer to that, but I have the solution to get your 3^rd-arm game or Superman-game noticed.

The great difference between genetics and game developing is that we can choose these new mutations in our games. If more and more people mutate 3^rd-arms it will become accepted in society and it will be carried on to future generations.

So, what is the solution here? If you have an original game that does not seem to get noticed, you should keep flogging it everywhere and produce sequels with the same gameplay. If more and more people see your original game and its variants, it WILL become recognised and talked about.

Take Team 17’s Worms as a brilliant example. All they have done is develop Worms after Worms. Who remembers the 1^st worms when it came out? No-one really knew about it, but now it is grossing huge sales with its latest incarnation on X-box Live Arcade. They just kept going.

It is as simple as that. Just keep going.