Top 10 Popular Video Games That Were Total Ripoffs
I was wandering the internet a bit longer than usual and found out how many popular games are actually shameless ripoffs of games you've probably never heard of.
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Flappy Bird
Let's start this list off with the fish-bird thing that has to traverse through green pipes. Most people look at it and call it an original idea, but really there was a game made back in 2011 called Piou Piou vs Cactus. Take a good, long look at both games and tell me that Flappy Bird is original.
The pipes have a resemblance to Mario's pipes. Nintendo has/had every right to sue the creator of this game. Even Mario and Goombas have a right to sue them.
This is what the creator was thinking: Nintendo has pipes? Let's make a game that is a ripoff of Mario pipes.
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Candy Crush Saga
This is probably the easiest one to identify in terms of where it came from. Actually, there are two valid answers for this: Candy Swipe and Bejeweled Blitz.
Both of these games are about matching items in rows to remove them from the board. Candy Swipe was copied in many ways by Candy Crush, and the power-up system of Candy Crush came from Bejeweled, where you can match items together in ways that generate power-ups, such as explosive pieces that obliterate everything adjacent to them.
No. When I thought the Candy Crush craze was over, along came Candy Crush Soda Saga. They're making a new one. No!
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Ms. Pac-Man
Ms. Pac-Man is a direct ripoff of another Pac-Man ripoff. A group of kids hacked into a Pac-Man arcade system, modified the game to their liking with a different map and modified sprites, and called it Crazy Otto. This was before Ms. Pac-Man was released.
Is it a coincidence that Crazy Otto and Ms. Pac-Man have the same exact map?
It's the same thing as regular Pac-Man, just with a different character.
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Angry Birds
Angry Birds is original, right? Well... no, it isn't. There is a free browser game on the web called Crush the Castle. I've played it myself, and it's a fun game to crush a few hours (pun intended). After that, I view Angry Birds as a complete ripoff of this free online game.
This was inspired by Crush the Castle.
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Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff
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Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare
Did you ever hear of Happy Wars?
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Words With Friends
Let's just take Scrabble, move the bonus squares around, and change some of the point values of the letters... Real original.
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Crossy Road
The original Crossy Road and its Disney-ified version (often referred to as Disney Crossy Road) are based on Frogger.
I have yet to play Disney Crossy Road with different Disney characters.
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Guitar Hero
Guitar Hero is a ripoff of another game known as GuitarFreaks, released by Konami in 1999. The gameplay was exactly the same as Guitar Hero: Players pressed plastic buttons and strummed a large plastic flipper on a guitar-shaped controller in time with the game's music.
Every so often, the player could even raise the fake guitar in the air to gain extra style points. A small meter showed how well a player was keeping up with the song. Too many missed notes and it turned from green to red to "Game Over."
Sound familiar in any way?
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FarmVille
Yup, the farming game that has eaten away many people's time and left them addicted to it. There's no way this can be a ripoff, is there? Well, it's on this list, so the answer is obviously yes.
The game in question, which Farmville is a total clone of, is Farm Town, a much friendlier game without extremely bad wait times, slow leveling up, and not just Facebook networking. In Farm Town, you can play with more people than just your Facebook friends.
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Super Mario Odyssey
We all know it seems normal, but it uses features from other ripoff games.
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Donkey Kong
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Pong
Yes, you didn't misread that. Atari's Pong itself is a ripoff of Magnavox's Table Tennis. It was this that made Atari such a huge entity in the video game industry in the late '70s and early '80s.
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The Simpsons: Tapped Out
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2048
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Overwatch
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Halo 4
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Undertale
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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
This game took mechanics from a better first-person shooter called Titanfall.
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The Simpsons: Road Rage
The Simpsons is a sitcom. Ever thought it could be a parody? A parody of Crazy Taxi. The Simpsons: Hit and Run, I suppose, could be a parody of Grand Theft Auto.
A blatant ripoff of Crazy Taxi... There's no way you can deny it.
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Armored Warfare
Ripoff of the popular tank game World of Tanks. Only much worse, with modern tanks.
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Block Story
Ripoff of Minecraft. I like it, though.
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Mortal Kombat
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Terraria
I strongly agree. I have been playing Terraria since 2015-2016 and still play occasionally. Terraria is the best game I have ever played.
The thing with Minecraft is that Terraria beat it by almost six months, so if anything, Terraria isn't the ripoff. I have a few thousand hours of gameplay - 1,500 hours on Steam, and even more on the Xbox.
I am not going to say that Terraria is downright "better," but Terraria has a lot more to offer than just 3D gameplay. It has 19 bosses, 13 mini-bosses, and 3 version-exclusive bosses. There are 5,000+ items, 540 different mobs, almost 70 armor sets, 28 unique NPCs, and three town pets.
I must say, if you have $10 to spare, I highly recommend Terraria.
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Super Mario Bros. 2
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Gangstar Vegas
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ARK: Survival Evolved
