There’s a phrase you’ll hear from time to time - ‘a comedian’s comedian’. It’s the idea that a certain kind of (usually odd, or cerebral) comic’s main audience is just other comics, who often go onto co-opt that style in more marketable ways. It’s an idea that maps to games rather well.
The ‘game developer’s game’ is something like Frozen Synapse - I’ve lost count of the developers I’ve seen losing their minds over its elegant, Spartan approach to tactics - or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a game so broken but so compelling that it died and had its bones picked clean by the likes of Bioware and CD Projekt Red.
But then you have something like Dragon’s Dogma. On the surface, Capcom’s 2012 action-RPG seems a similar case. This was a game made with the stated intention of capitalising on Elder Scrolls Fever, arriving mere months after Skyrim, and bringing with it similar fantasy references, quest design and open world structure. But its Japanese creators, and Capcom’s action game expertise meant it came out quite differently, a chimeric hodgepodge of cross-Pacific ideas.
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