I’m noticing a trend in games which involves taking a franchise and “rebooting” it in a different genre. Usually this means taking a beloved game or series and making an FPS out of it, but I’ll save my angst for another post. What interests me are the possibilities for this kind of genre-swapping.
Like many of my ideas, this one was born as I was playing around on my computer, specifically in Visual C#. I was thinking about games like XCOM and Syndicate, and decided to write a simple program to facilitate my thoughts. I loaded some genres in and basically created the equivalent of a hat filled with genres to pick out of (fancy, right?). Then, I thought of a game…
My first thought was obvious. I guess I wanted to strike back at the thought of strategy games becoming FPS, so I chose Call of Duty. The genre I got was Puzzle. Call of Duty: Modern Tetris? Puzzle Fighter: Modern Warfare? There were a lot of other funny results as well, including a popular action franchise becoming a Japanese dating-sim.
I remember putting “Cooking Sim” in there just for laughs. It never came up.
Call of Cooking: Modern Mama. I’d totally buy that.
Try it yourself, you don’t need anything fancy. Mix up the genres in your favorite games.