Inspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and passing them off as unique creations. Comandeer Keen started out as a project to copy Super Mario Bros. 3, for example. But is Comandeer Keen just a "rip off" of SMB 3? Hardly. And Minecraft is far from a rip off of infiniminer. If anything, today infiniminer is much more well known due to minecraft's success. Infiniminer is about as similar to minecraft as pong is to breakout.
+1 for your defense of minecraft. -1 for Hacker's News staunch outlook on intellectual property.
"Inspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and passing them off as unique creations. "
Who said that was inspiration? -no one goes out to "blatantly" rip something off. Your lack of understanding speaks to your lack of creative experience, sorry.
What is "amazingly unlikely" about that though? Revolutionary games that create their own genres (Rogue, Adventure, Dune 2) are amazingly unlikely. Minecraft is just evolution of the games that already existed.
Not sure of the others, but Dune 2 certainly didn't spontaneously big bang in a vacuum either, it was built on earlier iterations of similar games most notable being Herzog Zwei,whose english translation curiously enough is just 2 letters forward on a single letter, it translates as "Duke 2"
that said, played the shit out of dune 2, what a game!
