A few months ago on Kevin Smith's blog, he lamented that a movie idea of his was getting made. Without him. Several years ago, he had an idea for a particular film story, but never got around to making it. As time passed, someone else eventually, and independantly, came up with a very similar film idea, and has since finished production.
The same thing just happened to me with a game idea. Several years ago, I had the idea of creating retro-style arcade games with a unique theme. The graphics would look as if they were hand-drawn with pencils and pens on loose-leaf paper, hopefully triggering some high school study hall nostalgia. I figured that I would call them "Loose Leaf games." I even went so far as to prototype an Asteroids clone with a background image of a scanned sheet of notebook paper. But the long hours of my "day job" took over, and I never followed through on the idea.
This year, someone else came up with the same general concept, and release a game. SketchFighter 4000 Alpha is a classic scrolling shooter game, with, you guessed it, a hand-drawn graphical theme with a notebook background. The game looks terrific, and even made the "Featured Download" on Apple's Mac OS X games page. I hope it sells well.
I wonder what will happen to the rest of my game ideas?
