always thinking about the concept of a "clone" in videogame discussions. partially because i've been walking around for about a decade thinking about the claim that there was a "flood" of "doom clones" after 1993, a phenomenon that, as far as i can tell, simply did not occur - but was so anticipated, given recent history, that pundits simply imagined it into existence. every time a new game came out, for almost 20 years - preceding the careers of many of these writers - it was followed by a flood of "unabashed clones," so it was simply assumed that this would happen with doom as well.
watching jeff gerstmann play balloon fight, and he opens by asserting that it's a joust clone. can't argue with this, it's definitely a joust clone. the question is, do we apply this term to any other form of art?
in a sense we do so - movie reviews have always been willing to say something is "like a mix between [movie a] and [movie b]," but it's interesting that in the videogame industry, specifically, we'll point at a specific title and say "that game invented a genre, and now everything based on its mechanics will stand in its shadow and get an asterisk next to their names unless they cross some unspecified and unknowable threshold."
Symphony of the Night, by virtue of coming out a decade after Super Mario Bros., avoided being called a Mario Clone, but it's wild to think that it was only the time factor that guaranteed that, since there's no amount of altered or superseded mechanics that quantifiably lifts the velvet rope and allows a game to pass into the hall of Original Works. and i feel like we just don't apply that level of criticism to much else.
The one that has stuck with me for decades now is Wonder Boy/Adventure Island. I'm betting a fair number of people haven't played it but it's a side-scrolling platformer released in 1986 and honestly a pretty fun one that has some neat mechanics like starvation that 2D mascot platformers generally didn't have and still don't. Anyway, it was a fairly unique game, which was roundly declared a clone of Super Mario Bros.
It is basically nothing like Super Mario Bros. It is a little bit more like Mario than SotN is, but not much. I don't think anyone would assert these days that Adventure Island is a Mario clone but that's because we have terms like "mascot platformer" now. It only got to be a real boy once there was enough brightly-colored side-scrolling platformers to be a genre.
I don't have any better insight into why this happens than Gravis does but there's an interesting wrinkle where some whole genres get the asterisk forever like Metroidvanias and Roguelikes, and some don't, like mascot platformers or rail shooters.
i think it's interesting in a lot of those cases where they get stuck with the asterisk as a genre name forever, people still eventually think of it less as a clone.
i know a lot of people (myself included) who would consider themselves "fans of roguelikes" who have never even played Rogue, so "oh all these games you like are rogue clones" really doesn't have any negative connotation in that context
plus, with "roguelike" in specific, i think people act like proximity to the original is a status symbol, something to gatekeep based on, rather than the reverse of "it's too similar to mario to like". a lot of "roguelike fans" will literally say that because something is too different from rogue, it's inherently lesser, only a "roguelite" (see: the best hard drive article ever written, Roguelike Genre Purist Hopes Someone Will Develop a Roguelike Someday)
it's really interesting how different genres treat this idea of conceptual proximity differently
