Every game on New Old Gamer is an original game: our own code, art, names, maps and rules. Each one is inspired by a classic we love, and this page tells the story of those classics. We think knowing where a game idea came from makes playing it more fun.
The names below belong to their owners. We mention them only to give credit and history; New Old Gamer isn't affiliated with or endorsed by any of these companies or creators.
The Oregon Trail (1971)
This classic inspired our game Pluto Trail.
The Oregon Trail was created in 1971 by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, three student teachers in Minnesota, as a way to teach a history class about pioneers traveling west in the 1840s. It ran on a teletype terminal connected to a shared computer, and students typed their choices.
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) later distributed the game to schools, and its 1985 Apple II version became a fixture of American classrooms. Hunting for food, choosing a pace and ration level, fording rivers and the game's blunt messages about illness are the parts most people remember.
Pluto Trail keeps that shape of planning, rationing and pushing through random hardship, but it's an original game set in the outer solar system, with its own crew, ports, infection mechanics and asteroid-belt crossings. Its belt crossing was suggested by a player as a nod to fording the river.
Risk and the conquest board game (1957)
This classic inspired our game Isle & Empire.
The world-conquest board game began in France in 1957, when the film director Albert Lamorisse, also known for the short film The Red Balloon, published La Conquête du Monde. Parker Brothers released it in the United States in 1959 as Risk.
Its core rules are simple: reinforce, attack with dice, and move armies across a map of territories grouped into continents. In the classic rules the attacker rolls up to three dice and the defender up to two, with ties going to the defender. Cards that trade in for extra armies became a central part of the game.
Isle & Empire uses that familiar turn structure, but with our own world map, a random map generator, our own card art and options like random events. It began as Tide Claim, an island war game inspired by DOS-era conquest games.
Pipe Mania / Pipe Dream (1989)
This classic inspired our game Gusher Grid.
Pipe Mania was developed by The Assembly Line and released in 1989 for home computers such as the Amiga and Atari ST. In North America it was published as Pipe Dream by Lucasfilm Games. Players placed random pipe pieces on a grid to stay ahead of a slowly advancing liquid.
The idea was simple enough to be ported to many systems, and pipe-routing puzzles have appeared many times since, including as hacking mini-games inside much larger games such as BioShock (2007).
Gusher Grid is our own version of the pipe-racing idea with oil, ant, water and lava themes, bombs for clearing mistakes, and a fixed options menu for board size, speed and piece mix.
Rampart (1990)
This classic inspired our game Bastion Bay.
Rampart was released by Atari Games in arcades in 1990. It combined two genres in an unusual way: players built castle walls from falling-block style pieces, then switched to firing cannons at attacking ships or at other players' castles.
The game was ported to many home systems in the early 1990s, including the NES, Super NES, Genesis and Game Boy, and it's still often mentioned as one of the more original arcade designs of its era.
Bastion Bay keeps the build-fight-rebuild rhythm and adds a five-chapter story mode with the sea beast Murkmaw, procedurally generated maps, online rooms and a phone layout that plays upright.
Dig Dug (1982)
This classic inspired our game Burrow Blitz.
Dig Dug was released by Namco in arcades in 1982 and published in North America by Atari. The player tunneled through layers of dirt, defeating round Pookas and fire-breathing Fygars by inflating them with a pump or dropping rocks on them.
Its free-form digging meant every player shaped the level differently. Enemies could float through dirt as ghostly eyes, the last enemy tried to escape to the surface, and dropping two rocks made a bonus vegetable appear. Those details made it one of the best-loved games of the golden age of arcades.
Burrow Blitz is our own take on that idea, with original creatures, five visual themes, controller support and a quick changes menu for making the game easier or harder.
Fictionary, Pictionary and phone-based party games
This classic inspired our game Party Pack.
The bluffing game in Fib Finder goes back to Fictionary, a parlor game in which players invent fake dictionary definitions and try to fool each other. It was turned into the board game Balderdash in 1984. Drawing-and-guessing games became famous with Pictionary, created by Rob Angel and released in 1985.
In 2014 Jackbox Games released the first Jackbox Party Pack, which made it popular to play party games on a TV while everyone used their own phone as a controller.
Party Pack is our own small collection in that tradition, with original prompts, questions and drawings, a kid-friendly mode and no app or account needed.
Chess, and animated battle chess
This classic inspired our game Pixel Chess.
Chess descends from chaturanga, played in India around the 6th century. It spread to Persia as shatranj, then through the Arab world to Europe. The modern moves for the queen and bishop appeared in Europe around the late 1400s, making the game much faster.
In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue computer beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a match, and today free open-source engines such as Stockfish play far stronger than any human. In 1988 Interplay's Battle Chess showed captures as animated fights, an idea that charmed a generation of players.
Pixel Chess is a full chess game with its own animated characters, a browser version of Stockfish as the computer opponent, and puzzles from the openly licensed Lichess puzzle database.
All trademarks belong to their owners; New Old Gamer is not affiliated with them.