As I write this, Block Blast, a Tetris-like game, is the most downloaded game on iOS. Balatro, a poker-like game, is the reigning GDC Game of the Year. It’s always been true but perhaps has never been more starkly clear than this moment: Games are derived, not summoned. Everything, including games, is a remix.

If you’ve read up on the history of how your favorite games, you’ll often stumble upon a reference to a game that the designer was obsessed with at the time. Often it’s something like, “It’s like that game but...”. There’s a mountain of execution that goes into making a new game great, but before that mountain was forged there was a molehill: A novel mechanic being added to a familiar, beloved game.

This table does little justice to the notion of remixing a predecessor, as many games are a mix of multiple predecessors.

Beyond freestyle, open-world driving games like Turbo Espirit, Grand Theft Auto drew from a classic, grid-bound game: A creator of GTA once cited “Pac Man with cars” in an original design document.

In this early interview with the anonymous creator of Balatro, winner of Best Debut and Game of the Year at GDC last month, LocalThunk describes making a game based on the Cantonese card game Big Two (better known to kids who grew up in the US as “Asshole”), while developing a creative obsession for a “roguelike slot machine” called Luck Be a Landlord.

My coffee table is currently overflowing with Rummikub tiles, which remind of Mahjong but are played according to rules that are familiar to anyone who has played the card game Rummy, which I knew through its variant, Gin Rummy.

Fun fact: Rummikub was derived in the 1940’s in Romania, where playing cards were banned. Ephraim Hertzano enabled the mechanics of playing card game Rummy to persist through Mahjong-like tiles, creating something highly familiar yet new enough to be legal. After completing his invention of the game, years later in Israel, the game proved new and fun enough to become a worldwide hit.

Just as in film, music or literature, games are a mix of the familiar and the new. The familiar makes us feel comfortable and receptive to the new.

What would a thoroughly novel game even be like? How could it be good? You’d have to take care to avoid every bit of structure that that already existed just to qualify as novel, and by then you’d surely have made it impossible for your audience to get comfortable enough to await your surprise.

Developing new game mechanics is mysterious and important, but also difficult. The internet has made this easier. You can host games on Pico8 or Itch.io as a way to share your early work. You can build an early community on YouTube and Discord and Twitch to collect feedback. And if it seems like you’ve created something new enough to be great, you can then go big on Steam or the App Store. This is the story of Celeste and Balatro and many other recent hit games that share humble beginnings.

Our goal with Indigo is to accelerate play. You can play with the mechanics of your favorite games and perhaps even make something new. You can break things. You can play everything everywhere.

Join us in the Discord to say hello and meet people who share a love for your favorite type of game or puzzle. It’s all very familiar, but in the course of play you find yourself taking part of something very new.