Implications as Drac sees them of Portal: Flash Edition

[Dracos]

http://www.armorgames.com/games/portaltheflashversion_game.html

Reference or whatnot.  Portal, if you don't know, is part of Valve's orange box set.  It started as a student project with a shitty name that got shown to the right people at the right time.  As a puzzle game concept it is pretty clever.  Its got a real 'oooh, aah' sensation and seizes the imagination pretty well.  I think it needed quite a few other things, but that's just me.  It has a following, as Valve is good at getting and more relevantly, the game concept earned.  Kudos there to the designers.  The core of what made it up was made pretty open a while before it came out.  I'm not really surprised at that as really, it can be delivered in about four sentences tops.  Strength of simple concept and all that and an excellent example of grabbing at low hanging design fruit.

But what about that *waves above* the flash version.  That wasn't actually made by valve.  Or had anything to do with it.  It was made by fans, as they call themselves, and with a goal of doing it before the game came out.  Its pretty neat really, for a fan based project.  The fifteen or so levels I played were relatively well put together, reasonably entertaining and bug free, and showed a pretty decent production value for a 2d flash game.  It is, having watched and played a fair bit of portal, amazingly similar and an extremely effective 2d adaptation of the game.  Had you told me it was an early prototype/concept piece for it, I would've completely believed you.  It's got that same sort of charm and clever use of the primary design mechanic.  It's fun.

So what's the problem that's bothering me?  Well, it's an attempted copy of Portal.  One which seriously, nobody who has seen both would not realize it for.  It was built prior to portal coming out and based solely off of the knowledge that had been let into public domain about it, news media, interviews, etc.  It is darn good and pushes forth the obvious conclusion: If a bunch of fans can do this, what could a serious company do trying the same?  What this really struck to me is just really how relevant all the ridiculous secrecy that goes on in entertainment development ends up being.  Sure, fan projects like this don't hurt anyone.  They are nice advertising even.  But the importance of holding the cards close because given enough time, its pretty easy to steal or subvert cool new mechanics or stylisms such that your new project comes off as a knock off rather than an originator.  That a reasonably good 2d game was pumped out before it came out asks: "What if they'd done just a bit more, with a little more of a budget...  and released it on x-box arcade 1 month ago?"  Would folks get confused and think Valve was picking on the little guy, stealing their ideas?  Would they get tired of the concept before the nice polished version (Which is a short few hour experience itself) because they already 'seen it'?  It opens a lot of things I don't think most folks working on original properties want to have to deal with, so instead, they stay quiet as long as they can.

Mmm, that was more a sleepy ramble than truly meaningful, but I figured I'd jab at the game, since it really kind of stood out to me as a 'here is why companies keep their cards close, folks have no problem with flat out copying the game concept and narrative before it even launches.'

Dracos