With how long gaming has been around, it’s difficult to find a game with a totally unique concept, especially in the AAA space. But that’s not to say all indie games are a bastion of creativity, and there’s a reason for that. Video games are hard to make, and it’s even hard to make a good one. This should come as much of a surprise, but what might is how many good games take “inspiration” from ones that came before. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this on its own, except when too many games borrow from the same well. By and large, it’s produced some great games. This year’s Horizon: Zero Dawn doesn’t have a single original gameplay mechanic in its head, yet it’s the best game of the year.

The problem comes when games take a little too much inspiration from other properties. There have been countless games that have taken ideas, mechanics, stories, and even graphics quite liberally from other games in the past. Sometimes they copy the entire idea of a game, sometimes it’s even more sinister than that. The sad part is that sometimes these rip offs end up becoming more popular than the games they’re aping. That’s why we’re going to take a look at 15 Overrated Games That RIPPED OFF Unknown Games.

15 A Tale Of Two City Simulators

Often in life we falsely give credit to the wrong person or project for creating something new. In video games we see that with Metal Gear, often credited with creating the stealth genre even though Castle Wolfenstein came out a full six years before Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece. In that case, the two games are drastically different however. One example that isn’t so clear cut however is the case of Utopia and SimCity.

SimCity is often called the first city building game, released by legendary designer Will Wright and Maxis in 1989. This isn’t the case though, as another city builder has it beat by eight years. Utopia, created by Don Daglow, was released in 1981 for the Intellivision, and was the true first city building game. Utopia is a two player only game, with each player trying to build up their respective island first, and even funding rebel incursions to attack their opponent’s city. But overall, it’s a city building game exactly as we know it today, just more simplistic.

When you take away the multiplayer elements and give it better graphics, what you get is just SimCity.

14 This Famous Platformer Looks Familiar...

The American version of Super Mario Bros. 2 is a rip off in the most literal sense. We all probably know the story by now, but let’s have a refresher. The “real” Super Mario Bros. 2 which was released in Japan was deemed too difficult for western audiences, so Nintendo took a game that had previously only been released in Japan, and slapped Mario characters in it. This game wasn’t anything like Mario, but it was easy so they went with it.

That game was Doki Doki Panic, a 2D sidescroller in which many of the levels saw you progressing up or down rather than left or right. You could also pick up items and throw them at enemies, and there were multiple playable characters to choose from, each with their own stats. The reason the game was never released outside of Japan unaltered is because it was originally a promotional tie-in game. Although rather than promoting a weird Japanese movie, the game was promoting a Japanese event called Yume Kōjō '87, which was held by a Japanese TV station.

13 The Grandfather Of RTS Games

Blizzard has long been the Adobe of the video game world, i.e. they either buy somebody else’s product and sell it as their own, or they just copy it. Hearthstone is just Magic: The Gathering, and you’ll read about Overwatch later in this article. One striking example is the original Warcraft, and we’re not just talking about the fantasy setting.

Dune II was released in 1992 on DOS computers and was the first modern real time strategy game. You take the role of a commander of a military base in a sci-fi setting, and have to build up the base by collecting resources to build military units, which you’ll use to defend the base and attack your enemy’s bases.

A year later, Warcraft came out, featuring the exact gameplay mechanics and featuring a very similar art style. While Dune II was critically-acclaimed when it released, Warcraft quickly made everyone forgot about the original.

12 The Battle Of The Early Access Games

One of the most popular games going right now is an indie, Early Access battle royale type arena shooter called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Feel free to stop me if you’ve heard this before: it’s an online-only PC third-person shooter set in a large open world full of opponents who are simply trying to kill you, but you also have to worry about simple survival elements like food and water.

Yes, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is nothing more than the once popular DayZ. Originally created as a mod for Arma 2, DayZ blew up in the gaming community, as it was essentially the exact same game but also with zombies. For a good year, all anybody could talk about was DayZ. However, much like PlayerUnknown’s, the standalone DayZ game languished in Early Access for years. Nothing much changed, and people naturally grew bored and disillusioned with the game.

Today, nobody remembers DayZ, a game that only just recently entered beta after years of development.

11 Learning To Take Cover

Cover based shooting is the standard gameplay mechanic in third-person shooters these days, but that didn’t used to be the case. It was Gears of War, launched a year into the Xbox 360’s lifespan that changed everything. Chest-high walls were the flavor of the day, and you had to glue yourself to them in order to survive, playing an advanced version of Whack-A-Mole in order to progress.

But Gears wasn’t the first game to use this type of system. That would an old PS2 and Xbox game called Kill.Switch, released in 2003. The plot and setting are drastically different, but the gameplay is nearly identical. You walk around levels until you see enemies, then attach yourself to cover and shoot at enemies who are also attached to cover.

In fact, Gears of War developer Epic Software was so inspired by Kill.Switch, they hired the designer responsible for the cover system, Chris Esaki, to work on Gears of War.

10 A Rip-Off Of A Rip-Off

Ms. Pac-Man is another case of a literal rip off–taking an original game and slapping a different skin on it. In this case, that original game was called Crazy Otto. But it goes even deeper than that, because you could say it’s a rip off of a rip off.

Crazy Otto was the product of college students who were a fan of the original Pac-Man. So they did what any college student would do and acquired a Pac-Man arcade cabinet and modified the game files to create their own levels and characters.

Namco was ready to sue the students as they tried to sell this version of the game, right up until executives at Namco played the game themselves. They found that the game was faster, the levels more interesting, and the AI was smarter. Instead of suing them, Namco bought the rights to the game from the students re-replaced the new characters with Pac-Man ones, and called it Ms. Pac-Man–a sequel to the beloved original.

9 The World's Biggest Indie Game... A Rip-Off??

Minecraft is the biggest and most successful indie game of all time, launching not only itself into the spotlight, but indie gaming as a whole. It’s gone on to spawn a massive franchise before finally being purchased by Microsoft in 2014. The game is incredibly simple: you’re planted in an open, randomly generated world and you fight monsters. But the point of the game is to actually mine materials and create whatever you want.

The thing is, Minecraft is, like so many other games on this list, an almost exact copy of another game–Infiniminer. Again, feel free to stop reading if you’ve heard this before: Infiniminer is an open world multiplayer game with blocky, pixelated art in which the player can create anything they want by mining resources. Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson even said himself when he played Infiniminer for the first time that he “realized that that was the game I wanted to do.”

And that’s exactly what he did–he recreated the game in almost every way and became super famous (and stupidly rich) for it.

8 We "Candy" Believe These Aren't The Same Game

We now enter the world of mobile gaming, which isn’t so much a hive of scum and villainy as it the essence of scum and villainy itself. Just about every game on a mobile device is an overly simplistic “game” with hideous art, or a total rip off, and the first such game we’ll be looking at is good old Candy Crush.

We all know about Candy Crush. It’s a puzzle game with colorful candy pieces that you have to match up to score points and clear the board. But a game called CandySwipe that’s exactly the same came out two years before it. What seperates this one from the other rip offs is that this one resulted in a legal battle, but now how you might be expecting.

Rather than the creator of CandySwipe, Albert Ransom, suing Candy Crush creator King, it was the other way around. Ransom filed a trademark for the name CandySwipe in 2010, but in 2014 when King tried to copyright the world “candy,” they threatened Ransom over CandySwipe. But instead of this being a dispute about who ripped of who, it’s instead a fight over who gets to trademark the word “candy.” Ah mobile developers, you gotta love ‘em.

7 These Games Are Both Sickening

Plague Inc. has enjoyed a cult following ever since it was released on iOS in 2012. It’s a game where you essentially play as a terminal illness and have to spread yourself to as many different people around the world, eventually wiping out all of humanity. The game takes place over a world map and you have to decide how you’re going to spread yourself (airborne, water, etc.) and what kind of level ups you’ll get to be more potent and ignore any attempts at a cure.

Enter Pandemic 2, an online flash game released about a year before (and Pandemic 2.5, the same game ported to iOS) in which you play as a disease trying to spread itself across the world and kill all of humanity. It’s been said that Plague Inc. is more polished and refined, and while that may be true, it’s still an almost exact replica of the Pandemic 2.

Even Pandemic creators Dark Realm Studios thought so, saying on Twitter that the game was trying to cash in on the release of Pandemic 2.5 since the iOS launched just before Plague Inc.

6 Stealing The Rhythm

Music rhythm games are almost as old as gaming itself, so maybe it won’t come as much of a surprise to you that a simplistic guitar playing game has already been done before. We all know about Guitar Hero, released in 2005. It exploded in popularity, spawning countless sequels, spin offs, and rip offs of its own.

But Guitar Hero is itself a rip off. GuitarFreaks, a Japanese arcade game, came out in 1999, six years before Activision began their plastic guitar monopoly. GuitarFreaks featured the same fake guitar controller with a strum bar in the middle and buttons on the neck, the same conveyor belt showing you what notes to press, and the same 1990s punk aesthetic.

GuitarFreaks was so popular it got its own game on the PlayStation, whose controllers were made by RedOctane. RedOctane quickly decided to cut the middle man and made their own guitar rhythm game with Harmonix, and the rest became history.

5 Both Of These Games Will Drive You Crazy

The once popular Flappy Bird (another mobile game for the list) already found itself taking heat for allegedly copying its art style from Mario. But creator Dong Nguyen should probably be more concerned about Piou Piou vs Cactus, a game pretty much identical to Flappy Bird that predates the cheap mobile game by two years.

Released in 2011, Piou Piou vs. Cactus is an iOS game in which you tap the screen to make a bird bounce up on the screen to avoid obstacles. If that sounds familiar it’s because that’s exactly the premise of Flappy Bird. Not only are the gameplay elements the same, but so is the art work. Piou Piou features a yellow bird, green objects (cacti, in this case) that you must avoid, and a blue, cloudy sky in the background. The only real difference is that in Flappy Bird you have to squeeze through a small window between two pipes, whereas in Piou Piou you only need to go over or under single cacti at a time.

4 This Farm Land Is My Farm Land

Farm Town was released in February 2009 on Facebook by a company called Slashkey. It’s a simplistic farming game where you walk around a farm, watering crops, taking care of animals, and generally sit around being bored. Farmville was released in June 2009 on Facebook by Zynga, and it’s the exact same game as Farm Town.

Zynga is notorious for copying game ideas wholesale and selling them as their own, but unfortunately they’ve got the marketing budget to not only eclipse whatever game they’re copying, but also make a massive profit at it.

Farmville is no different. Everything from the gameplay mechanics, the art, and even the UI have been lifted straight from Farm Town. The only thing that sets Farmville apart is that it focuses more on socializing with your own friends on Facebook, whereas Farm Town was more of an open platform that let you interact with everybody. So technically, Farmville has fewer features and it still became more popular.

3 These Games Are Practically Twins

While many would point to Team Fortress 2 as being an obvious inspiration for Overwatch, one game that Blizzard took the most from is one called Paladins: Champions of the Realm.

Looking at the two games side by side is like looking at yourself in a mirror. The two games are practically identical in every way. The cast of colorful characters, the weird weapons, and the environments are nearly one to one. And of course it too is an online only competitive free-to-play shooter.

Paladins entered closed beta in November 2015, a year after Blizzard canceled their first attempt at a competitive only shooter called Titan. Blizzard then went back to the drawing board and unveiled Overwatch in 2014. But keep in mind, today’s video games aren’t made overnight. COO of Hi-Rez (developer of Paladins) stated as much in a Gamespot interview, and that footage from Paladins was released before Overwatch was announced.

Situations like this in Hollywood are referred to as “twin films,” and happens when one studio catches wind of a project another studio is working on and copy it. One recent example was Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down in 2013. Did Blizzard, with the broken remains of Titan in their lap, catch wind of Paladins and decide to copy it? You be the judge.

2 The First True Game Was A Rip-Off

Ah, Pong. It’s a classic game that some even attribute as the first true video game. It’s a simple game, released by Atari in November 1972 that features two white blobs moving up and down a vertical plane hitting another white blob. It became so popular it launched not only Atari, but gaming itself into mainstream culture.

But as you hopefully picked up on by now, Pong is nothing more than a rip off. Say hello to Table Tennis, a game featuring two white blobs moving up and down a vertical plane hitting another white blob, released on the Magnavox Odyssey in September 1972.

How did Atari get away with this, and why did Magnavox let them? Well, they didn’t. Magnavox sued Atari over Pong in 1974, and realizing they couldn’t possibly win, Atari settled out of court. Atari paid $1.5 million for the license to Table Tennis. It didn’t end up mattering though, as Atari continued to dominate the gaming landscape for years while Magnavox withered away and died.

1 I Guess The Pigs Make It Different?

You know that game where you have a catapult, and you have to launch projectiles at a structure to knock it down? You know the one, it got really popular for a long time, creating a ton of spin offs, one of which for Star Wars, and even got a movie. That game was called Crush the Castle, and it was a free browser game.

Oh, wait, no, sorry. That game was actually called Angry Birds. Crush the Castle is just the game that it ripped off and to this day remains completely forgotten. Right.

Barring the use of “fun” and “wacky” birds, the two games are exactly the same. You launch a variety of different projectiles at a poorly built structure to knock it down. You have regular projectiles, large ones, ones that explode on impact, and one that break off into threes in mid-air.

Perhaps the strangest thing in all of this though is Jeff Word, the guy who ported Crush the Castle over to iOS for the original developer, Armor Games, says Angry Birds is a clone, and yet thinks it’s totally okay. He even says “It’s okay to steal a game’s ideas. It’s wrong to steal their innovative ideas,” whatever that means. So there you have it kids, steal all the ideas you want, just make sure they’re not innovative. Chances are, you’ll end up being more popular and successful than what you’re ripping off.