I recently wrote an article summarizing what games I played that inspired my latest game Spark Rising.

Got me curious about others. So what games have you played that inspired your latest creation?

As for my game, I listed Minecraft, Dungeon Defenders and Earth Defense Force. And attempted to call the genre a sandbox action strategy game!

WildWright, The concept I'm currently developing over on gamesprout:

http://www.gamesprout.com/ideas/5212baa4e3211cd266000029

combines little bits of inspiration from many games, some of which are several years old:

Skyrim, Disgaea 1, Dofus, A Tale In The Desert and Wurm Online, Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon, Okami 1, WoW, Final Fantasy 7, Azure Dreams, and Harvest Moon(series). I could keep listing games that contributed smaller sparks to the idea, but the connection would be less and less obvious.

CAVEMAN was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons original rule set for rpg / open world stuff, and The Sims for person sim stuff. The original interface was inspired by The SIMs. The new interface is inspired by shooters - especially Oblivion. The core concept of "make a stone knife and take on a Saber Tooth" just popped into my head one day as something that might make a cool game.

SIMTrek, the game that started it all for me, conversely was un-inspired by the various Trek games available at the time (fall '88), of which EGA-Trek was probably the best. It was my disgust with them that made me say "i can write something better than that !". And the rest is history....

Other inspirations:

Global War (1990) was inspired by table top Risk.

GAMMA Wing (1994) was inspired by Wing Commander

Siege! (1990) was inspired by Castles. It ran too slow, so i had to make my own to play it.

Mordorventure III (1989) was inspired by D&D and Castles (I used the entire Siege! game as a module in Mordorventure to provide castle construction and combat for the rpg).

Combat Racer (2002) was inspired by Deathtrack by Dynamix

CyberTank (2003) was inspired by by Dynamix's BatttleDrome Earthsiege Mech sim series, (not mech warrior, the other guys).

Dominoker (2004) was inspired by poker and dominoes

Armies of Steel and Combat Zone (1993) were inspired by Avalon Hill wargames, especially Blitzkrieg, Panzer Blitz, and of course, Panzer Leader.

Tank! (1989) was inspired by the old top down (atari?) red vs blue arcade tank combat game.

Airships! (under development) is inspired by Dynamix's Red Baron 3D.

Flying Saucer shooter (1982 - unreleased) was inspired by missile command.

Lunar Lander (1978 - IBM 360 - unreleased) was inspired by the lunar lander arcade game.

My computerized D&D game (1981 - unreleased) was inspired by D&D.

(decided to leave out what I originally wrote, as it was becoming less about inspiration, and more about development history...).

I was originally mostly inspired by Quake and Quake 2...

also, by other games I played earlier on in my life, like Doom 2, ROTT, Hexen.

also, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, ...

more recently, I had mostly been playing Minecraft, which has had a big influence as well.

but, since Quake and Minecraft have thus far been some of my most-preferred games, these have had a lot of influence.

like, gameplay influenced by Quake, with a world-structure influenced by Minecraft, with a renderer design influenced by Doom 3.

part of the strong reason for Quake 1 and 2 being such large influences is because, early on, much of what I know about programming and 3D engine architecture came originally from hacking on these engines (and a few things also inspired by the Quake 3 engine as well).

I eventually got as far as throwing together things like real-time lighting and stencil shadows, rigid-body physics, A* pathfinding, a Minecraft style voxel system, ... on top of a hacked-up Quake 2 engine. it also had video textures, originally based on copy/pasting some code (for ROQ playback) from Quake3 and tweaking it to handle multiple streams, ...

I eventually discarded the Quake 2 engine and threw together my own engine though mostly because I wanted to get away from the GPL.

mostly it was built by throwing together "something functionally similar", using solely my own code (and building on top of the code base for my 3D tools), often implemented considerably more half-assedly.

just read brushes from a map, walk a linked list to render them, and walk lists checking brushes against a bounding-box for the physics, ...

though, luckily, previously with the rigid-body physics, I had learned a way to make it faster: quickly build a BSP-like tree directly from the list of brushes.

likewise, lacking a (non-GPL) ROQ decoder (or a good format spec), I just used M-JPEG + AVI instead (later hacking on more features), ...

I suspect I also picked up some bad habits as well, like my engine mostly being written using glBegin/glEnd, and later on mostly needing to be rewritten to use VBOs, ... (and, in general, my renderer is "pretty damn awful" as I have been left to learn later on...).

and, years have gone by, ...

as-is, I have a "game" which is arguably barely usable and sucks.

kind of like, I have put a lot of effort into it, and it all still basically sucks and no one really cares.

and other people hate on it, and HR people aren't really interested in hiring, and life still seems kind of hopeless, ...

yeah...

don't really know how to do that much better though...

like, people are like "your crap sucks"...

doesn't really help though...

doesn't even really help much that I have yet to really even recapture the "essence" of older FPS games (like Doom 2 and Quake), though partly this is due to having almost no map-making skills (and maps play a big part of the traditional FPS experience), and open terrain isn't exactly the same sort of thing, ...

and, it doesn't really recapture much of the essence of Minecraft either...

I am not sure what most people look for in terms of inspiration though...

I had at one point felt inspired about Nier (for being "generally compelling"), and the anime "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" for having a compelling art-style (particularly in relation to the witches).

not yet come up with any means yet to do anything similar. in both cases the level of art and presentation required I suspect is beyond my abilities...

I have been fairly disappointed in games for quite sometime, in terms of developing a game, the last inspiring game I played was probably Eternal Darkness and before that Sub-Culture (1997), although I must admit I did like the uniqueness of games such as Pikmin.

If anything all my creations have been inspired by math, science and politics

I would say my latest game was inspired by the Zelda series and Portal. Both of those games are also in the top of my list of favorites.

My "Week of Awesome" entry, Raptor Ace, was heavily inspired by Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Star Fox 64, and Fury3.