[Solvency]

Similar to this is there any example of someone building an entirely "new game" by changing the front-end client and assets so heavily that it literally becomes a different story/world/lure/characters? Essentially a total facade reskin?

[undersuit]

League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of Newerth were all directly inspired from a Warcraft III map mod, Defense of the Ancients. Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, MOBAs, are now an entire genre.

[oliverbennett]

Of the 10 most popular multiplayer games in 2023[0] seven of them owe their core mechanics to mods / flashes of brilliance from a handful of amateurs.

A more or less correct history of their origins:

- Four of the games on that list are battle royale games, which started life as a somewhat popular Minecraft mod and really took off with "Battle Royale" - a mod of "Dayz" which itself is a mod of "ARMA II". It's mods all the way down.

- Two are tactical FPS games, which owe a huge chunk of their mechanics to "Team Fortress" a Quake mod and "Counter Strike" a Half-Life mod.

- One is a MOBA, which started life as "DotA", a Warcraft III mod.

Of the other three, one is Minecraft. Created by a solo dev, and I expect its moddable nature has helped its multiplayer popularity significantly.

One is Roblox. Created by two devs, and is itself a game creation system.

The final one is Genshin Impact - something of a an outlier in terms of team size and genre origins.

[0] https://twinfinite.net/features/most-played-games

[aeyes]

I vaguely remember a mod called tower defense which we played on LAN, I wonder if that was the inspiration.

[undersuit]

I've never played the map, but Aeon of Strife from Starcraft is a custom map that has the origin of Dota mechanics... and the Protoss Photon Cannon brought about some earlier versions of Tower Defense custom maps.

[asvitkine]

Bungie's Myth II supported extensive modding (everything defined in the assets), so there's many total conversions that have been done.