The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is a forum for the demonstration and discussion of innovative game designs

Success Stories and Influences

Once in a while, people ask whether we are actually influencing the mainstream game industry. Many of the games shown at the Workshop are so wacky, it can be hard to imagine them affecting the heavily-inertia-driven industry. We created this page to record clear, concrete influences that the Workshop has had on the mainstream.

We actually think the Workshop has much more effect than what you see here, manifesting via all the subtle influences that are bound to happen when hundreds of game designers see lots of interesting things and take those inspirations home.

Katamari Damacy

America greeted Katamari Damacy with great critical acclaim. Keita Takahashi, the game's designer, gave a lecture at the GDC in 2005. In that lecture, he thanked us for our role in bringing Katamari Damacy to America -- two of our staffers saw the game at the Tokyo Game Show in 2003, when Americans knew nothing of the game. Our friend Masaya Matsuura helped us invite Mr. Takahashi to speak at the 2004 Workshop. In 2005, here is what Mr. Takahashi had to say (translated from the Japanese):

I'd like to thank the staff of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. This fact is not well-known, but last year my participation at the EGW was the trigger for my participation in E3. After last year's workshop the attendees told their bosses about how excited the audience was about my game, which led to my participation in E3 and the release of my game in the US. Everything went on smoothly from there. Thank you very much for your support at last year's conference.

A recording of Mr. Takahashi's lecture from the 2005 Game Developers Conference is available on this page.

Rag Doll Kung Fu

Mark Healey presented his game Rag Doll Kung Fu at the 2005 workshop. The audience loved it, and so did some employees of Valve Software, who accosted him and flew him to Valve's offices in Seattle for a meeting. Mark signed an online publishing and distribution deal with Valve, and the game was released in October 2005.

An article about Mark's presentation and his deal with Valve, from PC Zone Magazine.	An article about the presentation, from Edge.

Eye Toy AntiGrav

Greg LoPiccolo and Rob Kay of Harmonix demonstrated EyeToy AntiGrav at the 2005 Workshop. At that time, Greg pointed out that Casey Muratori's Owl Simulator, presented at the workshop in 2003, was a major inspiration for AntiGrav. (Owl Simulator was an Indie Game Jam game.)

So in this case, a Workshop presentation directly inspired a high-profile game for the PlayStation 2.

Darwinia

Darwinia is an independent game by Introversion Software. It's an RTS played on a stylized computer-ish landscape. Though the concept changed a lot, it was originally inspired by the first Indie Game Jam games, shown at the Workshop in 2002, which were about putting huge numbers of little sprite guys on the screen at once. One of the game's stylistic hallmarks is still the flocks of little 2D sprite men that you command indirectly. TotalVideoGames.com interviewed Introversion about the game; here's the page where they mention the influence.