One of My Favorite Games Was an Accident
Gaming is riddled with well-documented stories about projects that were developed in hopes of being wildly lucrative only to disappoint upon release. Try as studios might, success is not something that can be simply willed into existence. Sometimes you need to come up with something new and possibly involving geometry to capture people’s attention.
Geometry Wars began as a game inside a game. It was included in 2003’s Project Gotham Racing 2 as an arcade cabinet your character had in their garage, a little minigame you could play in between races. It garnered a cult following, and a few years later PGR devs Bizarre Creations released Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on the burgeoning Xbox Live platform. An Easter Egg had hatched into a full-blown game.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved was a high-octane twin-stick shooter that paid homage to arcade classics Galaga and Asteroids, with a modern coat of paint that made it pop on our new-fangled HD televisions after we were finished watching Lost. I played it a little bit and admired the backstory and originality of it all, but it didn’t occupy hundreds of hours of my time or anything.
That was the sequel, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 that did that.