Treasure Hunting Systems Found in the History of Video Games
A treasure hunting system is a system that unexpectedly puts out really good stuff. Proper treasure that makes people an enormous amount of money. An example is the Warcraft III modding community which invented several new genres of games and sprouted DotA, whose clones and offspring made their creators rich. (I don’t know how much money exactly, but Riot Games got acquired for $400 million, and their only product is a DotA-clone)
This has happened several times in the history of video games, but I didn’t link these together until I recently saw a talk about the Czechoslovakian game developer community before the iron curtain fell. The presenter talked about how the small country of Czechoslovakia had a thriving video game community despite the fact that you couldn’t buy computers in Czechoslovakia. But when I saw the talk I couldn’t help but think that “this reminds me of the Warcraft 3 modding community,” so I figured I should write up what these and other historical examples have in common so that we can build more systems that generate treasures.
Probably Dance 