You found your best idea twenty years ago and did not notice

I took the idea for Metal Thunder ready made from my childhood. As a kid I played the AC-130 level in Call of Duty and said I wish the whole thing were a game, and years later I sat down and made it. My announcement tweet says exactly that, I wish CoD’s AC-130 missions were a full game.

People looking for an idea get stuck in the same place every time, “I need to find a good idea first”. Months go into the search, and every idea they find gets thrown out a week later for not feeling original enough.

Most of the best selling games lately have no original idea, they have a childhood obsession. Nostalgia is one of the rare things that raises attention and conversion at the same time. It gets your game clicked and it carries the person who clicked into buying. Even AAA is drowning in remakes. Most marketing tools only do one of the two.

The power of nostalgia has a formula too. How old the memory is and how important it was at the time decide it. The strongest zone is memories lived between the ages of 8 and 18 with 10-20 years passed since. Dinosaurs, trains, being an ant, whatever gets stuck in a person’s head at that age.

Work that band out for today. In 2026, going twenty years back means 2006 and going ten years back means 2016. So the ground that is hot right now is the childhood of the Wii, the first Minecraft wave, Flash games and the first iPhone games. Someone who was ten in those years is thirty today, has their own money and does not ask anyone before buying.

You should also understand why this works. The wants formed at that age never got tested. As an adult you questioned what you liked, justified it, gave some of it up. That pure want you had at eight was never touched, it is still sitting there exactly as it was.

But that want has no search volume, because nobody knows they are looking for a game like it. You will not find it by looking at similar game lists, wishlist data or keyword research, what shows up there is demand that already exists. This demand does not appear until you show it, and the moment you show it the person clicks without thinking about why.

The level Metal Thunder is built on came out in 2007 with CoD4. I was around 13 then and I played it drooling at the screen, if you will pardon the expression. Even now when I go back, the two best levels are Pripyat and the AC-130 for me. The kids of that time are the adults of this time, whoever was that age in 2007 is between twenty seven and thirty seven today, and they can comfortably pour money into games that scratch this nostalgia.

That is what I aimed at, and there was a gap in the market on top of it. I put the want from my childhood up front, not the game from my childhood. The two are not the same thing, the first one becomes a remake and that game already has an owner. Getting the feeling right and bringing a modern take to the game worked.

Nostalgia also has a side that makes people share. When someone sees a thing from their childhood they send it to the friend who knows it with “man, we used to play this to death”. That is why it works extra hard on co-op games, it reminds and it invites at the same time.

But it is not enough on its own, be careful there. Nostalgia can also squeeze you into somewhere far too narrow. If you make a thing only you and three people born the same year as you remember, there is no audience. What you are after is not your own memory, it is the shared memory of that age group.

The same goes for geography, and this is where most people trip. The things played in internet cafés in Turkey in those years are the shared memory of our generation, they have no equivalent outside. You can hit the band right and still miss the market, and if the memory you are after belongs to a country rather than a generation, that game only sells here. Do not go and make the 87th local Knight Online or Metin 2 attempt.

Nostalgia does not have to be the subject itself either, it can be the form. What Dora is doing at Rogue Duck is exactly this. They are not making dinosaurs, they are making the shape of the game you used to open in a browser and play for ten minutes. A price between 6-12$, one clear concept, something you understand the moment you open it. Sticker like visuals and snackable gameplay. The thing people attack their games for most is looking like Flash games, when that is exactly what is working, a modern shell put over the old Flash feeling.

Do not confuse nostalgia with graphics alone or with old gameplay. When you do pure PSX visuals your game simply looks bad. What you have to do is blend, bring a modern breath to the PSX look. Games that just look old rarely get off the ground, or they end up underwhelming.

The place that blows up most is UI/UX. However much people want the old thing, their playing habits have changed a lot since then. Do not try to take the UI/UX one to one just because it worked in the old game, that is the first place you have to modernise. UX especially. If you model a UX from the stone age, the player hits Alt-F4 in the first moment.

Decide how old your target audience is today, count 10-20 years back, and find what a kid that age was hooked on in that period. Going from your own childhood is the easiest route, but check whether it is a memory of one person or the memory of a generation.

Original ideas sprout most often out of old games. Give the game you were obsessed with at 8 another chance.