Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?

“Earthquake” : You are randomly assigned an identity, could be male, could be female, could be any age or ethnicity. Your generated identity could be at any stage of life, doing practically anything from laundry, to getting married, to engaging in violent crime or performing medical surgery.

Whatever country you live in, the city this occurs in is the largest, most local that also experiences earthquakes. A magnitude 9 quake hits, pretty much leveling the city. The entire earthquake itself is a massive pre-calculated physically accurate simulation of what that city would actually experience, including at least a week of after quakes.

The first game level is simply surviving the quake. Where ever you are, your situation is different, but it’s all playing out in “bullet time” - slower than normal with visual streaks from motions. The initial quake is at least 1 minute long, 5–10 minutes in “bullet time”. After a quake ends, time is normal, but every aftershock it’s “bullet time” again.

If you die, you died this incarnation of the game. If you died an impossible to recover death, you get randomly assigned a new identity. If your death was preventable, you live that same life again. If you are trapped, you are trapped and you must get someone’s attention to rescue you, while whatever injuries you’ve received accumulate against your life reserve keeping you alive. If you survive, what you do next is up to you.

The game starts over every day/hour or whatever frequency makes sense, playing out until the last person quits/dies or the after quakes end, about a week of simulation time. It’s massively multi-player.

It’s like “Groundhog’s Day”, the movie, but with life or death circumstances for everyone. There’s modding capabilities for people to implement objects, so EMT techs, police, criminals, and everyday people’s various tools actually operate.

Due to the open ended capability of modding, there might be a need for a separate ‘Earthquake in Alice’s Wonderland’ after a while, but the game needs to be created first.

A separate, parallel mini-game is the ‘outside journalists’: an excuse for people to create ‘news clips’ of themselves or any other player’s activities framed in a “news reporter over the shoulder explainer” clip. These are fed into a teaser streaming channel anyone can view, playing the game or not.

FWIW, I left the game industry. So, if you want to make this game, please do.

Tower defense played from the enemy’s perspective. (This may exist, I’m not a huge gamer in my adult years.)

I imagine it as a race of sorts, potentially with the enemies being a multiplayer team and maybe rocket league esque physics/mechanics crossed with Mario kart. But, surrounding the track is an increasing level of towers that are bombarding the track. You can dodge and whatnot to survive, multitude of obstacles, ramps, power ups, etc. perhaps even a way to shoot back at the towers.

Minecraft-like builder with portals allowing seamless travel to/from other servers. (or this feature in Minecraft)

A massive online game where one person is "The Beast" and thousands of villagers are tasked at slaying the beast. The Beast can choose between a multitude of powers without the others knowing what these powers are. The villagers can choose from a multitude of tools / weapons in order to slay the beast.

Once selected, these are locked in and concludes what both sides have to work with. If the villagers don't have the right tool set(s), it may be impossible for them to win.

From there, it's all about defining the powers of both sides.

Wow, what a great question -- it seems like everyone here has been sitting on a wish list for a while. :) Here's one of mine:

Ever since reading Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth as a kid, I've thought some elements of that story would make a great game. The player plays an archaeologist in the distant future trying to unravel the mysteries of humanity's origins -- a galaxy-scale adventure of exploration and discovery where a rich tapestry of future history is slowly revealed. As a bonus, such a game could be very positive and not even require violence like many other games. :)