Luca Galante remembers clearly the first time Vampire Survivors was copied. "It was immediate," he says. "Even before the game got popular." At the time, he took it as a compliment.
After all, this was a game made years after Galante had given up any hope of working in the game industry, and one he'd prototyped over the course of a single afternoon. It was inspired by auto-shooter mobile games, which he was playing a lot at the time. "These games had something interesting about them – the auto-attacking, the very simple controls – but they were terrible," he says. "They were super-frustrating to play because they were full of advertisements. You had to play very short rounds, and then immediately they would try to sell you something." And so Galante decided to make one of his own.
