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[Inanimate]

Well, where did he get the idea to make an homage to all games featuring blocks? You can see hints of the idea in the Tetris/Mario mash-up.

[Gimym TILBERT]

each level as an homage to one game, there 50 level that's a lot of homage, also review seems to like the game so far, with above average mark, only people who play the game enjoy it 

[offal]

offal, I'm asking why he decided to make the homage to Alexey and Markus

and so am i

Nothing should ever reference anything that came before it

narrowly implying that other developers made the game is an entirely different thing

[William]

Thank you for your questions.

Did you ask for proper permission for all the references?
We asked for proper permission to some of the developers we mention, but not all (I will not make the list). For example, Markus Persson and Alexei Pajitnov know about the game, we send them emails and they answered, and it seems that they have no problem with that.

On a screenshot, you can see a "Tumbledrop" block. Someone here wondered if we had the permission to use it : yes, we asked Hayden Scott-Baron the permission to use this screenshot to promote the game.

Now, as I said, we didn't ask permission to everyone cause as a team of 2 people it would be difficult to discuss with everybody and not release the game before we have all the permission. We think that by giving credits to the developers and mentioning the platforms where the games are available is ok.

First Star Software, the owner of Boulder Dash license, contacted us when they saw our trailer. They understood our approach and only asked us to add some legal notices when the Boulder Dash block is on screen. And that's what we did.

We also send emails to some developers like Team Meat, Derek Yu, Terry Cavanagh, The Behemoth, (...) explaining what we did and giving them a copy of the game or a way to download it for free. Some answered, some didn't, but nobody asked us, for the moment, to remove their game from the blocks list. If someone asks us this kind of things later, we'll be sad but we will do it.

[William]

Where did you get the idea to make an homage to all games featuring blocks?
What inspired your storyline?

Before being developers, we are players and even if it sound a little bit naive we love games and we love to love them.

The idea to create fictional characters based on Markus Persson and Aleksei Pajitnov and use them as main characters / narrators was here since the very beginning of the projects. In the storyline, they are kidnapped by some evil people that want to steal their work, and it's kind of "funny" to see that today we are those evil people for some of you.

We were a little bit worried that some players could say that Blocks That Matter is a copycat of Minecraft, but we are honest people and we respect the work of Notch and Mojang. Blocks That Matter is a puzzle game that mixes gameplay elements from Tetris, Minecraft and many other games, but we are not the kind of people that are ashamed of their references. We love games, that's all.

In our first trailer, the one you use to illustrate our "evil marketing approach", maybe we made a mistake using the word "Featuring". For us (we are french), we thought that by "Featuring Aleksei and Markus" it would be clear that it was about the characters and not the real persons. We never mentioned their name cause we didn't wanted to create confusion. And I'm surprised that people can really imagine that Aleksei Pajitnov and Markus Persson worked together in secret to create this game. There's no mention of Blocks That Matter in any Notch blogposts, for example... Anyway, we will probably not use this "featuring" word in our next games, and we will not make other mashups.

One last thing : the robot that his the playable character in the game has tetris and minecraft based skills. It was natural, for us, to make fictional Aleksei and Markus its creators.

[William]

If you have other questions, I'll answer them.
Excuse my poor english skills...

[moi]

I had no idea that the game was an hommage to old games. It doesn't appear anywhere,I've watched the xblig trailers and it's not obvious.

[William]

There are old games, modern games, indie games, AAA games, a rubiks cube, dice,...
It's not about categories (except block games of course), it's just about games.

[1982]

There are old games, modern games, indie games, AAA games, a rubiks cube, dice,...
It's not about categories (except block games of course), it's just about games.

I usually like to specify rather than just use games as common term.