Set your game in interesting times

I would love to see more unusual historical settings in games. From what I can tell, there's roughly a dozen historical settings that get used again and again, such as "World War II" and "Ancient Rome", with century-wide gaps between them where apparently nothing sufficiently interesting happened. I understand that it's easier to create a game where you can use existing tropes and conventions, and easier to find an audience if there's an existing interest in a given setting - but it's so boring!

I think this is pretty much the master list of historical settings in games, excluding the second half of the 20th century, where things get a bit more detailed due to being within living memory:

• The "Stone Age", inevitably cartoonish.
• Ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome and China.
• The Middle Ages, about a millennium of history all put into one pot.
• The Renaissance! It happened in Italy! Paintings!
• Pirates!
• The US revolutionary war.
• Victorians, the US civil war, and cowboys.
• Prohibition-era Gangsters.
• World Wars I and II.

Of course there are plenty of games that break this mold, the Assassin's Creed series being the obvious big name contender. My suggestion to indie game devs: seriously consider making a historical game with a setting not in the above list. To be clear: the downside is that you will lose some instant "brand recognition" because people can't just go "it's a gangster game" and have an instant idea of what to expect. But you may have noticed that there are a lot of indie games around these days, getting released faster than anyone can play them, let alone buy them. Your game has to stand out to have any chance of success - and an atypical historical setting is a good way to do that. It can inform the aesthetic of the game, like in Aztez or The Cat and the Coup, and the fact you have a (historical) story to tell gives the press something to write about!

On top of that, of course, you get to make games a more vibrant and diverse medium, creating something new and of yourself rather than recycling a bunch of tired tropes.

Finally, here's a list of settings that I think would make for great games:

• The 1810s and 20s, known in England as the Regency period, just before Victoria. Social upheaval simmering below the surface, the first stirrings of what would become modern science. (In fact, I have a project - not a computer game - set in this era, which I will reveal once it's a lot further along.)
• Parts of the Americas in the early 16th century must have been quite post-apocalyptic, with European diseases wiping out more than 90% of the local population in some areas. What happens when everyone you know is dead and there's all these rumours of weird pale metal-clad people turning up in the east?
• From an aesthetic point of view, I would love to see a rigorously German Expressionist game.
• Ever since reading Collapse, I've been fascinated by the Greenland Norse, who survived for hundreds of years before dying to a man, starving to death next to an ocean full of fish.
• Set a game in the magnificent Mughal Empire!
• More? Fairy Tales are a treasure trove of ideas - and not just the European ones! You can get collections of "foreign" fairy tales. I have a bunch - see the picture above.
• More? Have a look at this blog, where each entry comes ready-made with a heroine to star in your game. People like "La Maupin, Julie d'Aubigny: sword-slinger, opera singer, and larger-than-life bisexual celebrity of 17th century France. Her life was a whirlwind of duels, seduction, graverobbing, and convent-burning so intense that she had to be pardoned by the king of France TWICE."