Video game developers have been toying with the bounds of the creative medium for decades. Sometimes, making breakthroughs of new and inventive ideas has been reliant on tech, and other times, they just need to hope that they realise such innovations well enough to garner mainstream interest. However, most of the best-selling games are of the standardised genre or blend naturally complementary genres.
Of the USA’s ten great-selling games from the first five months of 2025, you’ve got three action-RPGs, an action-adventure, and three sports sims, a first-person shooter, and a historical strategy game. While there’s a tremendous amount of variety on this list and within these genres, none of them go as far as to offer something revolutionary in the genre-blending department.
There’s a rich history of this in gaming, but now, it’s the more experimental space of indie gaming and one-person dev teams that are dominating this creative line of development.
The Genre-Blends that Changed the Game
One of the earliest genre-blends that continues to permeate the modern video game space came around via a couple of closely-timed releases from different game series in the 1980s. In 1986 and 1987, Metroid and Castlevania II forged the path for platformers without linear progression in the action-adventure genre to become known as Metroidvania games. The two series remain legendary and inspirational to this day.
Later, in a move that paved the way for so many triple-A games today, Borderlands showed just how developers could blend seemingly disparate genres. Co-founder and lead writer Randy Pitchford wanted to combine his affection for RPGs, roguelikes, action-RPGs, and his experience of working on FPS games. The result in 2009 created a masterful genre hybrid that remains the blueprint to this day.
Even in far, far older forms of gaming, blending genres and slapping a portmanteau label on the new creation isn’t uncommon, either. This is how the distinct genre of slingo bingo came into being. It began as an AOL game in the 1990s, but has since grown into a staple of online gambling sites. The games blend the spins and win potential of slots with the randomized bingo sheets to create a distinct experience that blends the polar-opposite game forms.
Indie Hits Continuing to Meld Genres
Easily the biggest hit genre-bending indie release of the last few years was Balatro. Combining deck-building, rougelike run progression, and poker into one game, Balatro was a hit on every platform and, by the time it arrived on mobile, was so popular that it managed to unseat the perpetual king of the mobile games charts. The accessibility of poker being the core approach certainly helped its fame.
Elsewhere, we’ve seen the excellent Monster Sanctuary combine the already combined Metroidvania gameplay with the monster catch-and-train genre, and present it in a beautiful pixel-art world. Also bringing pixel art to the fore is Dave the Diver. This tremendously expansive indie hit is based around a core mechanic of a restaurant sim. On top of this, you tap into RPG elements to upgrade and can go out exploring in adventure-like elements.
Throw in series like Sanctum and Orcs Must Die! as well as Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale and Crypt of the NecroDancer, and it’s clear that right now, indie gaming is where genres are being broken open and stitched together.