Audiosurf (2008)

Sometimes, unusual input can be the foundation for the entire game.

Audiosurf takes any arbitrary music track and turns it into a race course. This gives the player an immediate connection to the racetrack: as you race in response to your favorite song, you both anticipate the part that comes next and are curious about how the game is going to translate it.

It seems somewhat obvious, now that there are many games that use audio inputs, but the idea of automatically translating a song into a responsive racing track is the kind of off-the-wall use of procedural generation that can create new genres. This shouldn’t be confined to turning music into race tracks: Imagine exploring a dungeon generated from a photo or music created from your Twitter timeline.