Old or new, crappy or fantastic, what video games have inspired you as a GM?
Anything from yoinking story ideas and cool creatures to thematic or structural elements is fair game. Inquiring minds want to know!
(See also: GMs as video game designers and 9 lessons GMs can learn from World of Warcraft.)
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I get lots of inspiration from video games. Pick up an old issue of nintendo power, look at the images or the claymation and just think of what it is I want to bring out of that into my latest game. If I’m running a dungeon crawl I’ve been known to use exact levels from some games just for the hell of it. I try to adapt whatever I’m doing from a video game into something that is approrpiate for the game that I’m running. It would be an interesting idea to try to turn a video game like metroid into a straight gaming session. You get into all sorts of copyright issues if you do that professionally though.