Where every game mechanic came from

Genre is a shelving system that hardened into a critical vocabulary. It tells you what a game resembles, not what it is made of, and it collapses under pressure: Dark Souls and Slay the Spire share nothing on the shelf and share a spine underneath, because Bonfire Checkpoint & Currency Risk and Run-Persistent Meta-Progression are both arguments about what death should cost. Mechanics, unlike genres, have parents. Regenerating health in Halo revises hit points in Rogue, which revises collision in Spacewar!, and each step is a specific team solving a specific problem on specific hardware. Almost nothing arrives from nowhere. Of 168 mechanics here, twelve have no traceable parent — Rogue's generated levels, Dune II's real-time production loop, Lode Runner's shipped level editor — and they stand out precisely because descent is otherwise so dense. Tracing that descent explains things genre cannot: why the medium keeps rediscovering the same problems under new names, why an idea can lie dormant for fifteen years and then become load-bearing, and why the honest history of games is a history of arguments between designers rather than a history of console generations.