Fan Games
The Touhou website Moriya Shrine, which aims to make all Touhou games easily available to users outside of Japan, lists all 24 official Touhou games. But in addition, it lists nearly a hundred fan-created spinoff games. Most of these games are easily professional-quality, often more visually well-developed than the official Touhou games (as mentioned in the introduction, this is unsurprising—ZUN is only one person, while man fan games are developed collaboratively by large teams). In fact, many of these fan games are sold for profit, usually at conventions; this is perfectly allowable under ZUN's lax policies on Touhou derivative works
Many fan games are Touhou-themed takes on classic popular games that are not related to danmaku games at all; apparently, fans are primarily motivated not by the danmaku aspect of the game, but by the compelling characters in the story world that ZUN has invented. The central thread tying everything together—fan games, doujinshi art, cosplays, remixes, etc.—is the fictional characters of Touhou and their associated music themes. This is also apparent in 2channel discussions about Touhou, where many threads are simply filled with commenters professing their adoration for their favorite characters.
The following examples show the original inspiration games and the Touhou fan games side by side.
Castlevania vs. Touhouvania:
Many fan games are Touhou-themed takes on classic popular games that are not related to danmaku games at all; apparently, fans are primarily motivated not by the danmaku aspect of the game, but by the compelling characters in the story world that ZUN has invented. The central thread tying everything together—fan games, doujinshi art, cosplays, remixes, etc.—is the fictional characters of Touhou and their associated music themes. This is also apparent in 2channel discussions about Touhou, where many threads are simply filled with commenters professing their adoration for their favorite characters.
The following examples show the original inspiration games and the Touhou fan games side by side.
Castlevania vs. Touhouvania:
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Age of Empires vs. Age of Ethanols:
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Pokemon vs. Touhou Puppet Dance Performance:
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Some of these games actually have quite large followings. For example, Touhou Puppet Dance Performance sports a fairly extensive English wiki mostly aimed for competitive multiplayer.
CraftyMage, the admin of Moriya Shrine, thinks that the easy availability of games on Moriya Shrine gave people who may have stumbled upon e.g. a Touhou music video that “extra little push into getting into [Touhou], since it was a place where they could go and obtain the games to play them themselves.” The numbers substantiate this claim: every week, Moriya Shrine receives nearly 1500 new visitors, and gets over 33,000 page views.
There are also much more casual "fan games" that are essentially text-based role playing games in the style of Dungeons of Dragons; these are very common and quite active on the English forum Maidens of the Kaleidoscope.
The survey I conducted on the Touhou subsection of Reddit suggested that fan games are not as large of a factor in attracting new fans when compared to the music, but still contribute in some capacity. Most of the 112 respondents mentioned that they currently still play official or unofficial Touhou games to some degree. In fact, 12 respondents even cited fan games specifically as part of the method by which they were first introduced to Touhou, whether by playing the fan game itself, seeing a video of a playthrough, or encountering user-created Touhou material in other games, like Touhou beatmaps (roughly, levels) in the popular rhythm game Osu!. One respondent even cited a fan game on the Android mobile platform. Unfortunately, with numbers this small, sample size may be an issue here; these results should be taken with a grain of salt.
CraftyMage, the admin of Moriya Shrine, thinks that the easy availability of games on Moriya Shrine gave people who may have stumbled upon e.g. a Touhou music video that “extra little push into getting into [Touhou], since it was a place where they could go and obtain the games to play them themselves.” The numbers substantiate this claim: every week, Moriya Shrine receives nearly 1500 new visitors, and gets over 33,000 page views.
There are also much more casual "fan games" that are essentially text-based role playing games in the style of Dungeons of Dragons; these are very common and quite active on the English forum Maidens of the Kaleidoscope.
The survey I conducted on the Touhou subsection of Reddit suggested that fan games are not as large of a factor in attracting new fans when compared to the music, but still contribute in some capacity. Most of the 112 respondents mentioned that they currently still play official or unofficial Touhou games to some degree. In fact, 12 respondents even cited fan games specifically as part of the method by which they were first introduced to Touhou, whether by playing the fan game itself, seeing a video of a playthrough, or encountering user-created Touhou material in other games, like Touhou beatmaps (roughly, levels) in the popular rhythm game Osu!. One respondent even cited a fan game on the Android mobile platform. Unfortunately, with numbers this small, sample size may be an issue here; these results should be taken with a grain of salt.
