Play Older Games
Older games can make you feel nostalgic - either for your own childhood or for a place you've never been. Like other art forms the games of the past can also inform the evolution that lead to the games of today.
Consider the amount of 3D platformers that wouldn't exist without Super Mario 64, a game whose unique movement keeps people playing today. Although not everything innovative has had such longevity within the zeitgeist, it's always worth going back to an older game (which is likely under $10 without a sale!) and seeing where we came from.
Playing games is a language that can become intuitive over time. You start to see the same patterns in design, and you can see where a developer was inspired from as the variation in your diet of play grows. Even better, you can notice twists on design mechanics from previous games and see how a studio has bent inspiration to fit their own work. Having an eye for this evolution between video games lends to a conversation between developers that pays tribute to the hard work that came before.
Other art forms are often discussed as "having dialogue with each other." As new works are produced on the shoulders of others. Video Games do this very well in both positive and negative fashions. A recent example is the release of both Arc Raiders (Embark Studios) and Marathon (Bungie Entertainment), which are both building upon a genre that Escape From Tarkov (BattleState Games) defined.
As a side note you can also add that The Division's (Massive Entertainment) Dark Zone laid part of the foundation for Extraction Shooters
Arc and Marathon have both twisted the formula in their own way while adding a unique coat of paint on top. This coat of paint is the most important twist to the game play defined by Tarkov. Tarkov is cold, desolate, and the time to kill can keep human interaction at a minimum. Arc Raiders is designed to inspire co-operation between strangers and this can make betrayals devastating on a human level, not just a loss of gear. Marathon frames the world as dog-eat-dog, you and your fellow players are on Tau Ceti IV for the same, individual purpose. Yet their is still a storied PvE aspect, even if it does feel subtler than Arc Raiders. The direct oppression from the UESC and the more quietly sinister suffocation you experience from the corporations you serve instill a sense of comradery with your fellow players even if you are out to get each other. This fend for yourself mentality makes any event of co-operation a miracle.
This is merely one example of how that dialogue between developers has built even if they have not had any direct interaction with each other. Each world is designed in a different way to evoke a specific emotion as you traverse it, even if the broad stroke mechanics of each game is largely the same.
I personally first discovered this when I played Dishonored back in 2012 and I learnt the words "Immersive Sim" for the first time. I became enamored with the systems that could be present within a game and the choices that it offered the player - and better yet, the responses the game could give in return! I was naive in thinking that this game was unique in its design philosophies at first, but over time I wanted to know where this came from. Naturally you start with Thief (Looking Glass Studios), then System Shock (LookingGlass Technologies - yes the same as Thief), to Deus Ex (Ion Storm), and even to today- like the lovely Gloomwood (Dillon Rogers, David Szymanski, Nate Berens, Thomas Porta). Suddenly I wasn't just seeing a dialogue between developers, but I was experiencing a dialogue with myself about why I like this type of game and the mechanics within them (A love of stealth and then stealth-action was then born from this).
For those who may not know, Marathon is based off of a previous series also by Bungie which is free to download and play from Steam under the title "Classic Marathon..." When I wanted to learn a bit more about the 2026 release and what was inspiring its aesthetic I went back and tried the games in this original trilogy - i got stuck a lot. However, I also discovered something else, I was playing a prototype of Halo - right down to key story elements. This is the most important thing about going back and checking out older games, you realise that back in the day teams were given the chance to innovate on an original idea. It is hard to get something right the first time, but to improve upon it, it must first exist. Every time I take a journey back and take note of which studios made what, you can see a clear history of lessons being learnt by teams and when given the chance to prove themselves past an initial iteration, they made classic games that people still enjoy.