More Popular Spin-Off

The original movie had a bad bad day, but it was about time that Minions got its way.

Homestar Runner: What are you sorry for? It's my website.
Strong Bad: Umm... I don't think they're coming to see you, Homestar.

— Homestar Runner, on the 404 Doodoo Error animation

Sometimes, a Spin-Off series ends up becoming more popular than the original that spun it off. See also Adaptation Displacement, where the vast majority of fans are unaware that it started in another medium, as well as Sequel Displacement, Breakup Breakout, Parody Displacement, and Even Better Sequel. Contrast with Quietly Performing Sister Show. If it's a reboot or reimagining that is more popular, it may be a case of Remade and Improved.

A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until six months after the spin-off is released, to avoid any knee-jerk reactions.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Akagi was originally a prequel to the long-running mahjong manga Ten - The Blessed Way of the Nice Guy. Despite being launched only three years after Ten, Akagi outlived it by 16 years with spin-offs of its own.
• Brutal: Satsujin Keisatsukan no Kokuhaku: This manga is actually the spin-off of another Seinen called Trace: Kasouken Houi Kenkyuuin no Tsuisou, but its popularity greatly overshadows its parent series. For comparison, as of September of 2022, according to MyAnimeList Brutal has been read by around 12 thousand users of he site, where as Trace has less than a thousand readers.
• The Sailor Moon manga and anime are both relatively well known (the awareness of the manga has increased after ten years and an Updated Re-release), but not nearly as many people are as familiar with its sister manga, Codename: Sailor V which starred Minako as Sailor V. Sailor Moon actually began as a spin-off/quasi-sequel (they ran concurrently) when Toei saw potential and asked Takeuchi to expand it with more characters. In fact, when Codename: Sailor V was finally published in America in 2011, it was treated as the spinoff.
• Dragon Ball is the finalized version of previous one-shots Dragon Boy and The Adventures of Tongpoo. Akira Toriyama originally hoped for an added arc or two after the first one, but the manga's overwhelming popularity kept the story going for over a decade, solidifying this trope.
  • Dragon Ball Z became way more popular in Europe and the US than its parent story.
• Dr. Slump, another Toriyama work, originated from earlier one-shots such as Wonder Island and Today's Highlight Island.
• Ghost in the Shell was apparently meant by Shirow Masamune to be some sort of very distant prequel to the world of Appleseed. In the end, the former became a lot more popular then the latter thanks to its many popular adaptions starting with Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995).
• Magical Girl Site is much more popular than the series it spun-off, Magical Girl Apocalypse, that it even got an anime adaptation first.
• Paradise Kiss (Neighborhood Story) — The former is more popular outside of Japan since, unlike it, the latter does not have as many official foreign language translations. (Neighborhood Story has French and Spanish translations for the manga and an Italian translation for the anime, at least, but Paradise Kiss has at least 10 translations, including to English, according to That Other Wiki. As of 2023, Neighborhood Story finally has an English translation.)
• Outlaw Star is combination of both this and Adaptation Displacement, as most people only remember the anime, which was adapted from the manga, which itself was a spin-off of a manga called Future-Retro Hero Story.
• Great Teacher Onizuka was the spin-off of Shonan Jun'ai Gumi, a tale about two rambunctious delinquents. You'd be forgiven if you thought this series was a prequel instead of the first installment, since most countries that export it give it the title GTO: The Early Years.
• The anime adaptation of A Certain Scientific Railgun was originally presented as a spin-off of the anime adaptation of A Certain Magical Index, but wound up being more popular and selling more DVDs than the Index anime. It's not quite a straight example though, as the Magical Index novels are still among the best selling Japanese light novels, atlhough on the flipside the Railgun manga has secured more spin-offs than the Index manga. The debate over whether Index or Railgun (shows, not characters) is better is a highly debated topic among the fan base.
• The characters Trava and Shinkai in REDLINE were originally from a lesser-known OVA series from 2003 titled Trava: Fist Planet.
• While it's not strictly a Spin-Off, Gatchaman Crowds aired in the same season as the premiere of a live-action Gatchaman movie. Crowds was likely an attempt to cash-in on the film...except that the movie got poor reviews, and is considered a flop. On the other hand, Crowds got very high ratings for its time slot, and was given a second season.
• Lyrical Nanoha started out as a brief joke music video in an extra fandisc for Triangle Heart 3: Sweet Songs Forever. Then someone decided to turn this fantasy short into a serious Magical Girl series with Nanoha as the main heroine. Over a decade later, Toraha is dead in all but name, with three visual novels and two OVAs to prove it ever existed, the last of which was released back in 2003. The Nanoha franchise, meanwhile, has become a multimedia juggernaut still going strong to this day, with five televised series, four big screen movies, a dozen published mangas (ranging in length from one-shots to the Doorstopper that is ViVid), and three games (if you count the INNOCENT web game).
• PriPara is more popular than the 3 Pretty Rhythm shows that preceeded it, to the point where it's the most popular entry in the Pretty Series franchise. At one point, the franchise made 15 billion yen. The same can be said for the Pretty Rhythm: Rainbow Live spin-off/sequel film series King of Prism, which became one of the longest-running movies in the history of Japanese cinema.
• The light novel adaptations of Seraph of the End are widely agreed to be of better quality than the main manga. The fact that Takaya Kagami is already an author helps immensely.
• While Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales faded into obscurity, its spinoff Mononoke still remains a highly acclaimed series with a long-running manga. Many people seem to only remember the Bakeneko arc of Ayakashi where the Medicine Seller originated, or only watch that part.
• Wagnaria!! was a print spinoff to a webcomic also titled WORKING!!, but by the time the latter was remade for tankoubon format, the former had a large fanbase and several adaptations under its belt. The title became so associated with the spinoff that the original had to rename itself to Web-Ban WORKING!!, and later WWW.WORKING!!, to signify it wasn't the same as the other series. Much like Sailor V, advertising treated it as the spinoff when it was eventually adapted.
• While Futari wa Pretty Cure was popular when it first aired, one series seems to be more popular than the other parts of the franchise: HeartCatch Pretty Cure!, which remains the most well-received and highest-grossing incarnation of Pretty Cure to this day, especially in the Western world.
• Canaan is far better known than 428: Shibuya Scramble on the Western side, due to Late Export for You in regards to the latter.

Asian Animation

• The Korean stationary mascot Baby Aru/PinkAru, who can be seen somewhat as South Korea's answer to Hello Kitty, introduced a new character named Nunbory/Noonbory in 2000. Noonbory ended up becoming vastly more popular than PinkAru; not only has he had two Animated Adaptations (one as a film in the early 2000s, and the other as a television series in 2008/2009), but he has made it outside of South Korea while PinkAru remains in No Export for You Land.

Comic Books

• Many Marvel characters of The '60s started off in anthology series. Thor (Journey into Mystery), Doctor Strange (Strange Tales), and Spider-Man are just a few examples. The difference here is that Spidey's intro was in the final issue of Amazing Fantasy (which started out as Amazing Adventures, then rebranded as Amazing Adult Fantasy with issue #7), while the other anthology books starring future Marvel megastars continued with their anthology titles and formats for a period of time.
• Batman began as just one of many characters rotating through the spotlight in Detective Comics. Eventually, Detective Comics became both the source of DC Comics' name and a full-fledged Batman title. Batman would also receive his own self-titled series, which is known to be the best-selling monthly comic on stands almost all the time — beating it in sales is seen as an achievement in and of itself.
• Superman was originally just the central story in Action Comics #1. And while he was featured on the cover, Superman didn't get another cover until Action Comics #7, and wasn't regularly featured on the covers until #16 or #19, depending on interpretation. Action Comics is still alive today... as a Superman title.
• Marvel Comics' Wolverine first appeared as antagonist for The Incredible Hulk, and has gone on to eclipse him in some respects. And when he was brought into the X-Men initially, Wolverine wasn't a main character at all. In fact, it was something of a toss-up between him and Thunderbird on who to kill off in the second issue of the new X-Men team, as their similar personalities were considered redundant. Wolverine got to live because his appearance and powers were considered more interesting. He then, of course, went on to be one of the very few X-Men characters to get his own long-running solo book.
• Moon Knight began as an enemy in Werewolf by Night, and debuted pretty late in the title's run to boot. He's since become a much more popular character than the Werewolf by Night, and has gotten his own book several times.
• ABC Warriors spun out from Ro-Busters, and managed to last much longer and attain greater popularity.
• Popeye began as a minor character in a comic strip called Thimble Theatre.
• The Smurfs actually first appeared in, back before they became popular, Peyo's major series Johan and Peewit (Johan et Pirlouit). Guess which series fell in the shadows after the blue critters showed up, to the frustration of Peyo?
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye is not only this to Mike Costa's run, but also to its fellow spin-off Robots in Disguise. The main reason being that while MTMTE was breaking new ground and taking risks, the latter two books do very little beyond the same old "Autobots v. Decepticons" storylines other than taking place in supposed peacetime (which often came across as an Informed Attribute at times). It also helps that MTMTE has been virtually free of any and all Executive Meddling, while RID constantly has its storylines and characters picked based on what toys are out at the time.
• Ms. Marvel (2014) was launched as a spin-off of the Captain Marvel series. It's been noted with some amusement that Ms. Marvel frequently outsells Captain Marvel, and has garnered more awards and critical acclaim as well.
• Deadpool was first introduced as a recurring villain in the X-Men spinoff X-Force (although he technically debuted in New Mutants shortly before the book was retooled into X-Force). Today, X-Force is generally remembered as an endearingly cheesy '90s relic that only hardcore comic book fans know or care about, while Deadpool has grown to become a widely recognized pop culture icon, roughly on par with the X-Men in terms of popularity and iconic status. He even gives Wolverine a run for his money, publicity-wise.
  Deadpool: Ya hear that, Logan? Suck it.
• New Mutants was the first ongoing spinoff of the X-Men and featured a younger cast. While initially very successful, over time the series' sales declined. They were reinvigorated when Rob Liefeld started pencilling and the character Cable was introduced. Cable became the New Mutants' third mentor and, after a significant boost in sales, the series ended and was spun-off into X-Force, the first issue of which is the second-best-selling single issue of all time. In the decades to follow, there would almost always be at least one X-Force and/or Cable title on shelves, while New Mutants has struggled to maintain a series since, with the most successful being a revival in the late 2000s.
• Lady Death started out as a supporting character in Brian Pullido's Evil Ernie comics, serving as a Lady Macbeth to the title character. She went on to star in her own series, gained her own animated adaptation and all-around is much more well-known now than Evil Ernie himself. This is because Evil Ernie is much more unpleasant and nihilistic in tone, whereas Lady Death at least has a major Sex Sells appeal.
• The Authority began as a spin-off of Stormwatch, then ended up taking Stormwatch's place among Wildstorm's major titles, to the point that for a lot of comic-book fans, the Weatherman is better known as the archnemesis of Apollo and Midnighter than as the former leader of Stormwatch.
• Hellblazer was spun-off from Swamp Thing after John Constantine proved to be popular with fans, and while Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing is still acclaimed, Hellblazer ended up becoming Vertigo's flagship series and went on to hugely influence the urban fantasy genre as a whole.
• Certain characters who made their debut in the pages of Fantastic Four have spun off into their own and/or other franchises, and become more prominent in the Marvel Universe than Marvel's First Family themselves sometimes. Examples include Doctor Doom, Black Panther, Silver Surfer, and Galactus. Doom and Galactus are still heavily associated with the Four, especially with Doom being their Arch-Enemy, but they've both become general villains for the Marvel Universe that just about every hero has encountered at some point, and Galactus himself is a cosmic force of nature that's a threat to all life on Earth and beyond. Black Panther has his own mythos, his comics have become a popular franchise in their own right^note Especially since the movie, and he's been more heavily associated with The Avengers for decades. And Silver Surfer has his own mythos within the cosmic Marvel Universe, and if there's anyone likely to fill the role of hero for that particular side of Marvel, it's usually him.
• Richie Rich originally debuted as a supporting feature in Little Dot. Richie would latter get his own comic book series in 1960. Since then, Richie Rich has become one of Harvey Comics' most popular characters.
• Black Canary started out as a recurring character in the Johnny Thunder feature in Flash Comics. Almost immediately, she became much more popular and quickly had her own feature in Flash, replacing his. Since then, even though her own titles have always been short-lived, she's been a regular part of the DCU, most notably as a member of the Birds of Prey and being Green Arrow's longest-running and most popular Love Interest. She's appeared in multiple live-action and animated television shows, and appeared in the DC Extended Universe film Birds of Prey (2020). Johnny Thunder, meanwhile, is remembered as a minor member of the Justice Society of America, if at all.
• The Kate Kane version of Batwoman debuted in 52 as a supporting character to Renee Montoya, who had been a regular fixture in Gotham-located comics for some 14 years or so, including the acclaimed Gotham Central. In little over a decade, Kate had a widely-acclaimed storyline in Detective Comics, her own award-winning and popular solo series, had been the lead in an animated film, and had a live-action TV series, just to name a few things. While by no means obscure or unpopular, Montoya's notoriety as a character was not as fast or widespread, and she would not achieve the same level of pop-culture awareness until perhaps Birds of Prey (2020).
• Howard the Duck is nowadays a big part of the Marvel Universe with multiple own comic series, even having his own theatrical adaptation and appearing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He actually first appeared in Adventures of Fear #19 in a story about the Man-Thing. Howard proved to be more popular.
• Miles Morales debuted as Peter Parker's successor as Spider-Man in Ultimate Spider-Man. When Marvel ended their line of Ultimate Marvel-titles by literally erasing the Ultimate Universe from existence in Secret Wars (2015), Miles was brought into the main Marvel Universe, has gotten multiple ongoing series, and made tons of appearances outside the comics.
• Spider-Gwen debuted in Edge Of Spider-Verse #2, a tie-in to the Spider-Verse-event and starred since in multiple own comic series as well as media outside the comic books.
• Betsy Braddock began life as a supporting character for her twin brother Brian, the original Captain Britain, but was mostly just a damsel in distress at first. But over time she became a distinct character in her own right with psychic powers, dyeing her blonde hair purple, and having a love interest of her own. Then Captain Britain's series was cancelled, and writer Chris Claremont continued his long-established practice of migrating characters he liked from cancelled titles over to the more popular X-Men series that he also wrote. Betsy joined the mutants as Psylocke, and from there her popularity exploded to the point that she has become the most famous British superhero in mainstream comics, and Brian is better known as her twin nowadays rather than vice versa. Naturally, she has since claimed the title of Captain Britain for herself.

Films — Animation

• Dreamworks' take on Trolls was much more popular than the previous attempts to modernize the toys, to the point where it became a Cash-Cow Franchise.
• Minions: This spin-off/prequel made more at the box-office than any installment of the Despicable Me trilogy where the Minions came from.

Films — Live-Action

• White Christmas is only a spiritual spinoff of Holiday Inn (both movies feature Bing Crosby, the song "White Christmas" and other songs by Irving Berlin, and a Hey, Let's Put on a Show plot), but it's certainly the more popular movie.
• Pirates of the Caribbean was based on the Disney Theme Parks attractions of the same name; its popularity led to Jack Sparrow, Barbossa and Davy Jones being added to the ride. The Pirates films have also fared better than other films based on park attractions such as The Country Bears and Tomorrowland.
• The Pink Panther:
  • There are all these kids for whom the Pink Panther is a cartoon series... or an insulation mascot.
  • In Spain, the Pink Panther is more associated with a pink sweet bun children love eating than with any of the movies. At least the Pink Panther appears on the package.
  • In Trinidad, the "Pink Panther" name is associated with the reigning Calypso Monarch. Good luck finding anybody who remembers the movies.
• The Naked Gun series began as an effort to relaunch Leslie Nielsen's short-lived television series Police Squad! on the big screen. In contrast to Police Squad, which was canceled after only six episodes, The Naked Gun spawned two sequels and grossed over $216 million.
• Overlaps with Germans Love David Hasselhoff, but the much-hated Godzilla (1998) is far better known than any of the original (or later) Godzilla movies and is actually highly popular in certain European countries. In fact, most people didn't even realize that there were others until the trailers for Godzilla (2014) came out — which was in turn very, very badly received in these places, even if it was much more positively received than the 1998 film on a global scale.
• Although Godzilla is the main star of the MonsterVerse, the prequel Kong: Skull Island managed to financially outperform Godzilla in many foreign markets. Notably, in China, its total box office run surpassed Godzilla's in just 5 days.
• X-Men Film Series
  • Deadpool is the highest-grossing entry of the X-Men Film Series in both North America and worldwide, and was popular enough to attract the attention of many people who weren't major X-Men fans.
  • Logan became the most critically acclaimed entry in the entire franchise, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in the process. It also outgrossed the mainline movies X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix both domestically and internationally despite having a more restrictive R-rating.
• The Jackass movies ended up becoming more popular and profitable than the original TV show they were based on. On another level, Jackass itself ended up overshadowing both of its predecessors, Big Brother Magazine (the skateboarding magazine that first introduced Johnny Knoxville, Wee Man, Chris Pontius, and Steve-O), the CKY videos (independently produced skate/stunt videos by Bam Margera and his friends, Ryan Dunn, Brandon Di Camillo Brandon Novak, Raab Himself, and Rake Yohn) to the point where the only people to really remember or know of them nowadays are Jackass fans.
• Rogue One is a standalone Anthology film in Star Wars as opposed to a numbered episode. However, many fans consider it to be as important as the main episodes, if not better. In terms of ticket sales, it surpassed both Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith while also garnering a much better critical reception than all entries in the prequel trilogy.
• In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, although T'Challa was initially introduced as a supporting character in Captain America: Civil War, his solo movie Black Panther became the most critically acclaimed Marvel movie with 3 Golden Globe nominations and 7 Oscar nominations including Best Picture. It also has the distinction of being the first MCU movie to win multiple Academy Awards.
• Although Warner Bros. always intended Batman and Superman to be the main stars of the DC Extended Universe franchise, its movies based on "lesser" DC heroes have turned out to be much more profitable and well-received than the main entries starring the World's Finest. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice scored a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes, but Wonder Woman scored a whopping 93%, and its net profit was more than double what Batman v Superman earned. Later, Aquaman crossed the $1 billion mark, outgrossed Batman v Superman in just 3 weeks, and even made more money than the non-DCEU movie The Dark Knight Rises worldwide, making it the highest grossing DC movie of all time. Ironic, given how Wonder Woman has historically been the least popular of DC Comics' "Big Three", and Aquaman has spent much of his history as a Memetic Loser.

Food & Drink

• Nestle introduced a candy in 1997 known as the Nestle Magic Ball which was Overshadowed by Controversy because it broke a law about inedible objects in food (the same one that got Kinder Surprise banned in the United States). Nestle re-branded it as the Wonder Ball and it became a huge success, with nostalgia for the product causing it to return in 2017.
• Bellywashers and Tummy Ticklers, juice bottles with figurine toppers of popular cartoon, movie and video game characters, were not all that popular in their initial run. When the two brands were combined into Good2Grow, their popularity soared among children, likely due to retailer Target gaining distribution rights at the time.
• Coca-Cola began as Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton's non-alcoholic reformulation of his French Wine Coca drink, which itself was a knockoff of Vin Mariani, a popular drink of the late 1800s made by Corsican chemist Angelo Mariani, which was literally just sweet wine laced with cocaine. In 1885 Atlanta banned alcohol, so Pemberton scrambled to make a version of French Wine Coca without the wine (yes, the city of Atlanta had no problem with the cocaine, just the wine). Pemberton actually sold both drinks up until his death in 1888; before he died he sold the Coca-Cola recipe to businessman Asa G. Candler, who then founded the Coca-Cola Company, which quickly took the drink nationwide, then expanded overseas. Meanwhile, later restrictions against cocaine, coupled with Mariani's death in 1914, led to the disappearance of Vin Mariani.
• Tequila is technically a variety of the Mexican spirit mezcal, produced from blue agave plants in the town of Tequila in the state of Jalisco. Toward the end of the 1800s the local producers began to just call their product "tequila" rather than "mezcal de tequila" to differentiate it from competing mezcal varieties from other parts of the country. Around the same time they began exporting the beverage, which led to tequila being well-known but mezcal being obscure outside Mexico.

Game Shows

• The Price Is Right started as a more relaxed game of price guessing hosted by Bill Cullen in the late 1950's. However, when Mark Goodson decided to produce a revival in the 70's, he decided to re-work the show into a carnival of glitz with elements he scraped from the popular Let's Make a Deal (i.e. plucking contestants from the audience to play mini-games, three giant doors, etc). The revised version, dubbed "The New Price Is Right", eventually eclipsed the original in popularity, and still airs to this very day. Most viewers barely even realize that their favorite show has been around much longer than they thought.
• The Match Game started in 1962 on NBC as a simple panel game. When CBS retooled it in 1973, it quickly became daytime TV's top show.
• Family Feud was a spinoff of the Audience Match portion of Match Game. It eventually overtook Match Game in the ratings, and even took Match Game panelist Richard Dawson as host, eventually causing him to leave Match Game
• Bill Carruthers created a show for ABC in 1977 called Second Chance, which lasted four months. Six years later, the show was revived for CBS, the devils on the game board changed to Whammys and the show renamed Press Your Luck. Even though it ran three years, it still has a following to this day.

Literature

• Beverly Cleary's first book was about an ordinary boy named Henry Huggins. One of the supporting characters was his friend's pesky little sister, Ramona Quimby. She eventually got her own book series which is more popular than Henry's.
• The Kiesha'ra series (mostly Hawksong) is a lot more popular than the Den of Shadows series; a lot of people aren't even aware that they share the same universe.
• Carry On is a spin-off of the author's previous novel, Fangirl, it's a defictionalization of the Harry Potter Expy which the main character of the latter novel is writing fanfic about. The novel became a best-seller, and the only one of the author's to be expanded into a full trilogy.
• The Icewind Dale Trilogy: In 1989, R.A. Salvatore wrote The Crystal Shard about a barbarian named Wulfgar. A heroic dark elf named Drizz't was a sidekick. He didn't stay a sidekick.
• Ruby Redfort: The Clarice Bean novels were respected and praised for their own merits, but the Ruby Redfort series has gotten acclaim and praise for a realistic spy story, interesting characters, difficult codes, and complex plotting.
• In 2006, a light novel called SLASHDØG was published but went very much unnoticed. Several years later, another light novel that took place in the same universe was written and was recognized for its relatable characters and... ecchi atmosphere. That light novel in question? High School D×D. The notoriety of D×D became so great that SLASHDØG was eventually retooled into a Prequel series exploring the backstory of The Rival Vali Lucifer as he journeyed with the series' original group, who would then become Canon Immigrants in D×D.

Live-Action TV

• The Myth has considerably more fans than the original film. Opinions vary on whether this is because its length allows more time for character development or because it's more realistic (well, as realistic as a series about time-travel can ever be) than the film.
• The Andy Griffith Show, focused on a character introduced on The Danny Thomas Show.
• While both shows are well-remembered, Benson ran nearly twice as long as its parent series, Soap.
• Happy Days (Love, American Style)
  • And then Laverne & Shirley blew past Happy Days in the ratings, almost from episode 1. In the long run, however, Happy Days has made a far greater cultural impact.
    • And then Mork & Mindy was spun off from both of those shows. Probably due largely to Robin Williams' performance, Mork & Mindy became the only one of the shows mentioned here to earn an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series (in 1979).
• Also from the same producers, Family Matters is a show everyone remembers, mainly for Breakout Character Steve Urkel- but what many people don't know or realize is that it was a spinoff of Perfect Strangers- Harriette had originated on that show as an elevator operator, and Carl had made an appearance there too. But characters from Strangers never appeared on the new show, so many people simply thought it was a new show. It also doesn't help that, while Family Matters has been a syndication mainstay since the late 90s, Strangers wasn't nearly as popular in reruns and seemed to fall into relative obscurity after it originally aired. Hulu streaming and DVD releases have brought Strangers more exposure recently, but Family Matters and Urkel remain Household Names.
• The Buffy the Vampire Slayer series is far more well-known than the original 1992 Buffy film, which is nowadays known pretty much only for being spun off into the show.
  • In turn, the last two seasons of Buffy were eclipsed in the ratings by its own spinoff Angel, although Buffy is still the more well-known show overall.
  • As for the comics, Angel and Faith (the main spin-off, a Spiritual Successor to the Angel (IDW) comics) has become more popular than the regular Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 9 series. This is at least in part due to the fact that some of the more popular characters were Put on a Bus in the main series to get their own series/mini-series (Angel/Faith, Spike, and Willow).
• Deal or No Deal has an interesting origin as the Bonus Round of the Dutch postcode lottery program Miljoenenjacht (Million Hunt). Endemol would export just that round as a standalone show around the world to great success, with even The Netherlands getting its own standalone version of the Deal or No Deal format.
• NCIS, a spinoff of JAG, has gotten consistently better ratings and reviews since its debut, although JAG fared better at the Emmy Awards.
  • Unusually, NCIS had fairly modest ratings in its first few seasons. Basically the show was doing well enough to not get canceled but not good enough to be a top rated series. By the show's fifth season, more people became aware of the show thanks to reruns and it became one of the most watched shows by its sixth.
  • Whereas JAG was canceled after 10 seasons, NCIS has officially become a Long Runner at 21 seasons and counting. It's so successful that it has become its own franchise with four successful spin-offs (NCIS: Los Angeles,NCIS: New Orleans, NCIS: Hawaiʻi, and NCIS: Sydney), plus one Backdoor Pilot that wasn't bought. At this point, most viewers probably don't even remember that NCIS was a spin-off itself. When by-then-retired Admiral Chegwidden makes a cameo in the 10th season finale of NCIS, it's basically an Easter Egg to JAG fans because the average NCIS viewer had no idea he used to be a main character.
• The Honeymooners was originally a segment in The Jackie Gleason Show. Honeymooners is an interesting example. When the show was spun-off from The Jackie Gleason Show in 1955, it lasted only one season (39 episodes) before it was canceled. The skit version would occasionally be revived up till 1978. In the 80’s, collection of skits of the Honeymooners were repackaged as 1/2 hour episodes for Showtime under the title of the The Honeymooners: The Lost Episodes, which were later combined with “Classic 39” from the single standalone season for syndication. It was then that the show become the popular classic it is today.
• Diagnosis: Murder was a spinoff of Jake and the Fatman, which introduced the series lead character Mark Sloan in a Poorly Disguised Pilot. While Fatman has fallen into obscurity despite a five-season run (in part because it was never rerun), Diagnosis: Murder ran for eight seasons and has maintained popularity in reruns after ending in 2001.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has received more acclaim and ratings than the original Law & Order, and has overtaken the original's 20 seasons. Somewhat ironic in that the show is really a Dolled-Up Installment.
  • Technically the show is also a spin-off of Homicide: Life on the Street because of character John Munch. SVU has a dozen seasons more this predecessor and has survived the retirement of his character.
• Frasier started as a spinoff of Cheers, but it went on to be a Cult Classic with its own enthusiastic fanbase. While it's difficult to say which show was more popular as they were both quite popular and beloved in their day, the Frasier fandom seems to be much more active today, and while Cheers' fanbase is still decently active, it's mostly just remembered as a funny sitcom from the '80s. However, Cheers is still frequently referenced in modern pop culture, while Frasier references are much more rare. At the very least, Frasier was definitely a More Acclaimed Spin-Off: it won 37 Primetime Emmys in its entire run, to Cheers' 28. And unlike Cheers, Frasier was revived in 2023 on Paramount+.
• The Twilight Zone (1959) and The Untouchables were both spinoffs to a mostly forgotten anthology series entitled Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse hosted by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.
• The Colbert Report to The Daily Show. While the Daily Show is still fairly popular and running, Colbert's show was a Breakout Hit that really raked in the ratings, only ended because Stephen Colbert chose to end it and move onto other projects, and many consider Colbert's character performance much funnier than Stewart's more serious approach. Jon Stewart seems to have at least partly realized this and lampshaded it in a few episodes.
• Xena: Warrior Princess remains a ground breaking pop culture phenomenon. Its parent show, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, was moderately popular during the 1990s but never reached the same heights and nowadays, Xena tends to be remembered more whereas Hercules has gone further and further down the memory hole.^note The fact that Hercules' main actor Kevin Sorbo has gone on to give several caustic interviews bashing Lucy Lawless and growing increasingly polarizing with his right wing, evangelical rhetoric on social media has really not helped the popularity of H:TLJ over the decades.
• Ultraman to Ultra Q. While Ultra Q is very well-known and beloved in its home country, it never gained the massive popularity Ultraman enjoys in both Japan and the rest of the world. Thus, Ultraman is the show that Guinness World Records awards for "Most Spinoffs", not Ultra Q.
• The Flash spun off from Arrow and soon became the highest-rating show on The CW, regularly outrating its parent show by an average of about one million viewers. A big factor is the tone of both shows: Arrow, while a critically-acclaimed show in its own right, is generally very dark, drama-filled and often not very family-friendly; by contrast, the Flash has fully embraced its comic-book heritage and has more of a balance between drama and humour, making it suitable for adults and kids alike. The fact Arrow got a nasty case of Seasonal Rot about halfway through its third season, just as The Flash was hitting its stride, certainly didn't help matters.
• Stargate SG-1 is considerably more well-known than Stargate, the 1994 sci-fi/action movie that inspired it. While the original film was a modest success at the box office, it's mostly remembered as a minor footnote in the careers of its director Roland Emmerich and its star Kurt Russell. The TV series, on the other hand, ran for a full decade and spawned a major multimedia franchise—including books, comics, video games, a cartoon, and two television spinoffs of its own (Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe).
• Friday Night Lights is a major Cult Classic with a devoted fandom, and it's gone on to be much more well-known than the modestly successful Billy Bob Thornton movie that inspired it (albeit loosely). Overlaps with Adaptation Displacement, since the movie is now primarily known as the inspiration for the TV spinoff, and not so much as an adaptation of the 1990 nonfiction book by H.G. Bissinger. Ironically, the TV show's continued popularity has led to talk of it being revived as a movie, even though it was a movie in the first place.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is this, if you consider it a spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery, though there's a Continuity Snarl given that it is based on the franchise's original pilot. Discovery has its fans but it remains controversial and followed the usual Trek pattern of starting kind of weakly and getting much stronger as the series progressed. Meanwhile, Strange New Worlds had the benefit of developing its main characters on Discovery and then coming strong out of the gate on its own, using the classic planet of the week structure. It's already considered one of the strongest Trek series ever, only in its second season, and The Daily Beast even went so far as to declare Captain Pike the greatest of all Trek's captains.
• While Chicago Fire is quite popular, Chicago P.D. is far more well known, either because of the questionable police brutality on the show or the fact that it is a staple on the rerun circuit, airing almost as much as the various Law & Order series.
• The 1982 series Boys from the Blackstuff is much better-known than the original TV play it spun off from, The Black Stuff, to the extent that many people don't even know what the title refers to (in the original play, the characters were labourers who were laying tarmac roads, hence "the black stuff". The series follows their lives after that job ended.)
• Saved by the Bell and its sibling series are far more popular and remembered than the show it spawned from, the Hayley Mills vehicle Good Morning Miss Bliss. Tellingly, Miss Bliss was shown as part of the Saved by the Bell rerun package under the new title of Saved by the Bell: The Junior High Years and with a new intro that made use of the original Saved by the Bell theme and intro graphics. "Saved by the Bell: The New Class" would actually be far more successful than the original "Saved by the Bell" series at 143 episodes compared to 86 for its' predecessor.

Music

• Farrah Abraham's My Teenage Dream Ended has become a Cult Classic piece of Outsider Music, but the autobiography of the same name that it is actually meant to be a soundtrack album to is relatively ignored except to acknowledge it as part of the album's backstory.
• You ever hear of the band Rainbow (no, not the Ritchie Blackmore band or the K-Pop group)? No? Wicked Lester? No? What about KISS? Yeah, Gene and Paul founded Rainbow which became Wicked Lester and then, under the names Gene Simmons (his name during the Wicked Lester times was Gene Klein and his real name is Chaim Witz) and Paul Stanley (real name Stanley Eisen) they founded KISS. Both Peter Criss (his surname a shortened version of his real one) and Ace Frehley (also not his real first name) were in Wicked Lester and others had been as well.
• Journey started out as a vehicle for guitarist Neal Schon and keyboardist Gregg Rolie after they left Santana in 1974. While Santana remained popular, Journey had a string of multi-Platinum albums after bringing Steve Perry aboard as lead singer in 1977.
• Semisonic began as an informal side project for Dan Wilson and John Munson of the cult band Trip Shakespeare. Hugely popular in their hometown of Minneapolis, Trip Shakespeare couldn't translate that success to the rest of the country and eventually broke up. Wilson and Munson focused their attention on Semisonic, and had a huge hit several years later with "Closing Time".
• Michael Jackson (post-Jackson 5). While The Jackson 5 were undeniably a hit, as a solo act Michael was The King of Pop, with the best-selling album of all time and 8 Grammy awards. The Jackson 5 likely wouldn't have the same legacy they have today had it not been for Michael's solo career.
• Goth pioneers Bauhaus are considered an extremely influential band, but their members all had more success (in America anyway), although not as much influence, with their post-breakup work: Peter Murphy as a solo artist and Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins in Love and Rockets.
• Justin Timberlake post-*NSYNC. JT's solo albums have only sold a quarter of what *NSYNC sold, but he has had more number one hits and far more critical acclaim than *NSYNC ever did.
• Beyoncé is far more known for her solo career than she ever was as part of Destiny's Child.
• N.W.A:
  • Dr. Dre and Ice Cube both went on to greater commercial success in their solo careers. However, influence-wise, N.W.A. still wins.
    • In turn, Eminem over Dr. Dre.
  • N.W.A. was this for World Class Wreckin' Cru, of which Dr. Dre and DJ Yella were both members before joining N.W.A.
• Ever heard of the Norwegian Death Metal band Old Funeral? How about the bands some of its members formed after it: Burzum and Immortal?
• Crosby, Stills and Nash ended up outlasting and outselling the bands they left (The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies). And once one considers the best known incarnation is Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Neil Young is this to both Buffalo Springfield and CSNY.
• Following a mistaken felony charge during a North American tour in 1975, Hawkwind fired their bassist, Lemmy.^*He was caught in possession of amphetamine sulphate (a misdemeanor charge), but the authorities initially misidentified it as cocaine (a felony). So he went on to found a new group with a much faster and heavier sound, and named it Motörhead after the last song he'd written for Hawkwind.^* He also recorded a faster, heavier cover version of the song for his first album.
• City and Colour is starting to become this, in comparison to singer Dallas Green's former band, Alexisonfire. Though Alexisonfire is still popular, the more mainstream sound of C&C allowed them to be surpassed.
• The Polyphonic Spree was formed by a few members of cult post-grunge band Tripping Daisy after the death of guitarist Wes Berggren and are much more well known than their parent band. One of the few members of Tripping Daisy that didn't join the Polyphonic Spree was Ben Curtis, who later formed the Secret Machines with his brother (and later left to form indie band School of Seven Bells).
• Scottish indie band The Yummy Fur, while adored by their small cult audience, were virtually unknown during their 1990's heyday. Lead singer/only constant member John McKeown found more success with his next band, 1990s.
  • Paul Thomson and Alex Kapranos (then going under Alex Huntley), two former members of The Yummy Fur, formed Franz Ferdinand a few years after they left the Revolving Door lineup of the Yummy Fur. They has much more success than not only The Yummy Fur, but also 1990s.
• Death Cab for Cutie originally began as a solo project of Ben Gibbard, the guitarist for the now obscure band Pinwheel.
• Porcupine Tree started as a solo project for Steven Wilson alongside his main band No-Man; as Porcupine Tree became a proper band following Up The Downstair and grew in popularity, No-Man became the side-project. No-Man is still alive at the time of writing, but it's less of a priority for Steven Wilson because Porcupine Tree is much more popular nowadays.
• Another case of "beloved cult band begets more popular group" is The Hold Steady, formed by two former members of Lifter Puller.
• Uncle Tupelo were famous for being the Trope Codifier of Alternative Country, but when the band broke up the band's two leaders and various other members formed two different bands. Whereas Jay Farrar's band Son Volt is arguably only barely more famous than Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy's band Wilco is perhaps one of the most critically acclaimed alternative bands of the past 20 years.
• Joy Division only released two albums before their singer committed suicide, but the ensuing post-Ian Curtis band, New Order, is equal to them in terms of popularity and influence. Not in sales though, New Order is far ahead of Joy Division there.
• The Seattle grunge band Green River is best known for spawning both Pearl Jam (guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament) and Mudhoney (singer Mark Arm). Pearl Jam also counts for the two projects Gossard and Ament did following Green River: Mother Love Bone (who were on the cusp of stardom when their singer Andy Wood died of a drug overdose) and Temple of the Dog (a tribute to Wood helmed by the duo along with Wood's friend Chris Cornell, featuring Cornell's drummer in Soundgarden Matt Cameron,^note Who went on to join Pearl Jam as well and Pearl Jam's future singer - Eddie Vedder - and guitarist - Mike McCready). After Pearl Jam and Soundgarden broke out, Temple of the Dog and Mother Love Bone's albums (they only had one apiece) became big sellers due to the connections.
• Björk was the lead singer of The Sugarcubes, an Alternative Rock band that was one of the first Icelandic artists to ever find any mainstream recognition outside of Iceland. Whereas the Sugarcubes are fondly remembered by fans of 80's alternative music, Bjork's popularity completely eclipsed theirs by the time she released her solo debut album.
  • And before that, she was the singer of the post-punk/goth outfit KUKL.
    • And before THAT she was the singer of the punk band Tappi Tíkarrass.
• The Yardbirds have three popular spinoffs.
  • Eric Clapton went on to play in the psychedelic rock band Cream and is probably even more popular as a solo artist.
  • Jeff Beck who replaced Clapton as the lead guitarist has also had a very lucrative solo career.
  • Jimmy Page replaced Jeff Beck, all of the group but Page left the band. Page recruited new band members and toured under the name The New Yardbirds for a while before changing their name to Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin became one of the most popular, successful, influential and well-known rock bands of all time.
• John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers was a Revolving Door Band whose former membership includes not only Eric Clapton (after he left The Yardbirds and before he started Cream), but also Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie.
• Electric Light Orchestra from The Move. ELO was originally just going to be a side project for The Move, but lead singer Roy Wood left the organization after the first ELO album, so the others just continued on as ELO. While The Move placed several singles in the UK Top Ten, it didn't have any success in America.
• Savatage was a Progressive Metal band that ran from 1978 to 2001, known in particular for their Rock Operas. One such album, Dead Winter Dead, featured a song that became a surprise hit: "Christmas Eve / Sarajevo 12/24". Decided to experiment further with the style, they became founding members of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. TSO has became extremely successful for their Christmas themed rock operas (although casual audiences only know them for "Sarajevo"), while Savatage is almost forgotten and disbanded to focus on TSO and other projects.
• Most people consider Days of Future Passed to be the first Moody Blues album; it was indeed the first of their Justin Hayward era, but their Denny Laine era produced one earlier album, The Magnificent Moodies. This means that Seventh Sojourn, which even they regard as their seventh album, was actually their eighth.
• Australian band Daddy Cool, best known for their hit "Eagle Rock", was intended to be a side project of Sons of the Vegetal Mother, a progressive band in the vein of the Mothers of Invention. Thanks to "Eagle Rock"'s ten-week run at the top of the Australian charts, Daddy Cool ended up overshadowing the main project.
• The early 90's French indie band Darlin' contained Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo and Laurent Brancowitz. Darlin' didn't last very long, but Bangalter and De Homem-Christo eventually began recording as Daft Punk (named after a dismissive comment in a review of an early Darlin' show) and Brancowitz became a member of the popular indie band Phoenix.
• Young musician Sonny Moore was a vocalist in a post-hardcore band From First to Last, with modest success and a record deal. After going through some trouble with his vocal chords and preparing to do a solo album, he started experimenting with electronic music that he liked as a kid, releasing instrumental dubstep under the name of Skrillex. Skrillex became the face of the fast-rising genre, while From First to Last, while still around, are more known for being his old band than anything else.
• Epica has had more enduring success then After Forever, the band the main songwriter came from previously.
• fun. was formed by members of the indie bands The Format, Steel Train and Anathallo, and their success in 2012 far eclipsed the success of those three groups. Notably, The Format and Steel Train each have their own cult followings, both of which are rather split down the middle on Fun's success.
  • Lead guitarist Jack Antonoff's side-project band Bleachers has become this for Fun during their hiatus. Subverted for frontman Nate Ruess, however: Despite very high expectations and a #1 single with a duet with P!nk, his debut solo album bombed.
• British indie rockers Doves provide an interesting case of this trope, as they contain 100% of the members of another less popular group. After a fire destroyed their studio in the mid 90's, the members of house music also-rans Sub Sub reconfigured themselves into Doves. Whereas Sub Sub were known as a One-Hit Wonder for 1993's "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)", Doves has gone on to both critical acclaim and enduring popular success.
• Imogen Heap is far more known for her solo albums and singles than with her work with Frou Frou, although it can be justified that Frou Frou only had one album and she already had one solo album out before that.
• Indie rockers Y-O-U, though critically acclaimed & somewhat popularized by collaborations with The Brothers Chaps, hung up their band's collective hat in 2009 due to increasing difficulty getting bookings, but their barely serious side project, the oldies cover band Yacht Rock Revue, took off like a rocket financially. The Yacht Rock Revue still acknowledges their origins, though, on their first studio EP, they covered Y-O-U song.
• Have you ever heard of a band called The Garden Wall? No? How about The Anon? Not ringing any bells? How about Genesis, which formed when The Anon broke up due to most of the band members graduating from the boarding school they all attended, leaving the remaining members, Anthony Phillips and Mike Rutherford, to merge the group with The Garden Wall (Peter Gabriel^note who himself was originally the drummer for two now-obscure bands called The Spoken Word and Millords, Tony Banks, and Chris Stewart)?
  • On that subject, the main reason why the bands Flaming Youth and Quiet World are remembered today is because, when they broke up, respective ex-members Phil Collins and Steve Hackett went on to successfully audition for Genesis (Flaming Youth's guitarist, Ronnie Caryl, also auditioned, but was unable to make it in).
• Although The Birthday Party are fondly remembered, they are utterly eclipsed by the next band of about half their members: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
• Busta Rhymes was previously a member of a group called Leaders of the New School. The group is best known for its appearance on A Tribe Called Quest's classic posse cut "Scenario", which was a Star-Making Role for Rhymes.
• Tupac was a member of Digital Underground, best known for their hit song "The Humpty Dance", although he did not appear on that track.
• Missy Elliott was previously a member of a group called Sista.
• Chaka Khan had a successful solo career after leaving Rufus.
• Inverted with rapper Everlast who had previously had a solo career before joining House of Pain. Their only hit song "Jump Around" hit #4 on the Hot 100. He currently has a solo career again (performing "folk rap"), but his one solo hit "What It's Like" was nowhere near as big and remembered as "Jump Around". Inversely, Everlast's follow-ups to "What It's Like" are much better remembered today than anything else House of Pain has recorded.
  • The group's disk jockey, DJ Lethal, may be better remembered now as a member of Limp Bizkit.
• Nightwish has a case of this. They're far more popular that bassist Marco Hietala's other band Tarot , despite Tarot being fourteen years older.
• Though Kyuss is influential and has a strong cult following, more people have heard Josh Homme's next band, Queens of the Stone Age.
• Simple Plan was formed by two former members of Reset, though Reset continues to tour and is somewhat popular.
• One Direction are much more popular internationally than the show they formed on, The X Factor. Back in the UK though, The X Factor has produced many superstars such as Leona Lewis, Cher Lloyd, and Olly Murs, who, while having some international success, haven't reached the heights of the boy band. The same can be said for Fifth Harmony from the short-lived American version.
• A long-running TV commercial for classical music vinyl records used this trope as a selling point, showcasing some classical compositions and the pop songs they inspired, including:
  • Polovtsian Dance by Alexander Borodin / "Stranger in Paradise" by Tony Bennett
  • Concerto #1 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky / "Tonight We Love" by Tony Martin
  • Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff / "Full Moon and Empty Arms" by Frank Sinatra
• The Shins started out as an offshoot of Flake Music, who released one full length album and were chiefly popular in their hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. To some extent, The Shins are Flake Music in all but name — most of the same lineup recorded both Flake Music's When You Land Here, It's Time To Return and The Shins' Oh! Inverted World. Interestingly, The Shins got their name from a Flake Music song.
• In the 1980s there was a modestly successful Vancouver-based Synth-Pop band called Images In Vogue. Not happy with their musical direction, the band's drummer Kevin Crompton started a Darker and Edgier side project under the alias cEvin Key, called Skinny Puppy. He left Images In Vogue after a few years to work with Skinny Puppy full-time, and they're still around while Images In Vogue broke up a few years later.
• Melodic Death Metal band Kalmah was formed as a side project by several members of Eternal Tears of Sorrow. While they no longer share any members, Kalmah has since become one of the frontrunners of the Finnish melodeath scene, while Eternal Tears of Sorrow remains a fair bit more obscure.
• Australian Progressive Metal band Karnivool is not "unpopular", but Ian Kenny has had far greater success and more acclaim with his side project, alt-rock/indie pop band Birds of Tokyo.
• Motograter was a rather unsuccessful metal band, but is today remembered as the starting point for singer Ivan Moody, the future frontman of Five Finger Death Punch.
• Fecal Matter was a short-lived punk band from Aberdeen, Washington that only lasted a single year from 1985 to '86. After that, the frontman started a band of his own. That band? Nirvana.
• Issues was formed after vocalists Tyler Carter and Michael Bohn were unanimously fired from their former band Woe, Is Me in 2011 for Creative Differences. They quickly became bigger than Woe, Is Me ever was. For comparison, Issues' debut Self-Titled Album made the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 in 2014, while WIM's debut album in 2010 made #16... on the Heatseekers chart. WIM's second album (post-firing) in 2012 actually did crack the Billboard 200... and it only peaked #167. Just to add insult to injury, Issues' debut EP, released the same year, charted higher... 71 spaces higher that is. Woe, Is Me broke up in 2013, not long before Issues debut album was released. Nowadays, they're remembered solely as "Tyler and Michael's former band".
• Martin van Drunen started off as the original vocalist for Pestilence, but left after just two albums with them. While Pestilence still remained a name most hardcore death metal fans knew after he left, Martin himself gained a much bigger following with his main bands Asphyx and Hail of Bullets.
• The Australian band My Friend the Chocolate Cake was formed as a side project by David Bridie as an outlet for his more folksy songs that did not fit the mould of his then-current band Not Drowning, Waving. Suffice to say MFTCC proved to be much more popular (as evidenced by the critical acclaim of their second album Brood) which eventually lead to the breakup of NDW in 1992.
• Dashboard Confessional started out as Chris Carrabba's side project while he was still in the rock band Further Seems Forever. When he started becoming more interested in Dashboard, he left the band with their blessing after their first album and went on to emo superstardom. He reunited with Further Seems Forever in 2010 and recorded an album with them while he was on break from Dashboard, and Jerry Castellanos has occasionally toured with Dashboard as a backing member.
• Rock band Downplay were together for over ten years, but never had anything close to mainstream success. Dustin Bates and Ron DeChant started a side project called Starset. Starset quickly became one of the hottest new acts on rock radio, scoring a top 5 hit with "My Demons" and several more top 20s, achieving more in one year than Downplay did in a decade.
• Sometimes a remixed version of a song can be more popular than the original; One example being the Bad Boy remix of 112's "Only You".
• When Danish death metal band Dominus' vocalist Michael Poulsen tired of his original genre, ultimately leading to the band's breakup, he and Dominus bassist Anders Kjoholm formed a new band called Volbeat, which was named after Dominus' 1997 album Vol.Beat. That band released six albums since forming in 2001, and has developed a large following outside of its home country, even adding American guitarist Rob Caggiano (ex-Anthrax) in 2013.
• Filipino Riot Grrrl band Keltscross developed a cult following in the early-mid '90s, but weren't as popular as pop-rock band Prettier than Pink, which featured Keltscross lead guitarist Pam Aquino at the time of their breakout hit "Cool Ka Lang" (English translation: "Just Stay Cool"). They also weren't as popular as the secular alternative, and later Christian rock band the Pin-Up Girls (later the Pin-Ups), which featured two Keltscross members — Aquino on lead guitar, and Jeng Tan on bass — and male vocalist/NU 107 disc jockey Mon "Mondo" Castro as band leader.
• Also from the Philippines: Heavy metal band Death By Stereo's lead vocalist Jerome Abalos had two big hits on mainstream radio as a solo artist, including "Larawang Kupas" (English translation: "Faded Picture"). Both hits were folky ballads far removed from his metal roots.
  • Fortunately for Death by Stereo fans, Abalos was onboard for the band's reunion in the mid-2000s.
• Wisconsin bands Spooner and Fire Town are best known for the subsequent producing career of drummer Butch Vig (best known album being Nirvana's Nevermind) and the band Vig and guitarist Duke Erikson went on to form, Garbage.
• Guns N' Roses, originated from the short-lived Hollywood Rose and the still playing and not as successful L.A. Guns.
• Montrose had some success, but then singer Sammy Hagar became a superstar through both his solo career and his work with Van Halen.
• Exodus is a fairly influential thrash metal band, even if their biggest overall legacy is that founding guitarist Kirk Hammett went on to replace Dave Mustaine in Metallica.
• White Zombie was an Alternative Metal band that is highly influential to the genre, but only enjoyed mainstream success with their final two albums before breaking up. Afterwards, frontman Rob Zombie formed a new band named after himself and became one of the most inescapable mainstream metal acts of the late-'90s, and still enjoys popularity to this day.
• Fall Out Boy was formed by members of various Chicago hardcore punk and metal bands as a looser and more musically upbeat side-project. Five years after they formed, they became one of the biggest rock bands in America. Most of the members' original groups - Arma Angelus, Xgrinding processX and Project Rocket - are now only remembered, if at all, for being the bands that Fall Out Boy formed out of, while Racetraitor retained a devoted underground following that eventually helped spur a proper reunion in the 2010s, but was never a big name outside of hardcore and powerviolence.
  • Another former member of Arma Angelus, bassist Tim McIlrath, became the lead singer for the popular punk band Rise Against, while Jay Jancetic (one of their former guitarists) would later go on to join the well-respected metalcore/beatdown hardcore act Harm's Way.
• Underworld's "Born Slippy.NUXX", the B-side to their 1995 single Born Slippy, completely overshadowed the A-side after being featured in the 1996 film Trainspotting.
• Feeder's single "Seven Days in the Sun" did well on the UK charts (peaking at #14) and was pretty well-received. However, its B-side "Just a Day" became a major fan favorite, so much so that it was later released as its own single—and managed to chart 2 spots higher than its former A-side!
• Arguably, at least internationally, Australian band Crowded House's success (at least in The '80s) has far eclipsed that of the band it spun off from, Split Enz (known in America mostly for their minor hit, "I Got You").
• BABYMETAL started as a sub-unit of the Japanese idol group Sakura Gakuin, with the intent of "mixing heavy metal and idol music". The group was only meant to last for the three years Suzuka Nakamoto was going to spend in Sakura Gakuin, but far outgrew its parent group: BABYMETAL tours the world regularly, has enjoyed memetic levels of online popularity, and might have become the most internationally successful Japanese act in over 50 years. Sakura Gakuin, on the other hand, stayed firmly in the Japanese market and disbanded in August 2021.
• Fueled by Fire was a Thrash Metal revivalist act that had some very minor mainstream hype in the mid-2000s courtesy of a deal with Metal Blade Records and an appearance on the Saw IV soundtrack, but they quietly receded back into obscurity by 2009 and were mostly remembered as an uninspired Exodus clone. Around 2011, Chris Monroy (their lead guitarist since 2008) started the death metal act Skeletal Remains as a side project, with no real intention of having it go any further than Fueled by Fire did. By the middle of the decade, however, Skeletal Remains had some serious hype behind them, and the success of 2018's Devouring Mortality had managed to give them the clout and meaningful opportunities that Fueled by Fire never had that culminated in a tour with The Black Dahlia Murder around the end of the year.
• Victoria Hesketh's solo persona Little Boots is much better known than her prior band, Dead Disco.
• SSQ (formerly Q) were a relatively obscure New Wave band, whereas their frontwoman, Stacey Swain, gained more prominence as Stacey Q.
• Believe it or not, Rick Ross, who took his name from a real life former drug kingpin named "Freeway" Rick Ross who was big and well known in the 80s, until he was arrested and did a prison bid fading from the spotlight. However, most youth and young adults today only care about the rapper. The real Rick Ross tried to sue for his name sake... and lost.
• The German progressive rock group Amon Düül II were a breakaway group from, unsurprisingly, Amon Düül, which continued to co-exist with them for a few years. The original Amon Düül was more of a loose jam band, while Amon Düül II choose to take a more song-based, commercial direction — which paid off, as it became both critically acclaimed and far more popular than the original group.
• The Afterimage was a decently popular djent/metalcore act in their day, but they could never quite break that midtier ceiling they were stuck under. A combination of Tragic Hero Records not doing much with them and their final album Eve being considered middle of the road by their fans caused them to call it a day in 2018. Singer Kyle Anderson started brutal deathcore act with the final lineup of The Afterimage called Brand of Sacrifice soon after and it quickly blew up in popularity. Brand of Sacrifice would end up being heavily in demand for live shows and are seen as one of the rising stars in Deathcore while The Afterimage has largely been forgotten about outside of djent and metalcore circles.
• DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince were very successful in their own right, but Will Smith was only launched into superstardom (first as a rapper, and later as a film star) after going solo.
• The Cockroaches were a 1980s Aussie pub rock band that were hugely popular in their native land, up to an appearance at World Expo 88 in front of 92,000 people. In 1991, members Anthony Field and Jeff Fatt formed a little children's band called The Wiggles with Cockroaches roadie Greg Page and a Macquarie University student named Murray Cook (and another Macquarie student, Phillip Wilcher, but he left early on). Within a few years, The Wiggles became a huge success and became far more well-known and successful outside of Australia than The Cockroaches could ever hope to be, becoming one of Australia's most famous exports. While many know who The Wiggles are, you would be hard-pressed to find someone outside of Australia who recognizes The Cockroaches.
• Musical instrument example: the Mellotron, the early magnetic tape-based keyboard synthesizer famously used by The Beatles and The Moody Blues, was basically a British retool of the Chamberlin Musicmaster, invented by California-based Harry Chamberlin. Chamberlin's sales rep took it to England, ostensibly to find manufacturers for the interior tape heads, but instead his contacts talked him into letting them redesign the instrument. After some legal threats from Chamberlin, they worked out a licensing deal. To give you an idea of how much more famous the Mellotron is, its article on Wikipedia is nearly 3,000 words long, while the Chamberlin article is about half that length.
• Blur were a reasonably popular act on the Britpop scene, and were part of the so-called "Battle of Britpop" with Oasis. While Blur won that battle, Oasis wound up being the more internationally successful band. And then Blur frontman Damon Albarn founded a little virtual band named Gorillaz, and the rest is history. While Gorillaz are one of the most successful and recognizable virtual bands ever, Blur is pretty obscure if you're not British or a Britpop fan. In America they're considered a One-Hit Wonder for "Song 2".
• Fast food-themed parody cover band Mac Sabbath are more popular and recognizable than the band they were spun off from, shock rock band Rosemary's Billygoat.
• 'Til Tuesday were a Boston-based new wave band who had a One-Hit Wonder with their 1985 song "Voices Carry". Their frontwoman, Aimee Mann, gained much more popularity with her solo career as a folk rock singer/songwriter.
• Maroon 5 are more successful, acclaimed (at least earlier in their career) and popular than the band they were spawned from, Kara's Flowers.
• Death Grips started out as a side project of Zach Hill, the drummer for the Math Rock group Hella. Today, Death Grips are a recognizable name in internet culture, while Hella is only known among Math Rock geeks. This is to the point where Death Grips' Wikipedia page is 2,430 words longer than Hella's Wikipedia page.
• The frontman of Sound Horizon, Revo, uses the name "Linked Horizon" for when he is making music based on other creators' works, rather than his own stories, such as the soundtracks to the Bravely Default games and the openings and endings to Attack on Titan. Plenty of fans of the latter love the songs, but have no idea that Sound Horizon exists.
• Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) was a fairly popular Synth-Pop group in the early 80s in the UK, scoring several hits including the anti-war anthem "Enola Gay". In 1998, during the band's hiatus, members Andy McCluskey and Stuart Kershaw gathered a couple of girls from Liverpool and formed a girl group named Atomic Kitten as a vehicle to circumvent the fact that Britpop (which had already begun to die out by then) had killed OMD's career. Atomic Kitten became one of the UK's most successful girl groups, scoring a double platinum-certified debut album and many hit singles, including "Whole Again", the fourth-best-selling song of all time by a girl group in the UK. Today, Atomic Kitten are one of the most beloved 90s British pop groups, while OMD has largely been forgotten about outside of Synth-Pop circles.
• Dobber Beverly was a longtime figure in the Texas death and black metal scenes and more generally underground extreme metal, but for most of his career, the grindcore band Insect Warfare was his biggest success, and even that was a moderate-at-best success. Around the beginning of the 2010s, he started a new progressive/gothic metal project to explore a different and more eclectic side of his influences, with no real expectation of anything beyond minor underground success. Oceans of Slumber instead became his biggest band by a long shot, and began to steadily pick up a bigger and bigger fanbase by the end of the 2010s that eventually made them into a solid name in progressive metal.
• Ever heard of the rock band What Is This? They released an album and two EPs in the mid '80s, but guitarist Hellel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons eventually left the group to focus full-time on their side project, a little funk rock outfit called Red Hot Chili Peppers. Of course, the full story is more complicated than that, and the Peppers would only record one album with both founding members Slovak and Irons.
• Danielle and Este Haim were originally part of the short-lived pop rock girl group Valli Girls, which had some minor success with songs featured on film and TV soundtracks (for example, they performed the extended version of "It's a Hair Thing", the theme song for Trollz). After they left the group, they formed Haim, a band with a more soft rock/R&B sound. Haim are much more popular and recognizable than Valli Girls, who faded into obscurity as soon as their 15 minutes of fame were over.
• Graduate was a little-known new wave band active in England during the late 70s consisting of then-amateur musicians. Nowadays, people are more familiar with the much more successful act founded by their two lead members - Tears for Fears.
• Innosense were a short-lived Girl Group briefly active from 1997 to 2003 whose only real success was the 2000 single "Say No More", which peaked at number 20 on the Billboard Hot Single Sales chart. They'd probably be completely forgotten today if not for the fact that one of their founding members went on to major success after leaving the group to go solo in 1997. That founding member? Britney Spears.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone originated as a single bonus episode of My Brother, My Brother and Me, but is now its own show, and more popular than MBMBAM.

Professional Wrestling

• Rey Misterio Sr. was a successful lucha libre star in his day, but his nephew and successor, Rey Mysterio Jr., has all but eclipsed him in popularity.
• IWRG, a largish and moderately respected independent federation with aspiration of grandeur, has two more popular spinoffs: Último Dragón's Toryumon, and Dragon Gate, the Japanese branch of Toryumon rebranded under a rough English translation when Dragon left. Both have at points gotten large enough for people to consider it improper to call them "independent", a level IWRG continually falls ever so short of.
• WWE NXT as a developmental brand is much more popular than it ever was as a competition.
• The Nexus was born after seven of the eight wrestlers from the first season of NXT banded together. They left a much longer lasting legacy with the stable than they did with the season, thanks to an unforgettable RAW debut. Their promise, however, was snuffed out when Team WWE's sole survivor John Cena beat the odds to singlehandedly defeat their last two members in a 7-on-7 SummerSlam match in the summer of 2010, then when Cena literally buried Wade Barrett in a pile of chairs at the main event of 2010's TLC pay-per-view. This is averted with the Nexus's splinter factions, CM Punk's New Nexus and the Corre, neither of which were nearly as popular or successful as the original Nexus.
• Pentagón Jr. (as hinted by his name) is technically a Legacy Character to the older "Pentagón" gimmick established during the 90's in Mexico's AAA, but he has completely outclassed all other 9 persons to carry the name of Pentagón. Noticeably Wikipedia has a list of all the members to bear the gimmick, but only Pentagón Jr. has a page of his own under the name "Pentagón".
• Los Ingobernables de Japon ("L.I.J." for short) originated as a Japanese offshoot of the original Los Ingobernables, a Mexican lucha libre stable that formed at CMLL in 2014; Tetsuya Naito was inspired to create his own branch of the group after he returned to New Japan Pro-Wrestling following a brief stint at CMLL as a member of the original Los Ingobernables, leading to L.I.J. becoming a powerhouse faction under his leadership. While the original Los Ingobernables are one of the most popular lucha libre stables of all time, L.I.J. have a massive fanbase in their own right, and have arguably surpassed the original group in international recognition and critical acclaim. It helps that NJPW has a considerably larger viewership than CMLL, being one of the biggest wrestling promotions in the world.
• WWE, WCW, ECW, and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling to the National Wrestling Alliance. All four promotions had been NWA territories prior to breaking from the organization: WWE (then Capitol Wrestling Corporation, the NWA territory of New England) broke from the NWA in 1963, and then again (as the World Wrestling Federation) in 1983. After the WWF left the organization, it was Georgia Championship Wrestling (of Georgia, naturally) and Jim Crockett Promotions (of the Carolinas) that represented the NWA on television. In 1988, JCP became World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after it was purchased by Ted Turner, but kept the NWA affiliation and belts until 1993. In 1994, Eastern Championship Wrestling, the Philadelphia area NWA affiliate, publicly seceded from the NWA at the NWA World Title Tournament in 1994, it was reborn as Extreme Championship Wrestling—which soon became a nationwide cult sensation. These three promotions dominated wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s, and their popularity eventually far exceeded the venerable NWA, whose importance on professional wrestling waned considerably. Total Nonstop Action was founded in 2002 as an NWA affiliatie, and brought the organization back to TV until they pulled away from the NWA two years later. After that, the NWA wallowed in obscurity until ending its role as a governing body and becoming just another wrestling promotion, albiet one with a famous name and belt. Even the newer All Elite Wrestling has a connection to the NWA, as its world title was won by eventual AEW co-founder Cody Rhodes at the 2018 All In event that lead to AEW's establishment. Although the NWA also played a very important role in North American wrestling history, its popularity and level of recognition was pretty paltry compared to the massive fanbase that WWE, WCW, and ECW enjoyed at their peaks.

Puppet Shows

• Barney and the Backyard Gang was a Direct to Video series involving a purple dinosaur named Barney and a group of children (the titular Backyard Gang) going on adventures that taught educational concepts as well as children's songs. It would have stayed obscure had the daughter of a Connecticut Public Television production executive not rented a tape from this series and watched it on loop one Super Bowl weekend, causing the smash-hit Barney & Friends series to be greenlit.
• Sam and Friends, a puppet series from the 1950's, featured the titular Sam and his team of bit players, including a character named Kermit the Frog, who later went on to star in both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Nowadays, The Muppets are beloved by millions of people across the globe, while Sam and Friends is practically unknown to all but the most expert Jim Henson aficionados.
• The Chica Show was created in 2012 as a spin-off to Sprout's then-popular programming block The Sunny Side Up Show, even featuring then-host Kelly Vrooman and Chica's mom (Mrs. C), who made occasional appearances at the time.

Radio

• A Prairie Home Companion, from Garrison Keillor's weekday morning public radio show in Minnesota, which he stopped doing in 1982.
• The Dr. Demento Show started out in 1970 as a recurring guest segment on the weekly show of another DJ named Steven Segal ("The Obscene Steven Clean"). In 1971 Dr. Demento got his own timeslot for a few months, only to be fired along with the rest of the station's on-air staff. Then after guesting again on Segal's show on a different station, Dr. Demento permanently spun off into his own show in early 1972.
• Science Friday began as a weekly edition of NPR's daily talk show Talk of the Nation, but its popularity started equaling, if not surpassing, the parent show's. Talk of the Nation was discontinued in 2013, but Science Friday is still going.
• Transatlantic Quiz was a panel game co-produced by the BBC and NBC. When it ended in 1947, the BBC adapted the format into a UK-only version, Round Britain Quiz which despite, or because of, its Nintendo Hard questions, is now the UK's longest-running quiz show and isn't likely to end any time soon.
• WFMU, a beloved eclectic listener-supported radio station in the New York City area, began as the student-run radio station at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey. Eventually the station had its own set of staffers with no connection to the college. Upsala College itself went bankrupt and closed in 1995, but the station's staff purchased the license and kept it going.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000 is much better known than Warhammer Fantasy in America, France, and Germany. Just look at how many examples on this very wiki describe elements common to both as coming from 40K! However, in the game's home country, the United Kingdom, Fantasy is still more popular.
• Dungeons & Dragons, the Trope Maker for the Tabletop RPG genre and major influence on the development of Video Games and the modern fantasy genre, began life as a supplement/spinoff of Gary Gygax's old medieval war game Chainmail and actually originally recommended that players use Chainmail to resolve combat situations. In turn, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons spun off as the more in-depth branch of the baseline D&D, but fully supplanted it from the third edition onwards, dropping the "Advanced" from its title.
• While the Monopoly board game has the most sales, its card game Monopoly Deal has the better positive reception including from those who are not fans of Monopoly in general ^note Mostly because Monopoly Deal is simpler yet entertaining, doesn't degrade from (un-)Popular Game Variants, and doesn't last several hours to complete. Notable for being one of the very few Monopoly spin-offs to still be sold in several stores years after its debut.
• BANG!: The Dice Game to the card game BANG! due to keeping the spirit and gameplay intact while removing the clutter and downtime between players.

Theatre

• The Richard Strauss opera Ariadne auf Naxos was originally written as the Show Within a Show for a Max Reinhardt production of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Strauss also composed substantial incidental music for the play, and later revised it so it too could stand on its own.
• Felix Unger was a minor character in Neil Simon's play "Come Blow Your Horn" before becoming half of The Odd Couple.

Theme Parks

• Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular has received much better reviews than the original movie and continues to be popular with tourists at Universal Studios Hollywood after more than 20 years. This popularity lead to Universal Studios having it at the parks in Japan and Singapore.

Toys

• In 1981 Hasbro released a line called My Pretty Pony, based around a 10" tall hard plastic pony doll with grooming tools, accessories and so on. In 1983 they spun off a new line of smaller, simpler, brightly colored, baggable or pocketable pony dolls called My Little Pony... which needs no further introduction (apart from noting that the franchise that it launched has, for the most part, been running ever since). My Pretty Pony was nothing like as successful, and basically died when the original 1981 production run was exhausted. The design of the second My Pretty Pony was later reused for the My Little Pony character Peachy, and ponies that were the same size as the original run were rebranded as "big" variants.
• Digimon was originally designed as a Spear Counterpart to Tamagotchi. Both series would go on to become Cash Cow Franchises in their native Japan but in the English-speaking world, Digimon has gotten a lot more attention since the original Tamagotchi toys from the 90s lost their popularity, owing to the former's line of anime series.
• You'll be hard pressed to find people who are familiar with LEGO Technic, but you'll have much better luck finding people who know about one of its spin-offs, like BIONICLE and the "Constraction" themes in general.
• Bandai's S.H. Figuarts brand of action figures aimed at adult collectors was a spinoff of their prior Souchaku Henshin series (which is where the "S.H." comes from, which now stands for "Simple Style and Heroic Action" in every SH Figuarts packaging), which were 1/12 scale figures based on various tokusatsu heroes (primarily from the Kamen Rider franchise) as their civilian selves with snap-on armor that transformed them into their powered alter-egos (hence the name of the line, which means "armor transformation" in Japanese). While Figuarts are still being made, the original S.H. series has been discontinued since 2009.
• ToyBiz's (and later Hasbro's) Marvel Legends line was originally a spin-off of their Spider-Man Classics line. 15 years later, Marvel Legends is still going strong, while Classics is long since defunct. In fact, Classics was essentially absorbed into its own spin-off, as all of Hasbro's 6" super articulated Spider-Man figures since 2014 have been released through Legends.
• Shopkins was created as the Distaff Counterpart to The Trash Pack which was decently popular when it began. Now, Shopkins is more well-known than The Trash Pack.
  • In 2019, a spin-off toyline of Shopkins called Kindi Kids was launched, featuring the Shoppies characters as kindergartners. It soon eclipsed the popularity of the Shopkins line itself, to the point where there's more Kindi Kids merchandise in existence these days than there is of Shopkins.

Video Games

• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is this to some extent to the Metal Gear series. It's not uncommon to find players who love this title in particular, but have never touched a Metal Gear game in their life due to Continuity Lock-Out and Story to Gameplay Ratio. Not to mention, shitposting of this game overtaking internet discourse after discussion of Metal Gear's themes and politics have been exhausted. Part of it has to do with the fact that until the Master Collection released, Rising was one of the two canonical Metal Gear titles to be available for purchase on modern platforms (in this case, Steam), with the other being Metal Gear Solid V. However, between the two, V suffers more from Continuity Lockout due to it directly following up on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, whereas Rising is a standalone story set after the events of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and only contains minimal references to past installments.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, started with the eponymous Final Fantasy VII, is a Cash-Cow Franchise within a Cash-Cow Franchise, consisting of multiple spinoff titles (Dirge of Cerberus, Crisis Core), mobile games (Before Crisis, Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis), short stories (Final Fantasy VII: On the Way to a Smile), animated films (Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Last Order: Final Fantasy VII), and a trilogy of games remaking the original game (Final Fantasy VII Remake, Rebirth, and a yet-to-be-titled third game). It's reached the point where it's not uncommon to find people who have only played VII and no other title in the franchise, while Final Fantasy's overall representation in Super Smash Bros. consists almost entirely of content from Compilation of Final Fantasy VII.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics was popular enough to spawn an entire subseries called the Ivalice Alliance, spanning sequels to Tactics (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Tactics A2), Gaiden Games (Vagrant Story), and even a mainline entry in the series (Final Fantasy XII) with its own Turn-Based Tactics sequel (Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings). A good amount of people go as far as to say that Tactics is their favorite game in the entire franchise outright, and it's generally considered the most popular non-mainline title in the franchise.
  • Final Fantasy XIV is the most profitable single title in the series to date, bar none. Having amassed 24 million registered users according to The Other Wiki, it would make it the most played game in the series, surpassing even VII in that regard, and is a giant moneymaker for Square Enix in general. It's reached the point where its become comparable in popularity to World of Warcraft, the other big MMO on the market, and where a sizable portion of its userbase have never touched any other Final Fantasy title.
• Dwarf Fortress is the In Name Only sequel to Toady's older RPG Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. It's more this than Sequel Displacement, though, because the original game had very little to do with what DF is now.
• Wolfenstein 3-D to Castle Wolfenstein (an overhead stealth action game) is one of the earliest and biggest examples in the medium.
• Unreal Tournament, a multiplayer-centric offshoot to Unreal, which was more singleplayer-centered.
  • The Unreal Engine, the Game Engine that was originally developed for the above games to run on, has become more well-known than its namesake game series, thanks to Epic Games' immense success in licensing it out to numerous other developers across the gaming industry.
• The Starsiege/Earthsiege series of Humongous Mecha Simulation Games has been all but displaced by the Tribes series, multiplayer FPSs with an emphasis on extremely fast-paced team objective play, jetpacks, and no HERCs in sight. After the release — and enormous popularity — of the first Tribes game, Starsiege: Tribes, the Starsiege name was dropped entirely (instead simply becoming "Tribes ______"). Then again, the series never had a particularly consistent naming scheme to begin with. Ironically, the original Starsiege series is more familiar to fans of the MechWarrior franchise, due them being Dueling Games up until 2001, when Starsiege's creators went bust.
• beatmania IIDX to beatmania. IIDX added two more buttons and more powerful hardware, and quickly eclipsed beatmania in popularity. The last beatmania game came out in 2002, whereas IIDX has seen at least one new game a year since its debut in 1999.
• Due to the much lower barriers of entry, some video games based on Warhammer Fantasy almost certainly have far more players than the tabletop games ever did (but much lower revenue), as they cost low to mid double digits of pounds or dollars whereas pretty much everyone who plays the tabletop has spent several hundred at least. To wit, Games Workshop has grossed about 2.7 billion pounds of revenue◊ on all their non-licensed products over the last three decades (most of the licensing revenue is from video games); assuming Fantasy products account for a third of that (a quite generous assumption as 40,000 is far more popular and they publish other lines besides, including Middle-earth and the quite successful Age of Sigmar) and that the average Fantasy player only spent 300 pounds on the game over their entire lifetime (any player could tell you how much of a lowball that is), that puts its total player base around 3 million people. Of which only a fraction would still be active in the 2010s and 2020s. The inhouse novels have even lower exposure than the tabletop — the revenue figures^note in by far the best year on record, Black Library sales were only worth 2.4 million pounds. Fantasy likely accounts for a third of that or less, or <0.8 million. Making yet another extremely generous assumption that Black Library averaged that figure for the last three decades, that's still only 24 million pounds of revenue for Fantasy novels, or 2.4 million copies sold at an average 10 pound price. pointing to all Fantasy novels together having only sold in the low single digit millions of copies — or less (and note that there are over 150 Fantasy novels in over three dozen series, meaning the average one has been read by very few people indeed). By contrast, at least two game series have bigger player bases than even the highballed 3 million figure despite having been out a fraction as long as the tabletop game:
  • The largest example is without a doubt Total War: Warhammer and its sequels. As of August 2021, the first game had sold 2.38 million copies and the second game 4.55 million.◊ The series had also sold several million expansion packs (Steam achievements◊ indicate that 27.4% of the second game's players bought the Tomb King and/or Vampire Coast packs, for example). Total War: Warhammer dominates online discussion about the IP as a result, despite itself being an Alternate Universe scenario. The Total War sub-series is so popular that units and characters first featured in it were inserted into the Fantasy prequel game, The Old World, which was likely created in the first place because of Total War's revitalization of the brand.
  • Vermintide and Vermintide II are in a similar boat. The first game sold well over 2 million copies (of which 2/3 on PC), while the second sold 2.92 million on PC alone◊ (and thus about 4.38 million if its ratio of PC to console sales was similar to the first game). Whatever discussion of the IP that isn't taken up by Total War is usually snatched up by Vermintide. Aside from sales figures, an easy way of confirming this is searching fan art or fan fiction website tags for Vermintide characters and comparing them to Fantasy characters who get minimal presence in Total War but are prominently featured in the tabletop and/or novels; for example, Saltzpyre versus Gotrek or Nagash. Like Total War, it also sold a large amount of DLC. Vermintide is a particularly extreme example as, in addition to being more well-known than the tabletop franchise as a whole, it's also far more so than the Warhammer: The End Times event that it's set in (said event being the territory of wargame supplements and novels that were obscure even by the tabletop's standards).
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The Super Mario series itself is this to both Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., the former of which has its own example in the form of Donkey Kong Country.
  • The Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi subseries are more popular than the original Super Mario RPG. To be fair, Square's split with Nintendo pretty soon afterward probably scuttled any potential plans to keep the game and its own particular variation of the Mario-verse fresh in people's minds.
  • The Mario Kart games have more mainstream popularity than the main platformers since Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, with Mario Kart Wii in particular actually outselling Grand Theft Auto IV in its first week alone.
  • The Super Mario Land series has one in the form of the Wario Land series, and that series itself has one in WarioWare.
  • Within the main platform series, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is this to Super Mario 3D World, having received a port on the Nintendo Switch before its parent game.
  • The ludicrously popular Super Smash Bros. series does this not only to Super Mario, but also pretty much every other franchise from which it borrows characters. In some cases, Smash accidentally leapfrogs its own source material.
• The King of Fighters:
  • First and foremost, KOF serves as this to both Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting. Apart from various differences in gameplay mechanics, this status can partly be attributed to the setting of KOF itself: an Alternate Continuity to the AoF-FF timeline operating on Comic-Book Time that features a large, rotating cast of characters with little regard for their fate in other installments. (Most notably, Fatal Fury Big Bad Geese Howard met his end in 1995's Real Bout Fatal Fury... only to appear as a member of the Boss Team alongside Krauser and Mr. Big the following year in the KOF verse.) The fact that the series periodically has Dream Match Games for the explicit purpose of bringing back everyone who was playable in the current Story Arc, regardless of if they're alive in KOF's continuity, doesn't hurt either.
  • While Psycho Soldier and Ikari Warriors don't exactly count, as those weren't fighting games, the characters ported to KOF (Ralf Jones, Clark Still, Athena Asamiya, and Sie Kensou) are much more well known for their roles in this series than in their debut games.
  • K''s partner, Maxima, was originally the main character of Robo Army, a belt-scrolling Beat 'em Up released during the Neo Geo's early years.
  • KOF's status as a sort of Crisis Crossover series for SNK renders it as this for any of the company's other games that get represented (with the exception of Metal Slug and Samurai Shodown).
• Dark Souls is essentially a sequel to Demon's Souls that only became a separate IP out of necessity due to the developers wanting to bring the game to multiple platforms, as the original IP is owned by Sony.
  • Demon's Souls itself was a spiritual successor to King's Field, an earlier series of first-person RPGs released for the original PlayStation.
• Many World of Warcraft players are unaware that the Warcraft series also has three Real-Time Strategy games, which weren't exactly slouches either (two of them were best-sellers) — World of Warcraft was just that big. A sort of a running gag among the fandom is somebody mentioning having played Warcraft III and a WoW player responding something along the lines of: "World of Warcraft 3? I didn't know there was even one sequel." In fact, out of Blizzard Entertainment's most popular franchises, Warcraft without WoW is likely the least known of the three.
  • This led to a rather hilarious April Fools joke by the staff, announcing a new game that was a RTS-style spinoff of World of Warcraft. They then went on to describe Warcraft III, as if it were an up-and-coming new game set in the World of Warcraft universe: Warcraft, Heroes of Azeroth. WHoA, to be precise.
  • Speaking of Warcraft 3, the Defense of the Ancients mod has become far more popular than the game it was built from with people having bought the game just to play DotA, inspiring both a sequel and an entire genre.
  • Many critics and bloggers mistakenly referred to the 2016 film as "an adaptation of World of Warcraft." While it does borrow a lot from the latter for aesthetic and Worldbuilding purposes, the story adapts the 1994 RTS game that started it all, Orcs and Humans.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the two following sequels, compared to the original series that was quite popular in its own day. The Sands of Time trilogy was the first successful attempt to take the Prince into 3D after the failure of 1999's Prince of Persia 3D.
• Persona:
  • The series is this to Shin Megami Tensei, especially from Persona 3 onwards. While the Shin Megami Tensei franchise is considered one of the "Big Three" alongside Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy in Japan, Persona sells far better internationally — the extreme success of later Persona games has caused the series to slowly eclipse Shin Megami Tensei in Japan as well.
  • In particular, Persona 4 turned into a Cash-Cow Franchise of its own, receiving two fighting game sequels that also featured Persona 3 characters, a dungeon-crawler Crossover with Persona 3 again, an Updated Re-release for the PlayStation Vita, and a rhythm game sequel to the two Fighting Games. Furthermore, there were two manga adaptations, two anime adaptations, a light novel Spin-Off, and two live stage productions. Well into Persona 5's release, the characters from Persona 4 also guest starred in the crossover fighting BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and even got a release on PC via Steam in June 2020, well after Persona 5 Royal was out. And then Persona 4 Golden was ported again in October 2022, this time to various home consoles (Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S) and Windows PC.^*Though its release was accompanied by Persona 3 Portable and Persona 5 Royal also being made available on all these platforms; the mainline games were previously exclusive to the PlayStation brand. To really hammer this trope home, Persona 4 was the start of where Persona slowly phased itself out as its own individual franchise divorced from Shin Megami Tensei by removing "Shin Megami Tensei" as its title.
  • Persona 5 quickly reached the same status: Within three years of its initial 2016 release, it received two manga anthologies, a rhythm game Spin-Off, a dungeon-crawler crossover with Persona 3 and Persona 4, an anime adaptation, and an Updated Re-release of the original game. These were quickly followed by a 2020 sequel^*2021 for Western territories in the form of a hack-n-slash/action RPG hybrid game developed in part by Koei Tecmo's Omega Force. If that wasn't enough, its protagonist appears as a Downloadable Content Guest Fighter in Nintendo's massively popular Platform Fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Then, after its cast had multiple guest stints in various mobile games, 2023 saw Persona 5 receive its own officially-sanctioned-by-Atlus mobile game spin-off in Persona 5: The Phantom X, along with another sequel/spin-off later that year in the Turn-Based Strategy RPG Persona 5 Tactica.
  • Downplayed, but still notable, with the aforementioned Persona 3, which received (in addition to the above crossovers) a manga of its own, several drama CDs, a five-part stage musical, a rhythm game spin-off, and — unlike its successors — a four-part theatrical adaptation. Note that most of these came long after the release of the original game, FES, and Portable, well into P4 and P5's eras of prominence. Things came full circle with, following Portable's re-release on the same eighth and ninth gen consoles as P4G and P5R, the announcement that P3 would be getting a full-on, built-from-the-ground-up remake in the form of 2024's Persona 3 Reload, basically Persona's answer to Final Fantasy VII Remake.
• Spud's Adventure was just one of several potato-themed games in the Puzzle Boy franchise (Kwirk was originally Spud before being localized as a tomato) but eclipsed the rest of them, presumably due to having a deeper story and action amidst the puzzle-solving.
• Outside of Japan, if you see somebody talking about Tokimeki Memorial, they're probably talking about one of the Otome game spinoffs. This is in no small part because they're the only games in the series to date that have a Fan Translation ^note the first two game's DS versions and the third game's PSP version. None of the "original" games, where you play as a guy and date girls instead, have complete fan translations. In the case of the very first "original" game, this is very odd, because it was the Trope Codifier for the entire dating sim genre of video games, and is famous among dating sim fans in Japan. ^note Attempts have been made to translate the very first Tokimeki Memorial game's SNES version, but they've all ended in failure until March 2022.
• The Raving Rabbids series have garnered a lot of attention than its parent series, Rayman, to the point that most people don't know about Rayman, while the Rabbids are easily recognizable for almost everyone.
• Rune Factory from the Harvest Moon series, but only in Japan. The Rune Factory was produced as a Harvest Moon spinoff, but sold so much better than most Harvest Moon games that subsequent games were spun off into their own series. The first three Rune Factory games still keep the Harvest Moon label in the West.
• Many fans of the DJMAX series seem to be unaware that there was a PC DJMAX game that preceded DJMAX Portable, or at least have only heard of it. Even more recently has DJMAX Technika been gaining popularity, becoming even more popular than Portable in areas that have Technika arcade machines.
• GoldenEye was a successful movie in the James Bond series. GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 is one of the most beloved games of all time, a triumphant aversion of The Problem with Licensed Games, and one of the games which basically made the First-Person Shooter genre into something other than Doom clones. Not to mention proving that the genre could have first-rate console titles, not just inferior ports of PC games. Many players didn't even know the game was based on a film.
• Phantasy Star was a well-received series of console RPGs, albeit a series that was consistently overshadowed by Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Phantasy Star Online went on to become more popular than the original games, being one of the Killer App games for the Sega Dreamcast.
• Heroes of Might and Magic, a Turn-Based Strategy series, has all but displaced Might and Magic, the original first-person, party-based Role-Playing Game series, even before the setting was rebooted by Ubisoft, who acquired the rights to the franchise from the bankrupt 3DO. This led to some dramatic Fan Dumb events in the form of fan backlash towards the developers upon their attempt to bring Science Fantasy elements, mainstays of the RPG series, to the spinoff, perceived by unwitting fans to be solely High Fantasy, despite taking place in the same universe as the original series. The Kreegan "demons" who inhabit the Inferno town in Heroes III are actually a Horde of Alien Locusts, for example.
• Modern Warfare, a contemporary FPS compared to Call of Duty's World War II setting.
  • Battlefield's modern-day installments (2, the Bad Company series, and 3) are similar to this, overshadowing the original Battlefield 1942 and the less-than-well-received Vietnam and 2142.
• The Puyo Puyo games were spinoffs of Compile's RPG series Madou Monogatari, using the slime-type enemies as Falling Blocks. However, the Madou games have since all but fallen off the face of the planet, due partially to the popularity of Puyo games and partially to being Screwed by the Lawyers.
• NANACA†CRASH!! is a fairly popular browser game that spawned loads of browser game clones that requires no translation to understand. CROSS†CHANNEL, the original Porn with Plot Visual Novel that inspired it, did not receive a Fan Translation until August 2009, and remains relatively obscure.
• Da Capo is a semi-popular Visual Novel series that started as a bonus scenario in Suika, which remains rather obscure.
• River City Ransom and Super Dodge Ball to Renegade, which were all part of the Kunio-kun series in Japan, but are hardly related to each other outside of having the same main character. Even in Japan, the more comical Downtown Nekketsu sub-series of Kunio games had a bigger following than the original "serious" Nekketsu Kōha games.
• The Warlords Battlecry series is a real-time spin-off of the turn-based Warlords series.
• While itself far less popular than Toby Fox's later works, there are few even among fans of The Halloween Hack who are aware of his first EarthBound hack, Arns Winter Quest, which has a much lighter, softer and more comical story about Saving Christmas - err, EB No Matsuri - and was actually referenced in the Halloweeen Hack itself.
• The Guardian Legend was a Surprisingly Improved Gaiden Game to the experimental MSX shmup Guardic, which had nonlinearity going for it but little else.
• Bloons Tower Defense is actually a spinoff of the game Bloons, a Flash puzzle game where a single monkey has to pop a set amounts of balloons by carefully aiming and throwing a set number of darts. Bloons TD became so much more popular that there are now six main games in the series and it has its own spinoff games. Meanwhile, the original Bloons is mostly forgotten, despite being quite popular back in the days.
• Monster World to Wonder Boy, which specifically spun-off from the second Wonder Boy arcade game Monster Land (Monster World was the title of the Sega Mark III version in Japan). There's a reason why the Compilation Re-release of the whole series is called the Monster World Collection and not the Wonder Boy Collection.
• Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention and its sequel, Shining Force II: The Ancient Sealing were vastly more popular than their predecessor, Shining in the Darkness. The former two were Turn-Based Strategy Role Playing Games with tons of characters, while the latter was a first-person dungeon crawler where you only controlled three characters.
• First-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D is far better known than earlier platformers Duke Nukem and II
• Ganbare Goemon was a spin-off of an obscure arcade game titled Mr. Goemon.
• Ninja Jajamaru-kun, a sort of spin-off of an earlier game called Ninja-kun, became one of Jaleco's longest-running series in Japan; ironically, more of UPL's Ninja-kun games were released internationally because Jaleco often failed to export Jajamaru-kun even when they tried.
• Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus, a Dynasty Warriors-style spin-off of the sidescrolling beat em' up main series. It sold over twice as much as the first game in the first week and almost twice as much as the second.
• Dynasty Warriors is relatively niche compared to Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors, spin-off games based around the more mainstream franchises The Legend of Zelda and Fire Emblem, which itself is more popular than many other Warriors spinoffs of other series.
• Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds is more popular in the U.S. than the fighting game it was based on, as the original localization of the original fighting game was cancelled for unknown reasons.
• The popular online Casual Game series Papa's Gameria started out as a 2006 platformer named Papa Louie: When Pizzas Attack!. Papa Louie has a sequel (in fact, has two sequels), but it's eclipsed by the fast food titles.
• Hudson Soft's Momotarou Dentetsu was a long-running digital board game series spun off Momotarou Densetsu, a shorter-lived RPG series that was essentially Dragon Quest in feudal Japan.
• The Dwarves vs. Zombies "genre" of Minecraft server was originally created for livestream-only events. As people wanted to play DvZ on their own time, they made their own clones. Years later, even with the original Dwarves vs. Zombies server having long since switched to an on-demand system, the now-outdated clones are much more popular than the heavily updated original. Part of the reason is that the official DvZ server was never really advertised, while the clones are common on Minecraft server list websites.
• In a rare inversion of The Problem with Licensed Games, the video game adaptation of X-Men Origins: Wolverine received significantly better reviews than the movie it was based on (although that was not the most popular spinoff of the film overall; see the Film section above).
• While SimCity is by far no slouch in sales, in the 2000s The Sims began eclipsing it. Many people even think the latter came first. They're both popular in their own right however more people remember the 90s Sim City games than the newer ones, while The Sims pretty much gets more popular each game.
• Bloodrayne is better-known than Nocturne (1999).
• Knytt is an extremely popular indie game franchise, but it's actually a spinoff of Within a Deep Forest. The original protagonist of the first Knytt is a nameless NPC from the first game who originally existed just to provide atmosphere.
• A strange subversion occurred with Pokémon GO. While the franchise has managed to hold on a very large and dedicated fan base throughout the years, Pokémon Go became one of the most successful video games EVER, with many people who hadn't played any video games, let alone Pokémon, playing it, despite the fact Pokémon Go was in fact a spin-off with only a few similarities to the main series games and started a new Pokémon craze as big at the one in the 90s. This might seem like it qualifies at first, but in the fall of 2016, the upcoming main series games Pokémon Sun and Moon were revealed to be the most pre-ordered games in Nintendo history, no doubt due to Pokémon Go's popularity introducing new people into the franchise. Part of the reason why Go was so popular was because it's a free mobile game, compared to the main titles which require buying a console and then the game itself.
• While the Drakengard series has a fairly decent following in Japan, more people are probably more aware of its spin-off series NieR ever since the game achieved Cult Classic status and especially after the sequel became the series' most successful game.
• Although Fallout: New Vegas was initially thought of as being just an expansion pack of Fallout 3, it is now considered to be possibly the best of the Bethesda-published Fallout games.
• The Divinity games weren't exactly unknown, just that their popularity waned pretty drastically as the 00s went on and The New '10s started. However, these days, most Divinity fans started with Divinity: Original Sin.
• The Mummy Demastered is much more beloved than the movie it was based on.
• Ensemble Stars! is the main compartment and spinoff of Ensemble Girls! and shares some connections to it through Leo and Anzu 's backstory, but due to the former's wild success, the latter was mostly regarded as its Quietly Performing Sister Show until it ended in 2018. Amongst Stars! fans, Girls! is seen as little more than background reading for the aforementioned connections, and the characters in it more or less talked about according to their role in Stars! lore (i.e. "Leo's sister" for Ruka, "Mao's inspiration" for Mai, "Anzu's friend/brother" for Suzu/the Transfer Student). The lack of a dedicated translation team for Girls! unlike with Stars! is also a big contibutor.
• Fate Series:
  • Fate/stay night was relatively well-received, but it and its various spinoffs mainly catered to a niche fandom, with game sales typically along the lines of 100k total. Then along comes Fate/Grand Order, which not only became such a moneymaker to the point Sony Music consistently cites it in investor reports since release as a primary source of profit, it managed to rocket the fanbase to Touhou Project and KanColle levels at Comiket after only a year into release.
  • The Fate series itself is this to the rest of the Nasuverse, especially after Type-Moon started putting their other works on the backburner to promote it.
• Paladins is a Hero Shooter with a respectable-sized playerbase. When its Battle Royale spinoff, Realm Royale, went public, major Fortnite streamers tried out Realm Royale because Fortnite servers were down at the time. They really enjoyed RR and the exposure caused Realm Royale's player numbers to skyrocket, sitting much higher than Paladins on Steam's top 25 most played games. Though as time went on, the numbers starting to slowy decrease from 100,000 players upon release, to ~6500 players. For comparision, Paladins has around 20,000-30,000 concurrent players. You can view the data here.
• Although Player Unknowns Battlegrounds is a relatively popular Battle Royale game, its mobile port PUBG Mobile has a larger fanbase since it's free-to-play, has user-friendly mechanics like respawning and non-verbal pinging, runs well on most smartphones and has crossovers with other properties like The Walking Dead and Arcane. It's estimated that 70% of the PUBG playerbase is on mobile.
• Fortnite's Battle Royale mode started off a side game to the main Save the World mode. Player Unknowns Battlegrounds fans flocked to the game due to PUBG's buggy launch state and price, while Fortnite was comparatively less buggy and free to play. Fortnite: Battle Royale has since eclipsed both PUBG and Save the World's popularity and is usually the first thing people think of when talking about Fortnite.
• Although both Titanfall and its sequel are critically acclaimed, they are relatively niche properties that only sold 15 million copies combined across both titles. However, the free-to-play Battle Royale Apex Legends, which is set in the same universe, garnered over 50 million unique players in just one month after release. The popularity of Apex Legends was so strong that it lead to newcomers trickling into the mainline Titanfall games with Titanfall 2 seeing its concurrent playerbase double.
• Downplayed with the Game Boy Color game Xtreme Sports. It was meant to be a companion game to the completely different Dreamcast and PC versions by Innerloop Studios, but both ended up being forgettable cash-in games, while this version became fondly remembered enough as a cult hit that WayForward eventually re-released it for the 3DS Virtual Console, as well as a subsequent Nintendo Switch port and GBC reprint from Limited Run Games.
• The Dragon Slayer series eventually dropped the "Dragon Slayer" moniker after both the Xanadu and Legend of Heroes sub-series became more popular. Legend of Heroes in particular also has one of its own with the Kiseki/Trails Series.
• The fan-made Sonic Robo Blast 2 (which itself had completely overshadowed the first installment) was modified by different developers into Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, a Mascot Racer that ended up being just as popular as the original platformer, if not more-so. In fact, the game singlehandedly broke the "Most Users" record on SRB2's forums when it was released.
• While the original version of The Idolmaster was popular in Japan, THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls eclipsed it in popularity after the anime and Starlight Stage app were released. To put this into perspective, said app often makes the ranking of highest-grossing in-app purchase games year after year, with it being the third highest-grossing game in 2018. It was also the first installment in the franchise to become popular with Western audiences thanks to Crunchyroll releasing official same-day subs for the anime series.
• In the eary '90s, Sega's AM2 division developed the Virtua series, a series of early polygonal 3D games of varying genres, for their Model series of arcade systems. Out of all the titles in the initial AM2-developed Virtua lineup, Virtua Fighter saw the greatest success among all of these titles, spawning five major installments and garnering a dedicated fanbase due to its complex gameplay and perfect balance.
• Despite early fears due to Teyon, a Polish studio previously responsible for the much-reviled Rambo: The Video Game and the Invisible Advertising (only a couple of trailers shortly before release), Terminator: Resistance ultimately proved to be more popular among Terminator fans than Terminator: Dark Fate, which it was a tie-in for, feeling Resistance was much more respectful to the series than Dark Fate, which famously opened by killing off John Connor, the crux of the series from before even he was born, and then introduced a new character with essentially the same destiny as him, making all the attempts to save his life pointless.
• Aleste started off as "Zanac, BUT ON A SEGA CONSOLE!" It then ended up spawning a much more popular series with numerous sequels and a Compilation Re-release with M2's touch, while Zanac got relegated to a single sequel with the original game as a tie-in and an average-quality Virtual Console rerelease.
• Maximum Carnage was a Spider-Man comic storyline that sold well but was poorly received for its mix of violence and silliness, along with making Venom start to wear out his welcome, and is often being considered a standout case of Marvel's Audience-Alienating Era. But it managed to avoid obscurity like other reviled events because the Maximum Carnage beat 'em up it inspired is considered to be one of the best Spider-Man games.
• GRIDD: Retroenhanced is a Continuity Reboot for a pair of forgotten mobile phone games by the same developers.
• Playground Games' Forza Horizon, an open world arcade-style racer, was initially a spin-off of Turn 10 Studios' semi-sim track racing series Forza Motorsport, which already had four well-regarded games, one on the original Xbox and three on Xbox 360, prior to the first Horizon's release. But during the Xbox One's lifespan, Motorsport's reception took a hit with Motorsport 5, which was released as a launch title for the console, as it was seen as a bit lacking in content. Horizon 2 was released to greater acclaim and success than the first Forza Horizon. Both sub-series' next games got better reception, with Motorsport 6 being seen by Forza fans as a return to form, but Horizon 3 did even better than Horizon 2 with its beautiful depiction of Australia (helped by a chillingly stellar E3 reveal trailer), to the point that it was seen as the Xbox One's Killer App. The next games after those, however, did quite differently; Motorsport 7 lost some of its goodwill thanks to some questionable decisions by Turn 10, while Horizon 4 got even more acclaim than Horizon 3 and became one of the best-selling games on the Xbox One. It has now gotten to the point that the first Forza game on the Xbox Series X|S is not the still-in-development eighth Forza Motorsport (which was announced in 2020), but Forza Horizon 5, which was revealed at E3 2021 as Xbox and Bethesda's "best for last" game during their presentation and won "Best of Show" for the 2021 E3 Awards.
• The history of Microsoft Flight Simulator dates back to 1979 with FS1 Flight Simulator for the Apple ][ and (a year afterwards) the TRS-80. When Microsoft commissioned a version for the IBM Personal Computer, their brand was applied to the game's title, and the series has been primarily known as Microsoft Flight Simulator ever since.
• The Ace Combat series as it's known actually stems from Air Combat arcade games, with the PS1 Air Combat being a reformulation with completely original content in an effort to entice PlayStation owners to buy it, rather than being a straight port of the first Air Combat arcade game like it was originally intended to be. The rest is history, and now only the most well-versed of arcade game fans even remember that the original Air Combat and Air Combat 22 exist.
• A seemingly in-universe example in Five Nights at Freddy's The original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza was a sister location for Fredbear's Family Diner, but grew to be more popular. As it was the one who got reopened and it warranted its parent company: Fazbear Entertainment, to be named after it. Although other factors may have contributed.
• Downplayed with Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, a Spiritual Successor to Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a well-received Creator-Driven Successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and has many fans, but for those who prefer the more action- and platform-oriented Castlevania games that came before Symphony of the Night, Curse of the Moon is their preferred game.
• Project SEKAI is a spinoff of the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA series that ended up being far more commerically successful, to the point where it's now considered the main Hatsune Miku game.^note Technically it's not a Vocaloid game since Project SEKAI uses songs made with the newer Newtype voicebank software, rather than Yamaha's Vocaloid software. Miku, as well as the other four (or three, depending on what one interprets Kagamine Rin and Len as) Crypton Virtual Celebrity characters, are instead referred to as "Virtual Singers". Part of this has to do with the fact that Project SEKAI is a Mobile Phone Game that's free-to-start, making it more accessible than Project DIVA which are console and handheld games with the prices associated with them (espeicially in poorer parts of the world where consoles are expensive relative to the median income).
• The first major work in the Disco Elysium universe was a 2013 novel called Sacred and Terrible Air. Self-published by the creative collective that would go on to develop the game, it sold only a thousand copies before vanishing into obscurity. Disco Elysium, on the other hand, was immediately met with widespread acclaim, eventually going on to sell almost 3 million copies on Steam alone. The game's success looped back into renewed interest in the long-out-of-print book, culminating in an English fan translation being released 10 years after its initial publication.

Visual Novels

• CLANNAD shares the same universe as Kanon and AIR, and has proved more popular than both.

Webcomics

• Friendly Hostility (Boy Meets Boy) And the creator is perfectly content if people just forgot the first comic happened all together.
• Girly, from Cute-Wendy, which was itself a more popular "alternate art style" variation of a comic just called Wendy (which the artist expunged from the internet as punishment for being awful).
• Heartstopper: Alice Oseman is primarily a YA literature author whose books focus on different characters in the same setting. For instance, Oseman's debut novel focuses on Charlie's sister, Tori, as the protagonist. Despite being in the author's secondary medium, Heartstopper has emerged as the most popular of Oseman's works.
• You can find Mulberry comics much more easily than comics from the series where Mulberry first appeared: Marin Meadow. After Peter Paltridge's GeoCities website died, he didn't bother moving the Marin Meadow comics to his current website, Platypus Comix, since he doesn't like how most of them turned out.
• Girls Next Door is a Recursive Fanfiction Spin-Off of Roommates and according to webstatistics at least twice as popular^note A regular Roommates page gets around 100-150 individual comments, 6-7000 views, 350-400 favorites in about two weeks and its author has roughly 8200 watchers, in the case of GND this is 350-400, 15-20000, 900-1000 and 20000 respectively. Probably has to do with the professional art and the less Mind Screwy story lines.
• When Shamus Young ended his run of DM of the Rings, David Morgan Mar picked up the baton and ran with it, creating Darths & Droids. Young's comic went 144 episodes. Darths ran through the first two trilogies (with no plans to stop) with over 1500 pages!
• Though it's hard to compare popularity directly, Heroes Alliance has been running longer in terms of both time and number of pages than its predecessor Heroes Unite.
• Outsiders, a spin-off of the Maddie series, has demonstrated both higher subscriber counts and viewership on Webtoons than the previous series.

Web Original

• NationStates (Jennifer Government) The game was intended to only have a few thousand players and last a few months at most. Two million accounts, 2 decades, and copious amounts of improbable world-building by the players later...
• OverClocked ReMix is so much more popular than the webcomic it spun off, even the creators have neglected the latter in favor of the former.
• The Annoying Orange. Created by Dane Boedigheimer, Orange was originally just another Gagfilms character. The company was dedicated to making various one-off comedy short films, including videos about Anthropomorphic Food, amongst others. After the first Annoying Orange video became massively popular, Dane made more videos with the character, which were still posted on his YouTube channel alongside his other Gagfilms videos. However, Orange migrated over to his own YouTube channel soon after and began uploading new episodes every week. As of 2020, The Annoying Orange continues to release weekly videos long after the main branch of Gagfilms stopped producing videos.
• YouTube user Manga Kamen originally primarily made videos revolving around My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with his commentaries known as Skull Commentaries being intended to just be one of his numerous side series with the character hosting it, Skull Kamen, not even being placed alongside his two other characters, Manga Kamen (an OC with the same name as his YouTube username) and Al Kenneth Holic (another OC who hosts a series of CinemaSins styled videos known as Al's Sins) on his channel banner. However, the majority of his most popular videos tend to be Skull Commentaries with Skull Kamen becoming even more iconic an avatar of his than the original Manga Kamen, and as a result, has made commentaries the most frequently updated type of content on his channel.
• Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This? didn't take long to eclipse the Jogwheel Originals in popularity. And in a sense of the microwaving show genre itself, that same show surpassed both Will It Blend? and dOvetastic Microwave Theater, the two shows that inspired it, in total views and subscriptions.
  • And in the same vein, the most popular videos by Jon Paula are Movie Night episodes, one of his newest series'.
• Ask Fluffle Puff. Originally a recurring gag in the now defunct Dan VS FiM blog, the pink fuzzball quickly grew in popularity. Eventually receiving her own spinoff blog, with Dan relegated to a background character.
• YouTuber "Danger Dolan" had already achieved a small amount of fame on YouTube thanks to his gaming channel The DD Guides, which he's been running since 2012. However in 2014 he decided to create a channel dedicated specifically to non-gaming related countdown videos simply called Danger Dolan, and the amount of subscribers and video views show that this second channel has already managed to eclipse the popularity of his original gaming channel.
• The "Heist" videos of Achievement Hunter's Let's Play Grand Theft Auto V were initially just a mini-series that played off the lack of real heists in Grand Theft Auto Online, but it received so much Fan Art, fan-made videos, and tropes on the overarching series' page that it overtook their Let's Play Grand Theft Auto IV "Cops 'n Crooks" videos in popularity.
• Rooster Teeth productions:
  • Red vs. Blue is hardly unpopular by any means, being the Trope Codifier of the Machinima genre. However, during the eighth season, the company hired acclaimed CG animator Monty Oum to create custom animated sequences in order to have fight scenes and character movements not possible in Halo 3 limitations. Seasons 9 and 10 continued this formula with large sections in pure animation, which became incredibly popular with fans. Spurred by the success, Rooster Teeth later created RWBY, which isn't exactly a spinoff as much as a Spiritual Successor, which has gone on to generate a massive fandom and quickly became much more popular and recognized than RvB ever was. Being fully animated without Machinima, possessing an Animesque art style with some Magical Girl Tropes, and lacking the large quantities of swearing, it had much more universal appeal, including those that might have been put off by the former series' use of Halo lore.
  • Red vs. Blue: The badly received season Zero had a spin-off, Family Shatters, where the characters were used for a non-canon meta sitcom, and which fans liked more than Zero for ditching the Actionized Sequel approach and just returning to being a comedy.
• YouTube comedy duo Mike & Gian managed to have this happen to them twice. Their original channel had few short sketches before they decided to make another channel focused on the Breakout Character, Dom Mazzetti. The channel became much more popular than their old one, which stopped being updated soon after. After another two years they created another spinoff, BroscienceLife, focused on satirizing gym and fitness culture. It quickly gained enough popularity (especially among gym and fitness enthusiasts) to surpass both channels in popularity. The Dom Mazzetti channel stopped being updated soon after.
• Rhett & Link's morning talk-show (Good Mythical Morning) has more subscribers than their actual main channel.
• What Culture Wrestling was originally just an offshoot of the WhatCulture YouTube channel, itself a branch of the WhatCulture website, but continuously grew in popularity that it overshadowed both the main channel and the website.
• Russian YouTube personality Ekaterina "Kate Clapp" Trofimova's first channel, FoggyDisaster, has about two time less subscribers than her vlog channel, which was created two years later. It helps that FoggyDisaster is not updated consistently.
• Atop the Fourth Wall is quite the respectable show and still continues to this day as Lewis Lovhaug's primary show. However, several of his observers think that his side show History of Power Rangers might actually be in higher demand overall since its "next episode" was always in crazy demand once the series got going. Despite this, Lewis (in part due to official rules from Saban and in part due to his own desires) has always made his comic book show priority over HOPR due to wanting to use official DVD's for his clips and because they're MUCH more time consuming compared to his once a week comic reviews.
• The Mysterious Mr. Enter's Animated Atrocities was meant to be a placeholder between seasons of MLP Reviews. It quickly became the favorite series of both him and his fans, to the point where he eventually put MLP Reviews on an indefinite hiatus and Animated Atrocities becoming more or less his staple show.
• Netflix's digital streaming service has long since eclipsed its original mail-based DVD rental service in popularity, to the point that many people barely remember that the streaming service was originally an optional add-on called "Netflix Instant". It doesn't hurt that the streaming site is now home to many original programs and movies (House of Cards (US), Stranger Things, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, etc.) that have brought the site into new prominence as a network in its own right. ^note  Case in point: nobody assumes that the ubiquitous "Netflix and chill" meme refers to watching DVDs delivered by mail.
• Pusheen the Cat, a franchise of webcomics, web videos, messaging stickers, etc. spun off from a webcomic series called Everyday Cute. The former gains much wider popularity and success and continues to be updated, while the latter stopped in 2011 and was eventually lost.
• Malinda Kathleen Reese's Twisted Translations (formerly known as Google Translate Sings and Translator Fails) started out as a series on her main channel, where she primarily posted non-parody song covers. The popularity of the series made her expand her entire channel to Google Translate Blind Idiot Translations.
• Strong Bad Email, originally a weekly feature of the greater Homestar Runner site, very quickly eclipsed the site's "main" content in popularity after its introduction in 2001 — it spawned many classic Internet memes and inside jokes, and even some of its own sub-series (such as Teen Girl Squad and Stinkoman 20X6). The site's DVD collections are sorted into "Strong Bad Email" and "Everything Else". In-universe, this is lampshaded to no end.
  Strong Bad: I'm Strong Bad, and you don't know it yet, but I'm the reason you're here.
  Homestar Runner: It's true.
  • One such Strong Bad Email spin-off, Trogdor, to quote an old fan site, "has found the most fame from people who do not necessarily 'know' Homestar Runner, Strong Bad and the rest", and "[The Brothers Chaps] have yet to stumble across a new character to match his popularity".
• The PONY.MOV mini-series is actually a spinoff of an Ask a Pony Tumblr blog titled Ask Jappleack. However, the former is far more well-known among the public than the latter.
• "Tex Talks Battletech" was originally a side project of Tex from the Let's Play group The Black Pants Legion, intended to showcase one of his passions outside video games. Said videos took off in the Battletech community to the point that they make up the lion's share of views for the entire channel, and Tex is considered a minor celebrity whose video persona was eventually canonized in Battletech as the fictional historian Randolph P. Checkers.
• Welcome to Mountport More people have probably heard songs from Welcome to Mountport than those from Jess and Zach's main Podcast, Offbook:The Improvised Musical.
• Jacksfilms: Yesterday I Asked You (YIAY) started as a segment in Jack's Q&A series JackAsk, where Jack would turn the tables by asking his viewers a question and collecting their answers. The premise was so popular, he spun it into its own series, and YIAY went on to become his defining series with over 500 episodes (over twice as many as its sister series), a tie-in board game, and a live tour. On the other hand, JackAsk was nearly cancelled after just over 100 episodes and generally suffered more Schedule Slip.

Western Animation

• Beast Wars will never be as famous as its predecessor, The Transformers, but fans of the franchise generally agree it's the best written/produced of them all.
• Betty Boop (Bimbo the Dog)
  • In turn, Popeye from Betty Boop. Not to mention, Popeye started as a newspaper comic that spun out of another comic, an anthology called Thimble Theater.
• Donald Duck's Classic Disney Shorts to Silly Symphonies. Donald's co-stars in both the short The Wise Little Hen and a Disney comic strip in the early '30s (featuring other barnyard animals) are basically footnotes in the duck's history.
  • Depending on when you were born and where you're living, you might associate Chip 'n Dale with the popular 1989 cartoon Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers instead of their classic cartoon appearances opposing both Donald and Pluto.
• Celebrity Deathmatch (Cartoon Sushi)
• The Simpsons started off as animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. Although Ullman was a solid hit for the then-budding FOX network, it is today almost entirely forgotten outside the context of being The Simpsons' parent show.
• Beavis and Butt-Head and Æon Flux (Liquid Television)
• Daria. Downplayed, as while everyone still remembers Beavis and Butt-Head as being a staple of MTV in the 1990s, few know that this dry humoured, satirical turning point for both female-led and geek-oriented comedy was a Spin-Off of that show. Helps that the two shows are so different and completely avert Required Spinoff Crossover. The only reference to its parent show that Daria ever makes is in the first episode, where it's mentioned that her family moved to Lawndale from Highland.
• Batman: The Animated Series was originally produced as a tie-in to the Tim Burton-directed live-action movies, with the designs of certain elements and characters (such as Selina Kyle's blond hair and The Penguin's deformed hands) being clearly influenced by the 1989 movie and its sequel Batman Returns. The show went on to spawn the DC Animated Universe, which would go on to last over a decade throghout several more shows (such as Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and Justice League), outliving the Batman film series after it took a more campy direction with the two Joel Schumacher-directed sequels (Batman Forever and Batman & Robin) that failed to attract an audience.
• Godzilla: The Series is almost universally more well liked by Godzilla fans than the American film on which the series is based due to being much more faithful to the source material.
• In the Looney Tunes franchise, the Porky Pig series gave us Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny (his appearance in the Porky Pig short was actually an early prototype called Happy Rabbit), both of which quickly eclipsed it in popularity.
  • Not to mention, the Porky Pig series itself is much more popular than the Beans the Cat series, which is virtually unknown to those who aren't a diehard Looney Tunes fan by comparison.
  • The 2003 animated series Duck Dodgers got a lot of fans from people growing up at the time. Few would know that series was a spin-off of the 1953 short Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century.
• The entire point of the animated anthology series Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon produced were specifically to invoke this trope; create a large number of shorts and greenlight the ones with the greatest audience reaction.
  • Cartoon Network's What A Cartoon! Show gave birth to Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken (which eventually gained its own spin-off in I Am Weasel), The Powerpuff Girls (1998), and Courage the Cowardly Dog^note The Courage short (The Chicken From Outer Space) originally aired on MTV's own anthology series, Liquid Television. Another short called "Larry and Steve" was picked up by Fox and became Family Guy. The show was later rebranded as The Cartoon Cartoon Show, which would spawn Mike, Lu & Og, Grim & Evil (which itself would be split off into The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and Evil Con Carne), Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?, Codename: Kids Next Door, and Megas XLR.
  • Cartoon Network's short lived Wedgies program, showcasing various shorts, ended up spawning The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.
  • What would have been the Spiritual Successor to What A Cartoon!, Cartoonstitute, ended up spawning Regular Show and Uncle Grandpa (in the latter show's case, initially Secret Mountain Fort Awesome was made based on characters from the Uncle Grandpa short, but after that show ended, a proper Uncle Grandpa show was made, with it itself serving as a more popular spin-off to Secret Mountain Fort Awesome.)
  • Nickelodeon's Oh Yeah! Cartoons gave birth to The Fairly OddParents!, ChalkZone, and My Life as a Teenage Robot.
  • The short-lived Oh Yeah! revival Random Cartoons resulted in Fanboy and Chum Chum, Adventure Time, and Bravest Warriors. Interestingly enough, Fanboy and ChumChum was the only one to remain on Nickelodeon. Adventure Time became a critically-acclaimed Cartoon Network series, while Bravest Warriors would eventually become a internet series.
  • Nickelodeon's KaBlam! (which, unlike the previous anthology series, was purely meant as a showcase for experimental animation) gave us Angela Anaconda and Action League NOW!^note The first two Action League Now shorts aired on All That, but the shorts are better associated with KaBlam!. Oddly, Angela Anaconda aired on Fox Family (now Freeform), though Nick did rerun Angela's solo series briefly in 2006.
  • Disney Channel also had their own attempt at an animation anthology show with Shorty McShorts' Shorts: the only series that resulted from it was SheZow... which only became a show several years later on The Hub.
• While the 2003 Teen Titans series was a hit for Cartoon Network and Kids' WB in its own right, the spin-off, Teen Titans Go!, has arguably seen even greater success, eventually gaining a theatrical movie. There's some infamous Fandom Rivalry with fans of the original series who dislike the Denser and Wackier tone of the series.
• Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends has overshadowed the 1981 Spider-Man series, a cartoon made specifically to get the attention of the major networks. That show has since faded into obscurity, despite actually being a strong show in its own right. (Try putting "1981 Spider-Man" through Google.) Both were actually made concurrently. However, the solo show was sold to syndication while Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was aired on network TV during the traditional Saturday Morning children's show block, so it achieved a wider audience. Also there are inconsistencies with the portrayals of some villains who overlapped both shows, so calling one a sequel to the other may not be accurate.
• WordGirl began as a series of shorts on Maya & Miguel before becoming its own series, which ran for eight seasons (130 episodes) and gained a fairly large Periphery Demographic. On the other hand, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who remembers Maya and Miguel.
• Space Ghost is an example of a show that started a spinoff chain reaction. It was just one of many old Hanna-Barbera series that ended up on Cartoon Network. Then someone made a talk show out of it, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which was actually fairly popular and led to more spinoffs.
  • The first of these, Cartoon Planet was Coast to Coast reinvented as a Framing Device for the Turner cartoon library, keeping the personalities established in Coast to Coast. Cartoon Planet was more popular in its day, though not as long-lasting as Coast to Coast, and its version of Brak became the centerpiece of the [adult swim] acid trip The Brak Show.
  • Coast to Coast's second spinoff featured Moltar, another Space Ghost villain, broadcasting action cartoons from the Ghost Planet. Toonami was a massive smash hit that eclipsed all the other descendants of Space Ghost, with its amazingly high production values and resurrection of several syndicated anime and Western Animation action series. While it was later retooled to get away from its Space Ghost roots, ditching Moltar and replacing him with TOM, it remains a genuine icon of today's pop culture and the most popular spinoff of this family yet. In late 2015, a Shout-Out was made to the block's roots, with TOM's spaceship being destroyed and his escape pod landing at what appeared to be Moltar's old studio on Ghost Planet, which TOM promptly reactivated to broadcast anime once again.
  • The third one is Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Originating from an unfinished SGC2C episode called "Baffler Meal", the trio of Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad proved to be very popular, that it became one of Adult Swim's flagship shows during the 2000s.
• Doubles as an animated film example: The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius is much more popular than the movie it spun off of, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, to the point that many people thought the movie was a spin-off of the series instead of the other way around.
• Noddy's Toyland Adventures can be considered this. While the other attempts to bring Noddy to TV in the United Kingdom were only mildly successful at best, this adaptation made Noddy a household name in the United Kingdom and was one of the most popular British children's shows of the 90's.
  • Overseas, Make Way For Noddy is considered this to all of the older Noddy series (including the Importation Expansion The Noddy Shop), especially in Portugal, where it was massively popular, and the United States, where it was a staple program of PBS Kids Sprout.
• Legend Quest also doubles as an animated film example. A lot of English speaking fans of Legend Quest didn't realize it was a spin-off/reboot of a Mexican film series, and fewer have gone back and watched the original films.
• In 1998, a pilot for a Cartoon Network show called Kenny and the Chimp was aired, called Diseasy Does It. Among the planned recurring characters had the show gotten greenlit were five children called "those Kids Next Door". The executives themselves thought they were the more interesting characters and greenlit a second pilot starring them, which proved to be the more popular of the two shorts and eventually got the go-ahead to become a full series. Codename: Kids Next Door would go on to run for six seasons and is considered one of the best Cartoon Network shows of the early 2000s, while Kenny and the Chimp merely exists as the last segment of the show's first episode, which is also the only episode of the cartoon that uses a Three Shorts format.
• The 1989 Aardman Animations series Lip Synch produced two:
  • Ident featured a then unnamed character who became Rex the Runt.
  • The Oddball in the Series Creature Comforts spun off into a series of advertisements for the Electricity Boards, which became massively popular and acclaimed. A full television series followed some years later.
• Count Duckula is more popular and better known internationally than its parent show Danger Mouse and has a more prominent influence in pop culture. In fact, a lot of people probably don't know that it is even a spin-off of an obscure 80s cartoon if they don't read Wikipedia. It helps that the character has nearly nothing to do with his Danger Mouse counterpart other than name and somewhat similar look, and that it never had the Required Spinoff Crossover.
• While Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was a big hit, the animated spin-off Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood has become even more popular than the show it was based off of in the past decade, possibly thanks to the parents of the American kids who watch the show growing up with it, that the show is highly praised by many people for its lessons and the fact that it is the first official release of something related to Mister Rogers outside of North America. The popularity of Daniel Tiger lead to renewed interest in the original series, causing PBS to return reruns to their schedule and greenlight another spin-off involving Mister Rogers characters in 2020, this time involving puppets.
• Pinky and the Brain became so iconic most people forget it was a spinoff of the umbrella series Animaniacs.
• Woody Woodpecker first appear in an Andy Panda short. While Andy Panda is mostly forgotten, Woody Woodpecker is still considered a cult classic among cartoon fans.
• Professor Owl and his students from Adventures in Music Duology are more remembered for their appearances in the 1980s to 90s entries of the Disney Sing-Along Songs VHS series by children of the '80s and '90s better than the animated shorts that Professor Owl and his students came from.
• Doubles as an animated film example: while the Madagascar movies were somewhat of a success, they each have their own Broken Base about which one is the best/least bad one, with the series as a whole being seen as So Okay, It's Average. You won't find anyone badmouthing The Penguins of Madagascar, with many praising it for its witty humor, excellent use of pre-established characters, and cohesive storytelling. Same applies to All Hail King Julien, althought to a lesser degree.

Real Life

• Apple first developed Safari by forking the KHTML engine, created as part of the KDE Desktop Environment for Linux, into its own engine called WebKit, which quickly overtook the original in popularity due to macOS's larger install base than Linux. Later on, Google began development of its own broswer, Chrome. At first they used standard WebKit, but eventually they forked it to create another engine called Blink. Since Chrome was Multi-Platform, unlike the aforementioned Safari and KDE, as well as the default browser on Android (which eventually displaced Microsoft Windows as the most widely used operating system in the world) it eventually became the most popular browser in the world by far. Many other browsers (such as Microsoft Edge) would eventually abandon development of their own rendering engines in favor of simply using Blink, making Google's engine much more popular than its predecessors by a longshot.
• The premium cable network Starz, in that the older network in the equation, Encore, has been completely subsumed into the Starz multiplex, to the point that it was renamed as "StarzEncore" in 2016.
• UNLV (University of Nevada, Las Vegas-founded in 1957) is larger and more famous than the original University of Nevada in Reno (founded in 1874). Although the latter's official name is now "University of Nevada, Reno" they've taken to billing themselves as "Nevada" in athletics and other events to emphasize that they were first (though the state of Nevada recognizes both campuses as flagship schools).
  • Something similar happened in Alaska—the University of Alaska's original Fairbanks campus (officially University of Alaska Fairbanks; founded 1917, opened for classes in 1922) bills itself as "Alaska" in athletics although the Anchorage campus (University of Alaska Anchorage; traces its history to 1954, but operated solely as a two-year college until 1969) is larger. However, Alaska recognizes only Fairbanks as its flagship school.
• While on the subject of American higher education, there are several examples of this phenomenon within college sports conferences, generally overlapping with "Screw This, I'm Outta Here!"
  • One of the country's first athletic conferences was the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, founded in 1894 by a group of schools in that region with play starting the next year. It steadily grew over the next couple of decades until a dispute over athletic eligibility of freshmen (first-year students) led to a split. Eight of the largest SIAA schools left in 1921 to form the Southern Conference (SoCon), joining with six other non-SIAA schools. The next year, the SoCon lured six additional SIAA members, and the SIAA became a de facto small-college conference before disbanding in 1942. In the next 30-odd years, the SoCon would be on the receiving end of this trope twice...
    • First, in 1932, the SoCon split along geographic lines when the 13 members located west and south of the Appalachian Mountains left to form the Southeastern Conference (SEC). The SoCon, which still had 10 members, mostly large and public, continued to thrive. However, in 1936, it added seven relatively small private schools, leading to more than a decade of conflict between large and small schools.
    • Said conflict finally came to a head in the early 1950s, and in 1953, the large public schools (plus the private but ridiculously wealthy Duke and Wake Forest) left to form the Atlantic Coast Conference.
    • Fast forward to today. The SoCon still operates, but dropped to the second level of NCAA Division I football, now known as FCS, in 1982, and is clearly a "mid-major" conference. The SEC and ACC, by contrast, are two of the so-called Power Five Conferences in college football's top tier, Division I FBS.
  • The Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a league formed in 1907 by Midwestern and Great Plains schools, experienced two decades of conflict along public–private school lines. In 1927, six of the seven state schools left, with both factions claiming the MVIAA name for a time. The departing schools eventually called themselves the Big Six Conference, with the schools that stayed becoming the Missouri Valley Conference. While the MVC remained a respectable conference, the Big Six, which later became the Big Seven and Big Eight, greatly surpassed it in status. The MVC dropped football in 1986, though several of its current members now play FCS football in the closely related Missouri Valley Football Conference. The Big Eight became one of the most powerful college leagues, and in the mid-1990s picked up four members from the collapsing Southwest Conference (SWC) to form a new league under a new charter: the Big 12 Conference, now another of the Power Five leagues. (Which now has 14 members and will have 16 in 2024, but that's for another trope.)
  • A similar situation to the Southern Conference has been going on for the last century in the interior West.
    • The Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference was formed in 1909, ultimately encompassing schools in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana. By 1937, the aforementioned issues of budgets and player eligibility led seven of the RMAC's schools^note Brigham Young (BYU), Colorado, Colorado A&M (now Colorado State), Denver, Utah, Utah State, Wyoming to break off and form the Mountain States Athletic Conference, which later became known as the Skyline Conference. The Skyline became a respectable second tier league, with some membership shifts over the decades. Meanwhile, the RMAC declined in prominence and is now an NCAA Division II conference. By 1962, though, there was another big philosophical split among the Skyline schools, so several members^note BYU, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming joined with discontented members of the neighboring Border Conference^note Arizona, Arizona State to form the Western Athletic Conference.
    • The Skyline and Border leagues disbanded, but the WAC added more members and by The '90s had become a prominent conference, though not quite at the level of leagues like the SEC, ACC, Big Ten or Pac-10. With the collapse of the SWC, the WAC saw a chance to stake a claim to major status. In 1996 it expanded from 10 schools to 16.^note (huge breath) Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, Fresno State, Hawaii, New Mexico, San Diego State, San Jose State, Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV), Rice, Southern Methodist (SMU), Texas Christian (TCU), Texas-El Paso (UTEP), Tulsa, Utah, Wyoming Big. Mistake. The new WAC was arguably the most unwieldy conference in NCAA history, as it spanned nearly 4,000 miles and four time zones.^note Central, Mountain, Pacific and Hawaii. Technically Alaska would count as the fifth time zone in the footprint, but no Alaska schools were in the conference. University of Hawaii was two hours behind the West Coast, and two more hours behind the easternmost members. On top of that, Hawaii doesn't use daylight time, meaning that for much of the year, it was five hours (!) behind the easternmost schools. The "WAC 16" was not only sprawling geographically, but a jumble of different institutional profiles: state flagship schools, land-grant schools, overgrown normal schools (founded as teachers' colleges), one overgrown mining college, state-run commuter schools, one federal service academy, and private colleges both small and large, all standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
    • Fed up with all this, after just two years five old-line members^note Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, Utah, Wyoming met in Denver and decided to go the Skyline/WAC route and form a new conference, eventually recruiting two more old-line members,^note New Mexico, San Diego State plus 1996 arrival UNLV, to form the Mountain West Conference (MW), which began play in 1999. Today, the MW is one of the better leagues in FBS football's Group of Five Conferences, though two of the charter members have left (Utah for the Pac-12, and BYU as a football independent and the West Coast Conference in other sports, with BYU much later moving on to the Big 12 and Utah set to follow suit in 2024). As for the WAC, it muddled along until its members became targets for leagues seeking to survive the conference realignment cycle of the early 2010s. It dropped football after the 2012 season, and only began to recover some semblance of stability in the early 2020s... or so it thought.
    • After the conference added four schools in July 2021 and reinstated football, this time at the FCS level, with another school set to join a year later, it looked like things might finally settle down. The four schools that joined in 2021 were all from Texas, previously home to two WAC members, and the 2022 entry was from Utah, also home to two pre-2021 members (with one of them less than an hour's drive from the newcomer). And even though the revived WAC football league started with single-sport members in the very non-Western states of Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky, those schools were only in WAC football to give it enough members to qualify for an automatic bid to the FCS playoffs, and left in 2022 when their home conference started its own FCS football league.
    • But then Oklahoma and Texas announced in 2021 that they would leave the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference no later than 2025 (eventually confirmed for 2024), leading to a cascading series of realignments that eventually touched the WAC. New Mexico State, which had joined in 2005 (making it the longest-tenured WAC member at that time), and Sam Houston, which was one of the four 2021 entries, announced it would leave for Conference USA in 2023. The WAC didn't stand still, poaching (football-sponsoring) Southern Utah from the Big Sky Conference and bringing back non-football UT Arlington, which had been a WAC member for one year during the 2010s realignment cycle. However, WAC football suffered three body blows in mid-2022. First, Lamar, another one of the four 2021 entries, announced it would return to its former home of the Southland Conference in 2023. Next, Incarnate Word, another football school out of Texas that had announced it was joining the WAC in 2022, backed out of that move and stayed in the Southland Conference. Finally, Lamar accelerated its return to the Southland Conference to 2022.
    • All this led to the WAC merging its football conference with that of the ASUN Conference ahead of the 2023 season, with the football entity operating as the United Athletic Conference. The two conferences were partners in a football alliance that operated in 2021 and 2022; the aforementioned 2021 football-only members in Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky were all full ASUN members.
• The operating system Ubuntu, which started out as a fork of the older Debian distribution, managed to become one of the most popular Linux distributions, to the point where it has quite◊ a few forks of its own.
• Linux as commonly understood is a combination of Linux kernel with various software and libraries, some from the GNU Project. GNU Project's attempt at developing their own kernel stagnated due to Linux's success, and they were quite annoyed that the combination is popularly known as Linux, instead of their preferred GNU/Linux. In a way, Linux is also this with the popularity of Android and Chromebook in the consumer device market since while they carry the Linux kernel, most user doesn't know about it nor care to try using Linux on their own PC.
• Wikipedia is extremely popular with numerous articles in multiple languages while its predecessor Nupedia was closed down within a few years of Wikipedia's formation.
• This site, which spun off from a thread from Buffistas.org.
• In the 1920's, General Motors launched their Companion Make Program which introduced smaller divisions within Oakland, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac to close price gaps between the makes. The companion makes all ended up failing... except for Oakland's: Pontiac, which outlasted Oakland by seventy-five years and was only chosen over Buick for shutdown because Buick's so popular in China.
• The AK-47 is one of the rarest guns in the world. Surprised? The ones you are seeing in the hands of Iraqi insurgents or Somali pirates are AKM's, a version of the AK-47 that was improved and made easier to mass produce and the one that eventually saw mass popularity in both Warsaw Pact armies and Soviet client states.
  • While much more extensively modified than AK-47 variants, the M16 emerged from the attempt to create a lighter, more controllable version of the M14. The M14 is now largely relegated to reservist and ceremonial roles, while the M16 is among the most recognizable firearms ever created.
  • On the topic of the M16, the M4 was understandably created as a carbine variant of it, with the target buyers being special forces and other specialist roles. The M4 eventually took over the M16 as the US military's preferred service rifle, and its semiautomatic version found a huge audience in the civilian market as well.
  • The G3 came into existence primarily because West Germany wanted their standard rifle to be locally produced but Fabrique Nationale wouldn't let them do so with the FAL that everybody else was using (the fact that Germany had invaded Belgium and seized the FN factory twice in 25 years probably had something to do with that decision). So they chose to license-produce the Spanish-made CETME as the G3. Today, the G3 is, along with the FAL, one of the most popular battle rifles in the world, while the CETME is little-known. ^note The one notable exception is the American civilian firearms market, where parts kits and technical assitance were widely exported by Spain. Even domestically made copies are based of the orginal CETME specs rather than the G3, which a comparitvly rare collector item in the States. If you want to sound in the know to American gun enthusiasts, you'll even call this family of rifles the "the CETME pattern" rather than the G3.
• The fast food chain Carl's Jr. got its name because its founder, Carl Karcher, originally opened it as a smaller version of his restaurant Carl's Drive-In Barbecue. ^note  Karcher wasn't actually named "Carl Jr." His father's name was Leo. The name became a bit ironic when Carl's Jr. became a major restaurant chain in the western half of the US, while Carl's Drive-In Barbecue remained obscure.^note The parent company of Carl's Jr. also owns Hardee's in the eastern half of the US, which has essentially the same menu.
• Panda Express is a scaled down fast-food version of the fairly upscale Panda Inn. Panda Inn is itself a chain, but it's a VASTLY smaller one — six locations, all in California, compared to Panda Express and its 1600+ locations across the US and even internationally.
• Famitsu, the famous Japanese video games magazine which began as far as 1986, was spunoff from a column in LOGiN, a Japanese PC gaming magazine that began only a few years earlier. LOGiN would ceased publication in 2008, while Famitsu is still ongoing to this day, having amassed over 1,500 issues and still counting.
• Microsoft Windows:
  • Microsoft Windows was originally an add-on program for MS-DOS, eventually merging with the text-based OS and finally replacing the DOS kernel when NT was released^note albeit only in business-oriented versions until Windows XP made versions of the more stable NT line available to home users, with the DOS-based 9x line discontinued as a result to form a stand-alone operating system.
  • Windows NT is one to OS/2, which was originally a joint venture between Microsoft and IBM to create a next-generation operating system to suceed MS-DOS. However, the success of early versions of Windows, Creative Differences between Microsoft and IBM, and lukewarm reception to OS/2's early releases convinced Microsoft that they'd be better off developing a new OS on their own, which resulted in the creation of Windows NT. IBM would continue to work on OS/2 to little success.
  • Windows 2000, along with Windows XP and beyond, are actually part of the Windows NT line of Windows operating systems originally designed for workstations and servers, with the complementary Windows 9x line being focused on the average consumer; Microsoft simply chose to remove the "NT" branding from 2000 onwards. When Windows ME was released after 2000 as part of the 9x lineup, it was received extremely poorly due to its poor stability and killed off the Windows 9x line and DOS for good, leading to the NT line becoming the new main Windows branch from Windows XP onwards.
• Sun Microsystems started as a workstation maker that ended up developing or acquiring popular software outliving the company acquisition by Oracle.
  • Java, as its installer and website frequently remind you, is installed on billions of devices, far outnumbering total workstations ever made by Sun. Sun wisely changed their stock ticker symbol to JAVA and rebranded some of their products with the Java moniker in an attempt to ride the brand recognition.
  • The modern LibreOffice is a fork of the discontinued OpenOffice.org (not to be confused with Apache OpenOffice which is another fork with barely any development) which in turn was Sun's attempt to improve the adoption and development of their StarOffice acquisition, hoped to be the Killer App for their workstation.
• Firefox is the biggest browser that doesn't use the Chromium engine, briefly threatening Internet Explorer domination before Chrome took that throne. The browser is actually spun off from Mozilla Suite out of concern about bloat, the suite, in turn, was Netscape's open-source attempt to improve their browser.
• Acorn Computer had a good run with their BBC Micro, and while trying to expand the successor's Archimedes capability they ended up with the ARM architecture. Apple's interest in adopting ARM for their upcoming Newton PDA led the ARM division to be spun into its own company since Apple didn't want to rely on a competitor in the desktop computer market. Acorn is defunct, Archimedes and Newton were considered innovative but never sold well enough, yet it was ARM that ended up dominating pretty much every mobile computing device and advancing on the desktop & server market. Ironically, selling their ARM shares was part of what kept Apple afloat, and today all of Apple's devices are powered by ARM chips, so not only ARM outlived Acorn, it saved and helped Apple to regain their glory.
• Midwest FurFest, an annual Furry Fandom convention held in Chicago, started as a spinoff of a now-obscure science fiction convention called Duckon. The two were split in 2000 and MFF grew to become one of the two biggest furry conventions in the US (it surpassed Anthrocon in 2017 to become the world's largest furry con, and the 2018 incarnation became the first furry con to surpass 10,000 attendees), while Duckon gradually petered out due to lack of interest.
• Target was originally started in 1962 as the discount store subsidiary of the Twin Cities-based department store chain Dayton's. By the 1980s, it began to eclipse the company's other stores in sales. In 2000, the entire company changed its name to the Target Corporation and sold off all its other brands to other companies, leaving just Target.
• The discount clothing and home-goods chain T.J. Maxx started out as a subsidiary of Zayre, a New England-based competitor to Kmart. The stores typically sold close-out merchandise from the bigger chain. In the late 1980s, the company sold its flagship Zayre brand to its rival Ames, and selected to rename itself TJX Companies and put its focus on expanding TJ Maxx. Since then, TJ Maxx and its sister store Marshalls have become ubiquitous in strip malls around the United States, and no one really remembers Zayre anymore.
• Speaking of Kmart, while the company's American side is a near-legendary victim of corporate mismanagement, Kmart Australia^note a now completely independent entity that also governs its New Zealand locations is still going strong.
• DreamWorks is now better-known as an animation company than a would-be conglomerate with animation being one of its assets. It helps that after DreamWorks Animation was spun-off from DreamWorks SKG in 2004, the DreamWorks trademarks were part of the deal.
• F. W. Woolworth Company (Woolworth), an American five-and-dime chain, went under in 1997, and its stores are largely forgotten by anyone who wasn't old enough to have shopped at one. However, the Woolworth company owns many other retail chains that they kept and remain popular to this day, including the athletic footwear and apparel chains Foot Locker and Champs Sports, to the point they are now known as Foot Locker, Inc.
• The Limited was a popular mall clothing store chain in the 1980s and 1990s, and parent company Limited Brands owned a myriad of sister chains. By 2002, however, it had begun to fall out of favor, and was sold off to another owner before finally closing in 2017. The parent company, since named L Brands, has kept going with its two remaining brands, Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, both of which have surpassed The Limited in popularity. Former Limited subsidiaries that have remained more popular in the long run are Abercrombie & Fitch, Lane Bryant, New York & Company (formerly Lerner New York), Justice (formerly Limited Too), and Express/Express Men (formerly Limited Express and Structure, respectively), although none of them are still under the same ownership.
• Converse's "classic" black design of their Chuck Taylor All-Stars (or "Chucks" for short) are this for the shoe's much older white design; the black design was first unveiled in 1949, well over a decade after the white variation was first made available. ^note  Technically speaking, the white and black versions are both much more famous than Chuck Taylor's original basketball sneakers, which were fairly utilitarian shoes made from brown canvas. Converse has experimented with several designs over the years, but the black one is the most popular and iconic by far. However, the red variant also received a huge Colbert Bump thanks to Doctor Who's Tenth Doctor including them as part of his standard outfit.
• There was a longstanding pizza joint in the college town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, called DomiNick's, named after its founder, Dominick DeVarti. In 1960 the Monaghan brothers, Tom and Jim, bought it, but kept the name. Within a few years, they'd acquired two other local pizza places and wanted to turn DomiNick's into a chain, but DeVarti wouldn't let them use the name. Instead, one of the Monaghans' employees suggested changing the name slightly to Domino's Pizza. Shortly afterwards Jim sold his share in the business, and Tom eventually expanded the operation beyond Washtenaw County. Now it boasts 17,000 locations in 84 countries.
• Twitch was founded as a spin-off of Justin.tv dedicated to gaming content, unlike its parent website which was much broader in its offerings. Twitch very quickly overtook Justin.tv in popularity, to the point where the latter shut down in 2014. Twitch today is among the biggest streaming sites in the world, with it notably also having a sizeable amount of non-gaming content of the kind that Justin.tv used to have, bringing things full-circle in a way.
• You likely haven't thought much about Kutol, a manufacturer of cleaning and hygiene products, but you have absolutely heard of Play-Doh, a product which spun off from an attempt by Kutol to manufacture a wallpaper cleaner. The company's marketing team noticed that the clay-like substance was popular with children, and created a separate company to market it as a toy. Play-Doh today lives on, and no longer has any relation to the company that invented it.
• Kohl's originally began in 1962 as the department store subsidiary of Milwaukee-based supermarket chain Kohl's Food Stores. The two chains were co-owned until 1983^note co-founder Herb Kohl had already stepped down in 1979, and would go on to become a U.S. senator and own the Milwaukee Bucks, when the Kohl's supermarket chain was sold to A&P (and subsequently closed in 2003), while the Kohl's department store chain, which at the time was just starting to expand beyond Wisconsin, has grown into a national chain with 1,100 stores and counting.
• This has happened a number of times in the history of aircraft:
  • The Lockheed L-188 Electra was the first American turboprop airliner, designed as a "backup" in case the first generation of passenger jets failed to deliver on their promises. However, the Electra was regarded as unsafe, with an inherently flawed design, and very few were ordered. It would be regarded as little more than a footnote today were it not for the fact that it was developed into the P-3 Orion, one of the greatest anti-submarine planes of all time.
  • The Antonov An-12, the workhorse of the Soviet Air Force and one of the most versatile cargo planes in the world, started out simply as a military version of the An-10 airliner. The An-10 was built only in small numbers and withdrawn due to a bad safety record, but the An-12 remains in service around the world to this day.
  • The Cessna 172 Skyhawk, the best-selling airplane of all time, was originally just a version of the established Cessna 170 with nose-mounted landing gear and a more powerful engine. The 172 quickly eclipsed the 170 in sales, and is still in production today after more than 70 years, whereas the 170 has been out of production since 1956. Over 44,000 Cessna 172s have been built, compared to 5000 or so 170s.
• The word "Dollar" comes from the Kingdom of Bohemia's "Thaler". None of the nations that accepted the original Thaler still use it; Czechoslovakia replaced Bohemia's prior currencies with the Koruna, which is still the Czech Republic's currency today. Instead, many other Dollar currencies around the world have become far more recognisable and widely-used up to the present day, with the fact that it originates from Czechia being an obscure factoid.
• The popular Southern US-based fast food chain Chick-fil-A originated when its founder S. Truett Cathy began licensing his chicken sandwich recipe for sale to numerous eateries throughout Georgia—most notably Waffle House. The sandwich's popularity eventually led him to withdraw it from sale at other eateries so that he could sell it directly via his own restaurant chain. Today, Chick-fil-A is a considerably larger and more lucrative business than most of the places that formerly sold its sandwich, having long since dwarfed even Waffle House in size and revenue.
• Pop-up costume chain Spirit Halloween started out as a marketing gimmick by San Francisco dress shop owner Joseph Marver, who had the idea of swapping out all of their usual offerings with Halloween costumes around the fall season. That side of the business took off, and the original dress shop was closed to focus on Spirit Halloween.
• American Top Team (ATT) is one of the largest and most succesful Mixed Martial Arts camps in the world. It started as a North-American version of the Brazilian Top Team (BTT), which at the time (early 2000s) it was one of the top gyms in the world. One of BTT's co-founders, Ricardo Libório, together with former BTT and Carlson Gracie black belt Marcus Silveira and American entrepreneur Dan Lambert decided to found their own version of BTT in the States. Although it should be noted ATT was not an official branch of BTT. In the late 2000s BTT started to lose relevancy as PRIDE Fighting Championships (at the time, the world's top MMA promotion) closed down most of their fighters went to found their own gyms or join ATT, while ATT became a champion factory and came to dominate the UFC.

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