In 2010 Mike Bithell was a designer at Blitz Games, one of a big team, and he was watching other people’s games. “I’d been in the game industry for about three years,” he told Edge. “I was a guy making stuff in a big team, and that story of one or two people making something on their own was very attractive.” He went home and, in his evenings and weekends, taught himself to program. The result, Thomas Was Alone, a platform game about a group of coloured rectangles, came out in 2012.
Bithell had seen what Edge called “the explosion that was happening in the indie scene”. For a few years from 2008, games made by one, two or a handful of people sold to hundreds of thousands of players, won awards and were written about as seriously as the work of big studios. Wireframe, looking back on the decade, dated it from Braid, the 2008 game that “helped pave the way for the indie renaissance”. This entry covers those years. The longer history of independent games, back to the mail-order programmers of the early 1980s, is in Indie games.
Fast facts
- When: from about 2008 to the middle of the 2010s.
- Where the games were sold: Xbox Live Arcade and its cheaper sibling Xbox Live Indie Games, Steam, Apple’s App Stores, and later Sony’s PlayStation stores.
- Tools: Game Maker, and Unity, free from October 2009.
- Money: download sales, pay-what-you-want bundles and, from 2012, crowdfunding on Kickstarter.
- Games of the time include: Braid (2008), Spelunky (2008), Super Meat Boy (2010), Limbo (2010), Minecraft (finished 2011), Fez, Hotline Miami (2012), Thomas Was Alone (2012), Shovel Knight (2014).
Games without a box
Download services made the difference. Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade, Valve’s Steam and Apple’s App Store sold small games with no disc, box or shop, and a game made by two people could sit on the same menu as one made by two hundred. Jonathan Blow’s Braid, a puzzle-platform game about rewinding time, was an Xbox Live Arcade hit in 2008. Playdead’s Limbo, a monochrome platform game in which a small boy dies again and again in traps and is chased by a giant spider, was “a widely lauded title that helped to cement the value of downloadable games on console platforms”, in Edge’s words. Super Meat Boy, the work of two people, Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen, sold more than a million copies in less than two years; Wireframe called its success on Xbox Live Arcade the moment that “crystallised a new era of small, independently made games that could find a mass audience”.
Getting onto those stores was not easy. “Steam is the Holy Land for indies,” the designer Randy Smith wrote in Edge in 2012. “It’s notoriously hard to get into, but epically rewarding if you do.” Microsoft’s cheaper Xbox Live Indie Games service was built for hobbyists. James Silva of Ska Studios told Edge in 2010 that he was “completely charmed by the concept of an official platform for bedroom coders to be able to put games on a console”, but the magazine found that games on all the smaller download services struggled to be noticed. Valve opened its doors a little in August 2012 with Steam Greenlight, which let players vote on which games Steam should sell, for a one-off fee of $100. Smith described it as combining “the unpoliced opportunity of Apple’s App Store with the democracy of Kickstarter”.
Tools anyone could afford
The new games were cheap to make as well as to sell. Derek Yu made the first Spelunky, released free in December 2008, with Game Maker. Unity made its basic version free in October 2009; two students told Edge in 2011 that their prize-winning game GLiD had started “with Unity, because I found out it was free”. Bithell built Thomas Was Alone in Unity too, and his folder for it, he said, was still called “Teaching Myself Unity”.
The developers become the story
The developers themselves became famous. James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot’s documentary Indie Game: The Movie, paid for on Kickstarter, followed Team Meat finishing Super Meat Boy and Polytron showing Fez in public for the first time in four years, with Jonathan Blow talking about Braid. It won an editing award at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012, and HBO and the producer Scott Rudin took it up to adapt for television. “These are extreme stories,” the film-makers told Edge. “A lot of indie games get made without the drama that you see in this film.”
By 2013 the console makers were competing for these developers. Sony made a point of inviting them onto its PlayStation platforms. “I think indies are moving to Sony’s platforms for one simple reason: because they asked us,” Bithell told Edge. Shahid Ahmad, whose small team in London had signed Hotline Miami and Spelunky for the PlayStation Vita, said his biggest success had been getting the industry, “particularly the indie community”, “so firmly behind PlayStation”.
Players as backers
In February 2012 Tim Schafer’s Double Fine asked players on Kickstarter for $400,000 to make a point-and-click adventure. By the end of the campaign 87,142 backers had pledged $3,336,371. Edge called crowdfunding “gaming’s latest gold rush”, and others followed. Yacht Club Games asked for $75,000 in 2013 and raised $311,502 for Shovel Knight, a new game in the style of a NES platformer. In 2015 Koji Igarashi, the former producer of Konami’s Castlevania games, raised $5,545,991 for Bloodstained.
An echo of the 1980s
The comparison with the home computer years was hard to miss. Like the bedroom coders of the early 1980s, the new developers were often one or two people, selling directly to players, and many of their games went back to old forms: Spelunky to the roguelike, Shovel Knight to the 8-bit platform game. One company spanned both eras. Team17, which grew out of a public domain software library in the Amiga years, went back to publishing other developers’ games in 2013, and by 2019 Wireframe was calling it “a British indie publishing powerhouse”.
Too many games
Success brought crowding. Valve replaced Greenlight with Steam Direct in 2017, letting any developer put a game on Steam for a fee of $100. In 2019 Haley Uyrus, marketing manager at Mediatonic, wrote in Wireframe that indies faced a store where “over 200 games release each week on Steam alone”, while big publishers’ games were filling the streamers’ schedules and the quiet release months that small games had relied on. “Is this the dreaded ‘indiepocalypse’ everyone’s been talking about?” she asked. Her answer was more marketing. Independent games had become a permanent part of the industry, and the hard part was no longer getting a game into a shop but getting anyone to notice it there.
Sources
- “The making of Thomas Was Alone”, Edge issue 255, July 2013, p. 134: Mike Bithell at Blitz Games, the “explosion that was happening in the indie scene”, teaching himself Unity.
- Wireframe issue 30, January 2020: retrospective of the 2010s (Braid and “the indie renaissance in 2008”; Super Meat Boy, its two developers and its sales; Limbo and Playdead).
- “Opening the Macintosh”, Edge issue 226, April 2011: Braid as Jonathan Blow’s “2008 XBLA hit”.
- Edge issue 257, September 2013: Denmark feature (Playdead’s Limbo and downloadable games on consoles); feature on Sony and independent developers (Bithell’s and Shahid Ahmad’s comments).
- Randy Smith, “A tale of two cultures”, Edge issue 247, December 2012, p. 126: Steam as “the Holy Land for indies” and Greenlight.
- Edge issue 214, May 2010: feature on independent developers’ visibility (James Silva on Xbox Live Indie Games).
- Edge issue 229, July 2011, p. 198 onwards: Unity’s free version and GLiD.
- “Indie game dev story”, Edge issue 240, May 2012: interview with James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot on Indie Game: The Movie.
- Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 10–12: Kickstarter, “gaming’s latest gold rush”.
- Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, p. 8: Double Fine’s Kickstarter ($400,000 target, 87,142 backers, $3,336,371). See the Tim Schafer entry.
- Wireframe issue 8, February 2019, p. 50: Team17 profile (“a British indie publishing powerhouse”).
- Haley Uyrus, “Discoverability in 2019”, Wireframe issue 11, April 2019, p. 26.
- For Spelunky, Shovel Knight, Bloodstained, Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct, see the Spelunky, Shovel Knight, Bloodstained and Steam entries and their sources.