Celebrate Independents

Celebrate Independents

Make this 4th of July a game about freedom (from executive oversight)

The U.S. celebrates its 250th Independence Day this weekend, which means hot dogs and sunburns and fireworks aplenty. However! For the indoor kid set who just wants to clutch a controller while basking in the soft glow of an LCD screen, “independence” has a different meaning: indie games. That is, small studios, unaffiliated with larger publishers, at liberty to create the games they wish, free of the constraints of corporate oversight.

In this day and age, indie studios have grown more important than ever as a way to ensure our favorite medium has a future. Literally every day brings news of industry-wide job losses and award-winning studios closing. Every month, we learn that some “next big thing” title in video games failed to make back its prodigious budget despite a grand marketing campaign and the shiniest graphics money can buy. If you only pay attention to the AAA section of gaming news, things can look pretty bleak sometimes. But out there on the fringes where tiny teams turn their big dreams into real experiences, video games are thriving, livelier than ever.

Indie gaming doesn’t exist in opposition to the corporate side of the business. Rather, it’s more of a complement. Think of video games as an ecosystem like the savannah, where a handful of ponderous elephants and rhinos stomp around while countless birds and foragers scurry around at their feet, existing in the same space but largely unbothered by one another. (We bloggers are the National Geographic photographers in this metaphor.) You need all of those different elements for the whole system to work the way it should.

Indies know that physical is forever, even if they’ve gotta do it themselves in a Ziploc bag, like Richard Garriott did when he invented the PC RPG. [Source: oldschoolgamer.com]

And in a lot of senses, indie game studios represent the primal form of video games. Games have been around a lot longer than an industry existed to sell them. The earliest video games were created by students and scientists with access to primitive computers and a determination to make those massive machines do something fun. Pioneering titles like 1969’s Spacewar! and 1977’s Zork were created by tinkerers secretly using shared time on their university computers to create unauthorized entertainment. Heck, 1971’s Star Trek involved both unauthorized time and an unauthorized television license. It was really only when companies who manufactured and sold consoles entered the picture that video games became an industry. And even then, countless scores of 8-bit computer games owe their existence to one-man studios whose sole proprietor had a dream of creating something new, something compelling, and—potentially, but not always—something profitable.

Independent game development never went away, even with the rise of closed, proprietary machines like Nintendo Entertainment System and Genesis. They just shifted focus to home computers. When id created DOOM, the company was by all definitions an indie developer. Epic may be an all-consuming behemoth today, but when the company published ZZT in 1991, it consisted of a single person. Bungie got its start making goofy little indie games for Macintosh. And that’s to say nothing of the countless freeware and shareware titles that filled up endless stacks of diskettes and CDs back in the day.

However, the modern concept of indie games really began to take form in the mid 2000s. A handful of standout titles appeared in a stark contrast to the prevailing style and direction of games at the time: as the overall business began to focus on high-definition 3D visuals and vast, cinematic experiences, one-man projects like studio Pixel’s Cave Story captured the atmosphere and mystery of classic 8- and 16-bit adventures. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Nintendo made efforts to open up its new digital platforms (Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and DSiWare) to small developers—companies without the means or team size to produce full retail releases, but who could certainly create lo-fi or bite-sized titles as inexpensive downloadable titles.

Within a few years, the concept of indie studios had evolved from computer programmers toiling in obscurity to a thriving corner of the industry, where small teams created games that don’t fit into the framework of the big-budget releases that major publishers thrive on. A company as big as Square Enix needs to release a massive blockbuster like Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy in order to go on being big, but a developer the size of Zeboyd does just fine with a retro-style release like Cosmic Star Heroine with a team of two plus composters.

Everyone’s favorite indie game, DOOM.

Plus, indie studios have the freedom to experiment in ways that would be an impossible risk for major publishers—which often lead to games that can redefine the medium. Some of the most influential releases of the past decade have been the work of small teams or even a single person. How many Hollow Knight clones have you seen recently? Or Undertale? Or Celeste? Those indie studio projects have affected the shape of at least as many games as something like Dark Souls or Batman: Arkham Knight! Despite vastly more modest budgets! And then you have things like the Touhou Project, in which dozens of different indie (or doujin) creators play in a collective creative sandbox as part of a shared universe.

Indie games have certainly been the lifeblood of Limited Run since its beginning. Heck, the company exists entirely because an indie developer wanted to get his work into physical form. And as much as we love working on our favorite blockbuster titles, there’s something special about collaborating with the actual director or designer of a game and helping their passion project to take shape as a physical release. So this holiday, celebrate Independents Day by spending a little time with your favorite console indie release. Heck, you could even take it to the beach if it’s on Switch or a retro Game Boy title like Shantae.