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    Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming
    Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming
    Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming
    Ebook139 pages1 hour

    Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming

    By Mike Diver

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Everything you need to know about the exciting new trend of indie gaming.

    Independently made video games have become some of the most original, ingenious and successful games available on the market today. Matched against giant tech companies and their mammoth-budget franchises, indies, have demonstrated the extraordinary impact that individuals and small teams can have on the direction of the gaming world.

    Mike Diver takes us behind the scenes to explore this incredible movement, where freedom from major studios has allowed for near-infinite possibilities, revolutionizing gaming mechanics and remoulding genres. Including interviews with legendary developers such as Tim Schafer and David Braben as well as the brains behind newer studios such as The Chinese Room, Hello Games and Simogo, Indie Games introduces us to the personalities, the passion and the practicalities that have transformed an industry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateMar 24, 2016
    ISBN9781910552353
    Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming
    Author

    Mike Diver

    Mike Diver lives by the sea in East Sussex. His writing on video games has appeared in publications including VICE, EDGE, The Guardian, Nintendo Life and Official PlayStation Magazine. He is the author of three previous books – Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming; How to Be a Professional Gamer: An Esports Guide to League of Legends; and Retro Gaming: A Byte-Sized History of Video Games – and editor of several more.

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    • 3/5
      This book was lovely. I love indie games. It was an interesting read. I liked how it featured many different games. It didn’t go into that much detail with some of them.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Indie Games - Mike Diver

    Mike Diver is Video Games Editor at VICE, and has contributed gaming articles to the Guardian, Kotaku and Edge. He previously worked in music journalism, serving as Album Reviews Editor for the BBC, online editor at Drowned In Sound and Clash, and writing for magazines including NME and Kerrang! An associate lecturer at Southampton’s Solent University when not playing games or reporting on them, he lives by the British seaside with his wife, two sons and two cats. You can find him on Twitter @MikeDiver.

    First published in Great Britain in 2016 by LOM Art, an imprint of

    Michael O’Mara Books Limited

    9 Lion Yard

    Tremadoc Road

    London SW4 7NQ

    Copyright © Mike Diver 2016

    All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

    A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    ISBN: 978-1-910552-09-4 in hardback print format

    ISBN: 978-1-910552-36-0 in paperback print format

    ISBN: 978-1-910552-35-3 in e-book format

    www.mombooks.com

    Cover design by Claire Cater

    Designed by Claire Cater

    Typeset by Billy Waqar

    Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publisher, so that full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of the work.

    CONTENTS

    Chapter 1: A Brief History of Indie Gaming

    Chapter 2: The Indie Spirit

    Chapter 3: The Marketplace

    Chapter 4: Ever-expanding Universes

    Chapter 5: Primal Fears

    Chapter 6: Emotional Resonance

    Chapter 7: Indie at its Most Brilliantly Bizarre

    Chapter 8: The Draw of Difficulty

    Chapter 9: Small Screens, Big Ideas

    Chapter 10: The Future of Indie

    Thank You

    Picture Credits

    Index

    CHAPTER 1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIE GAMING

    Even the most casual of gaming observers will have noticed the ‘rise of the indies’ in recent years, where games blossom without the blockbuster budgets and support of major studios and publishers. In the era dominated by the Xbox and PlayStation, contemporary console culture is as much coloured by innovative releases from the margins as it is the usual suspects – heavyweight franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and Halo. Online stores are stuffed full of smaller, quirkier, but no less compelling, interactive experiences from throwback-styled platformers to ingenious puzzlers and nerve-shredding horrors. These are what players worldwide have come to call indie games.

    Nintendo’s eShop is similarly swollen with independently made releases, and while its Wii U and 3DS platforms aren’t home to as many system exclusives as Sony and Microsoft’s equivalents, the Japanese giant’s acceptance of externally developed games from tiny teams – or even a single creator – is among the clearest indicators of the indie sector’s position as a powerful player in the modern video-games market.

    In PC gaming, the online distributor Steam (created by tech company Valve) is a channel through which members can both buy and sell software, while enjoying a host of community features. And when it comes to mobile gaming, Apple’s App Store opens its doors to over 500 new games every day. Of course, their quality fluctuates wildly, but a great many of these smartphone-friendly downloads come from independent developers.

    It’s in the indie sphere where genre traits and tropes are unshackled, mangled, remoulded. Here, reduced manpower and money represent no limit to imagination. It’s a space of near-infinite possibility, manifested most frequently through digital distribution – cheap, reliable and direct to the homes of the consumers. It’s a scene alive with excitement, driven by unstoppable momentum, rarely pausing to look back at past successes with the intention of replicating them in a shinier, slightly louder new-gen render – something that can’t typically be said for those mammoth teams working on yearly iterations of gaming’s biggest-selling franchises.

    Think of it like movies or music: not every film you love is a Hollywood smash, and the albums you adore aren’t all from the same major label. The same logic applies to gaming: an ‘indie game’ might be smaller of means, but no less affecting in appeal.

    The present position of indie gaming in the public consciousness can be traced back to the release of Indie Game: The Movie, a 2012 documentary made by Canadian film-makers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky. Their account of the creative processes behind indie titles Super Meat Boy (developed by Team Meat), Fez (Polytron Corporation) and Braid (Number None Inc.) – all three of which were published initially by Microsoft and released through its Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) service – not only provided an amazingly comprehensive slice of marketing for the games in question, but also made their core individual talents into relative, and in some cases reluctant, indie-gaming celebrities. It’s through Indie Game: The Movie that Phil Fish (Fez) and Jonathan Blow (Braid) became figureheads for a movement that shows no sign of letting up.

    ‘The widely publicized success of Jonathan Blow’s Braid, which made him a multi-millionaire, inspired many developers at larger studios to strike out on their own,’ says British games journalist and author Simon Parkin, whose first non-fiction book, Death by Video Game, came out in 2015. ‘Independent developers answer to nobody, so don’t need to be media-trained, or watch what they say, as they don’t have shareholders. There’s freedom in this, but peril, too. Phil Fish is a good example of an extraordinarily talented independent game-maker who frequently speaks his mind, and has suffered severe consequences as a result of that openness.’

    Fish announced in 2013 that he would be exiting the indie-development scene, having clashed with critics, most viciously GameTrailers’ Marcus Beer, who called Fish a w***er and f***ing asshole, prior to Fish suggesting that Beer should ‘compare your life to mine, and then kill yourself’. To date he’s not followed up Fez with anything new. Indie Game: The Movie did wonderful things for Fez, but its profile had a career-compromising effect on its maker, Fish. Just as in indie music, where

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