The indie game development scene is one of madness, and is full of whatever you could want. Action platformers in 2D, 2.5D, and 3D, simple puzzle games for kids, or puzzle games for adults with naked women all over them. Anyone can make a game, and they often do. I’ve tried my dab hand at it too. Sure I made a crap version of Tetris, Mario, and other classics of the gaming world, but I did it because I wanted to find out how it was done. It has become commonplace for storefronts like Steam to allow people to have the freedom to plop out any old guff and call it a game.

Back in the 80s, that was a little harder. Believe it or not, the world wasn’t dominated by games that (in part) teach you how to code. In a language called “basic,” most of us learned how to make the computer say something then repeat it. Of course, we then told it to swear sixty-nine times a minute. In the UK it was the advent of home computing that would spark the indie scene into overdrive. The ZX Spectrum was a cheap-ish (for the time) system that allowed parents to do accounting or boring things. Meanwhile, kids made it swear, and it gave the ambitious a chance to start the revolution.

Before this, the entire world of gaming was done through little boxes that Nintendo called “Color TV-game,” and Sega’s version “Sega Vision.” Those are the home consoles of years gone by, Arcades were in their heyday, and the cabinets that housed games were everywhere from fast food joints, bars, clubs, and anywhere else you could think of. Now with these early home computers, no matter how primitive, indie game development could take off.

They were all been loud, eye-poppingly colorful, ear drilling nightmares that any child now would turn their nose up to. Back when these things first released, they were the greatest thing the world had ever seen. With the Spectrum came America’s version, the Commodore 64. It was a more powerful computer that made games look less headache-inducing and more like that 8-bit thing some games go for now. Then, if you were in the UK there was a very upper-class system that no one in their right mind would use. It was The Monkees counterpart to The Beatles, and any pop-punk band from 2004 onward vs Punk’s origins.

The BBC Micro was a system the BBC used to start television programming teaching people how to code, but it became a bit of class issue as it was quite expensive. “What is the point if you can’t have a bit of good ol’ fashioned classism,” as Margaret Thatcher once said, probably, I don’t know she was Prime Minister or something. There were entire TV shows dedicated to teaching programs that were drier than whatever your mother boiled to death and called dinner. Yet, with all of these systems came the plucky indie scene of the mid to late 80s.

Believe it or not, this wasn’t the cause of the economic crash of video games. Thanks, Atari! Instead, this was in the recovery period that children of today don’t know about. Yes, in 1983 the bubble burst on gaming. Thanks to the over-saturation of the market as a result of third-party developers, games were coming out the ears for console and PC owners. Yet, somehow we’ve not had that same bubble popping moment in nearly 40 years. Through it all, from shifts in genre and console generation to console generation, independent game development has been the punk rock of gaming for over 30-years.

From the days of Manic Miner looking like every color of the rainbow was stabbed and bled out on the floppy disk, to Elite Dangerous, indie development has created some mad things. The entire Elite series started with just David Braden and Ian Bell. Jet Set Willy‘s predecessor Manic Miner was developed by one man, and Papers Please was also developed by one man. The framework of modding, or as it was called back then, “Shareware” didn’t even provide commercial success directly for the developers; in fact, it is the basis of demos as well. Before this, indie games had to be posted by mail order because the term for indie developers back then was “Bedroom coders.”

My point is, in the early days of gaming, we’d have full magazines with lines of code teaching you how to make a game. The rule of indie development has always been “Do as you please!” Much like punk rock, people who had no clue how to code, make a game, or how to do any of it, were picking up the microcomputers and making colorful vomit-inducing nightmares by today’s standards. Even now, some will tap away at their keyboard, making crude or malformed depictions of Nyarlathotep in the aim of creating their vision. Punk was all about not knowing how to sing, play guitar, play drums, or do anything, but it was about angrily yelling your political opinion at anyone who’d listen.

While money rains down on Rockstar for the third console generation in a row, as GTA (V) Online keeps the company from worrying about anything other than being called out for “crunch.” Indie developers now bask in a beautiful place of wonder, an insipid hell eating itself from the inside out, and the hallowed halls of pretentious fandoms. Times might have changed for the games industry, tastes have shifted and still continue to; However, independently developed video games continue to be a driving force in the scene.

This beautiful anarchic culture in gaming provides us with storytelling that Triple-A games don’t touch with a 10ft bargepole. Gameplay can be interesting but minimalist, or just something personal someone wants to get out. Indie development of all shapes creates beautiful examples of homage, fandoms, and an interesting take on something more or less forgotten. Of those three examples, I could name Rusted Warfare and the love of Total Annihilation, The Orville and The Orville fan game, along with our inability as adults to play with playdoh without looking weird, which led to the game Claybook.

Without indie games, we wouldn’t have A Normal Lost Phone; A game about a lost phone and nothing else. Even games that are inherently held up as bastions of more recent indie game development can, and have been published by larger studios, such as Bastion being published by Warner Brothers Interactive until 2019. The ethos of an indie game, for some, has become any small game that is made and published by a handful of people. Sometimes that isn’t the case, as Respawn’s 65-person developed multiplayer shooter Titanfall fits that mindset, but it is published by EA which didn’t own Respawn at the time.

So the question now should be, “What is an indie game?” and if I were a philosopher with time to waste pondering a question that doesn’t need asking, I might tell you in 65-years. I think most would agree it is the idea of a small studio self-publishing, however, that leaves out studios such as Devolver Digital. The bloody and often pixelated games coming from the studio can be developed under the Devolver banner, but can also be DeadToast’s My Friend Pedro. Indie game development is a messy little place of every flavor of video game you could ever want, now including VR.

If you want an anime-inspired match-four cooking game, you’ll want Battle Chef Brigade. Want to swear at a beautiful logic machine that creates diner-style fast food, you want Automachef. Want isometric multiplayer shooters? Squids From Space went free-to-play. Those are three tiny examples of indie games that console publishers and large Triple-A studios wouldn’t touch; aside from the free-to-play shooter. I might have said the other month that some genres need a rest, but that’s because there are so many more interesting ideas out there. You can do just about anything, but you choose to make another Battle Royale? Another Souls-like? Another Rogue-like/lite?

My point is, keep making your weird and wonderful ideas a reality, it is the punk thing to do. If the game is received negatively, take the quality concerns but forget the personal ones. That is unless you’re making “Zombie Hitler: Rebuild the Third Reich,” then I’d have an issue with you making the indie game you want. Tell your personal stories, make your interesting puzzle games, and do all the fun weird punk stuff indie games are known for. Just don’t be a racist, xenophobe, homophobe, transphobe, or anything else. Be proper punks and be peace-loving hippies with an attitude.

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