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Comment by justintime2002 | Hacker News Reader

justintime2002

"Jonathan Blow's beautiful, distinct 2008 platformer Braid is largely regarded as the original indie game"

Really? I find this difficult to believe, considering the success of Cave Story back in 2004.

A lot of people love Cave Story and I am one of them. We can look at Braid's success without taking anything away from Cave Story.

1) it was on a console 2) it made the creator rich 3) it inspired a generation of puzzle platformers

All three of those things contributed to the growth of the indie community.

Indeed. Braid was a landmark indie game, but not the first by any stretch of the imagination.

The whole early PC gaming industry was indie games... Infocom, Sierra On-line, etc...

yes! wtf!! id, commander keen, duke nukem, shareware etc. etc.

My thoughts were more like it was the first indie game because it was the first game I recall being referred to as "indie"

Before that they were just "games" or "a cool new game" or stuff like that. I dunno.

shareware.

How do you consider Infocom and Sierra to be "indie"?

Sierra started with Ken and Roberta Williams working out of their house on Mystery House, in their spare time while Ken held down a full time job. Later, of course, they became a big company and so no longer indie.

"Next time, be more careful!"

Epic?

Apogee...

Yeah, that's a bit of an odd thing to say. It may rightfully be considered among the first indie games that got mainstream attention, but 'original indie game' is rather an overstatement.

Man, I need to replay Cave Story.

This is very true. However, I recall it being in the first crop of commercially successful indie games: World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, Castle Crashers, Braid.

All those remind me of Steam. Which was new at the time, yeah?

Actually, this was around 2008 or so, so Steam was already out for a few years. Most of those games hit it big on XBLA before heading to Steam a few years later.

Doom was pretty commercially successful...

"Indie" doesn't just mean independent. It is (or was) a specific scene, centered to an extent around TIGSource and its forums. The games that came from this scene are what put the genre in its current spotlight.

I would say that that's a redefinition/hijacking of a word that's been in use since long before 2008 to mean exactly "independent" in many different art forms.

EDIT: You may find it interesting to read Jordan Mechner's journals about the making of Prince of Persia as a solo dev (published by Broderbund, so not quite fitting the indie self distribution model today, but otherwise fairly similar). They used to be available online, which may not be true anymore, but it's certainly worth $8 or whatever they may be asking for.

Still, that's how the word is used today. Many, if not most, "indie" games are either made by those original TIGSource people, or were strongly influenced by contact with that community.

Doom was not indie. It had a publisher, for one thing. (GT Interactive)

"It was first released on December 10, 1993, when a shareware copy was uploaded to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin."

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm sure they published it later via a variety of publishers, but they made a ton off of the shareware version. Masters of Doom is a fantastic read, if you haven't read it.

What about Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, etc? Or Elite?

All pretty indy and commercially successful.

Back then Indie was called Alternative, don't you remember 90's kid?

And remember we're on the 17th annual Independent Games Festival. (http://www.igf.com/)

That statement shouldn't be read as Braid being the first indie game (it wasn't by a long shot). But as Braid making indie games popular.

Before Braid, the average (console) gamer did not know what an indie game was. Or if they did, generally considered indie games to be terrible.

Probably should specify indie on consoles. Braid was huge on the xbox360.

Well, it is also not hard to think of other successful independent games that predate 2004. Or 1994. Or 1984. It seems to come down to what you mean by it? Without access to the author's mental definition of the term we can't really quibble successfully.

I mean, if you go back far enough, there wasn't such a thing as a games industry, so everything was an "indie" game.

I say Spacewar! is the original indie game.

Actually this article shows many interesting examples going back to the late '40s, most of which would be considered indie. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_video_game

Interestingly for me was the second in the list which I hadn't heard of before - Alan Turing's chess simulator.

It is just an easy narrative trope to throw if you are a lazy journalist having to write an article. Braid was a very successful indie game. Even if you don't consider the early games such as Doom as indies, there has been cult games like Uplink way before Braid. It just arrived at the right time in order to be published on consoles as well (and with the right portable gameplay).

It's a bit of a silly statement because it completely ignores the fact that in the recent past video games were almost universally "indie" efforts.

Actually it kind of died out for a bit. During the PS1 and PS2 era, with the introduction of optical media and a push for mainstream quality, low-budget (and hence only moderately profitable) games slowly died out, while high-risk, high-return 'AAA' games dominated. That's not to say that people didn't make independent games at this time but they were rather niche. The Indie movement was in part a rebellion against that.

The first indie game was obviously golf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcnFbCCgTo4

I played indie games in 1981. Making indie games by 1982. Selling my own indie games by late 90's.

so yes this another case of the "kids are so cute, thinking Katy Perry invented rock-and-roll" pattern.

We were making commercial games from our bedroom in the 80's and 90's but we were not calling ourselves "indies".

I'm pretty sure industry comparisons with indie filmmakers and indie music bands started before Braid (IndieCade was founded in 2005), but as a widely used and popular term, I think it's fair to choose 2008 as a turning point [1], and Braid as the poster child.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132041/the_state_of_in...

That segment of the market has gone through many names. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom as "shareware" which defined a fairly large chunk of the indie market back in the early 90's. Before that there were people putting games out on BBS systems that you could buy the full versions of by mailing in checks of money with your return address. You don't get much more "indie" than that (but you can).

The difference would be that at the time, there weren't a lot of / big publishers to be independent from.

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