The above has been well-documented, and is no revelation. But while music and film have had their indie success-stories sung on and off the Internet, indie games have not had the same amount of attention, and rightly so: there are very few indie games worthy of this praise. Over the last few years, low budget hits such as Introversion's back catalogue (Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON) have all been for sale, and therefore void their validity as an indie game, and the browser-games, as championed by Orsinal and their peers, but these are variations on a theme, and a theme that originated decades ago.
Introversion call themselves the "Last of the Bedroom Programmers". They may well be, with the videogame industry being at it's technological high-water mark at the moment, and the amount of man-power to produce something akin to the thousand-strong GTA4 team is unmatchable by the lonesome amateur programmer.
There have been success stories, of course, such as Counter-Strike, quickly snapped up by Valve, as was the (once free to play) Garry's Mod, and hundreds of others buried in the obscurity of riding on the back of commercial releases, but as far as I can tell, there has been only one game worthy of mention that was created from the ground-up, and it is called Dwarf Fortress, by Toady One of Bay 12 games.
The title will be an immediate turn-off. "Dwarf Fortress" sounds like fantasy wank, and it very much is fantasy wank. It is also ASCII-text generated, which is going to be another turn-off. It looks, at it's very finest, like this:
But Dwarf Fortress is the future of videogaming. It is a leap that will fundamentally change the way videogames are made, or, it should be. It is the first gun, crudely made from a section of pipe and gunpowder, when everyone else is using bows. While the subject matter may be fantasy wank, the promise and potential lie within the way it makes the subject matter. Dwarf Fortress generates a world unique to the player (complete with geology, erosion, and climate), with two thousand years of events and history, and this is before you start messing with the generation controls. The end result is drama. Unscripted, and unwritten, but instead generated.
Dwarf Fortress really requires you to be a like a child with an empty box. To use your imagination to fill in the blanks, and to piece together what happens between the entries in the "Legends" screen. Toady One, the sole developer, does such while experimenting with world generation with baby-snatching enabled, and comes up with the following little tale.
"Kivish Soarcrafted the dwarf was abducted at age 3 and moved to the Cruel Tower in Felldweller. He became a farmer and married Olin Roofchanced, another abductee, and eventually joined the guard. The humans and goblins were fighting a lot at this time, and the demon and many goblins were slain in the wars, as well as Kivish's wife. Kivish then personally led four defenses against the human onslaughts on the dark tower, and by the year 33 there were only 11 defenders left. In the year 34, only 4 defenders remained, and Kivish became the leader of the goblin civilization, such as it was. More attacks followed, and in the year 35, Kivish stood alone against twenty four human attackers, defending Felldweller and a goblin baby that had been born in 33, the only other resident. Kivish was victorious, but the dwarves then launched an assault on Felldweller, and Kivish faced 22 dwarves in the Forest of Dashing outside Felldweller, killing 4 of his own kind before being fatally shot by a crossbow bolt. Although the dwarves were victorious on the field, the humans slipped in and installed a new leader in Felldweller, who lived alone with the goblin child, Amxu Blottedvile, for a year before more humans decided to move in, establishing a temple to Odel the goddess of truth called the Truthful Temple in 37 and a mead hall called the Muscular Voice in 54. The original human city declared war on the dwarves after this and was eventually conquered, and the humans there died out over fifty years, with dwarven populations established in two mountain fortresses and the formerly human town. Felldweller, now a human-populated dark tower, never went to war again, but without support from the original human city, the humans left there eventually died out. I'll have to check out exactly what happened there."
S/Cooke
Dwarf Fortress is still in production, and can be downloaded for free from Bay 12 games. Also, google "Boatmurdered" for an in-depth exploration of an average game of DF.
