What Does ‘indie game’ Even Mean?

Recently I have been going through some of my favorite independently developed (indie) games from the last few years. Specifically The Finals, Cult of the Lamb, Kenshi, and a fresh new game called The Bloodline. My brother asked me “How are all of these games indie, when none of them are anything alike in appearance, polish, quality, or budget?” I might be paraphrasing but the important thing is that I’ve been asking this question a long time as well. In this article I’m going to explore the concept of what it means to be an indie game, a AAA game, and figure out whats in-between. Do AA games exist? BBB? There are obviously L games, just look at Gollum if you need an example.

Upon doing some research I found that the origin of the moniker “Indie” is much older than the gaming industry, and has its roots in contemporary American culture. In the 1910s in America there was a burgeoning scene of young adults who had been raised on the first waves of mass media, radio and cinema, who in turn wanted to contribute to the arts of music and film. Unfortunately for them; back in 1908 a trust formed named the Motion Picture Patents Company which was also known as the Edison Trust, named after Thomas Edison who owned the patents for the technology to produce and distribute motion pictures. Anyone in this film cabal was decidedly not an independent filmmaker, and anyone unaffiliated with them was de facto an indie film director according to OxFilms.

Far Out Magazine claims that the first truly indie film was produced by the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and United Artists the same year they were founded in 1916. Sources on the etymology of indie are scarce but Vocabulary explains that the term indie was first used to describe independent film projects, this makes sense considering the information from Far Out. Oxford English Dictionary asserts that the first use of Indie to refer to an independent production was in an edition of the New York Times in 1928. I still haven’t been able to find the article in question but given that Webster Dictionary agrees first usage was in 1928, I am left to believe them. According to Etymonline, a free etymology resource, Indie wasn’t used popularly until the 1940’s, and the word referred to independent theaters showing indie films. I compare this to the phenomenon of YouTubers who build their identity playing indie games, the same way these theaters build their identity showing indie movies.

The BBC documentary Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie claims that the first indie music was made in 1977 by the Buzzcocks with the release of their EP Spiral Scratch. Upon further research this seems to be a complete fabrication, and I’ll explain why. For starters Triumph Records, founded by Joe Meek in January 1960, after the big UK music producers EMI, Philips, and Decca, had already been established. At best the title “The story of Indie” is an exaggeration, and at worst it is an attempt to whitewash the real history of independently produced music. I am not accusing anyone of anything, I just would have named it The Story of Indie Rock. You see, the first people to make an earnest attempt to separate themselves from the mainstream music labels were jazz and bebop artists in the United States in the 1940s. The Wire explains that the original indie music artist was Charles Mingus, although Mr. Mingus says he was second to Gladys and Lionel Hampton, Otis and Leon René, and Lennie Tristano. The point being that the UK has no claim to the origin of independently produced music, only that they were the first culture to arbitrarily assign the word indie to refer to a genre of media. Before this, indie was synonymous with “experimental” or “inventive”, and after this the word indie suddenly has expectations and preconceptions associated to it. How’s that for irony? I digress, so let’s resume the discussion. Sharetopros explains that, in the modern day, music is considered to be independently produced if the artist or band is unaffiliated with the “big four” record labels which are Universal, Warner, Sony, and EMI. They go on to explain that the term indie has gone on to become a genre of music; which means that an artist who signed with one of the big four record labels, such as Imagine Dragons, can still claim to make indie music even if their label is owned by a company owned by Universal Music Group.. I think that last fact, that indie has come to define a genre pioneered by independent artists and now has been repurposed by big labels, is already pretty interesting when considering the landscape of indie games.

To summarize what we’ve discussed so far: first there was the film institution, then the indie filmmakers were the people outside that institution. There was a demand to see these independent movies, and so the demand was met by the independent theaters popping up. Music labels started to produce music that sold well, and independent musicians started making music that challenged the stagnating music landscape. All that is well and good, but we’re all gamers and as everyone knows gamers neither have time for movies or any music that isn’t the Cult of the Lamb soundtrack.

I would say we have a reasonably good understanding of the word indie’s origin and use in the early and mid 20th century, and I’d like to make the massive leap to the late 20th century to look at the origins of the term as it relates to the videogame industry. According to American Physical Society (APS) Back in 1958 the first interactive video game, named Tennis for Two, was invented by the physicist William Higinbotham and was a popular attraction at the Brookhaven National Laboratory open house. Obviously without an institution to be separate from, calling this the first indie game would be a weird choice albeit a defensible one. Toronto Film School claims the first indie game was Spacewar! from 1968. Spacewar! actually predates Pong by 4 years, fun fact. We can actually go further back, though. The first patent for an interactive digital media was the Cathode-ray tube amusment device, but this was not really a game, and since it never released to the public it has no bearing on the larger video games industry.

During 1982 Andrew Fluegelman created PC-Talk which was possibly the first shareware application for home computers, although he considered it freeware. Although PC-Talk isn’t really a game, I mention this so that we can establish an idea that independent programmers are inseparable from the rise of home PC gaming. This is unlike both the film and movie industry since both of those industries required hefty investments in technology and patents, whereas programming has always been free and low-barrier-to-entry. That was until 1997 when Final Fantasy VII hit the scene with a budget of $45,000,000. FFVII is considered the first AAA game owing to their commitment to create the highest quality product they possibly could, expanding their studio and more importantly advertising their game more aggressively than anyone before them, spending about $100,000,000 on advertising alone. Two years after FFVII releases, Shenmue outdid Squaresoft and blew $80,000,000 on production and established that FFVII was not an anomaly, it was the new standard for big game studios to match.

So then how will we identify indie games in the era of AAAs? Is anyone who isn’t AAA indie? Let’s consider this: publishers. Squaresoft was originally making games for PC, then at one time for Nintendo on their consoles, then moving to Sony on their consoles. FFVII was their first Sony-published game. This is important because we can now point at Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft as the institutions that indie games can be separate from since they were the ones who owned the proprietary technology for consoles and controlled who could create what on those consoles. This means we can explore the discussion of indie games by first identifying the first third party developer: Activision. After Atari was acquired by Warner Communications four employees took their knowledge of Atari’s systems and started making their own games, got sued, and settled agreeing to pay licensing fees for the games they made.

During all this circus independent game developers kept trucking along. Games were being shared between friends, being made for personal use, and for the first time in the 90s this thing called the internet made it really really easy to find, download, and provide payment for independently developed games. Newgrounds hit the scene in 1995 for Tom Fulp to host his flash animations and games, by the year 2000 newgrounds automated its upload process so that users could add their own content and the internet flash gaming scene is born. Websites like OneMoreLevel, Kongregate, ArmorGames, and others created an ecosystem where you could very easily get a lot of exposure as an independent game developer, as long as you programmed in flash. I think most people agree that Kongregate was not a AAA game studio, and I personally feel that pretty much every flash game soundly earns the indie game title.

History lesson over, because now I can talk about something I really like. The Binding of Isaac (BoI) was a flash game created by Edmund McMillan and hosted on Steam (the demo was hosted on Newgrounds before the full release). I had played mostly Playstation games as a kid, and never really gave any thought to the hundreds of flash games I played, but BoI was different. It was the first time I played a game and thought to myself “this is disgusting, I love it.” I had found other games disgusting, but it was always a shock factor or a joke. This was different. I was a very faithful little boy and was put off by the religious imagery, the literal feces scattered around, and the satanic imagery. I had never been so offended by a game before in my life and I could not look away. That my friend is the vital essence of what it means to be an indie game: To create something that is truly unique and experimental without fear of being commercially nonviable, and show people a side of art and creativity hitherto hidden from them by the distractions of high fidelity graphics and huge advertising budgets. Compare this to The Finals which is, in my opnion, largely indistinguishable from any other arena shooters except for how little content it offers. I love The Finals by the way, but I can’t help but point out there just isn’t the same feel between this game and say Kenshi, but Kenshi and BoI do have similarities. Kenshi is named after the moon the game takes place on, and it is disgusting in the same way that BoI is, minus the feces. The moon of Kenshi is littered with ugly npcs, nude cannibals, insect-vomit housing, and corpses. Kenshi was developed by one man with the help of an independent music developer and his sister to write dialogue, and for that reason it is as indie as indie gets. Both BoI and Kenshi have very heavy themes, BoI of religious fanatics, child abuse, drug abuse, and general neglect and Kenshi of slavery, relative morality, identity, and Obedience. Despite such heavy themes both games are extremely fun and funny, owing to the fact that if you weren’t laughing, you’d be crying. Cult of the Lamb proves that BoI is an indie classic because it basically gives you a distilled version of Isaac’s floor-by-floor fighting gameplay, item rooms, and soul and cursed hearts which any BoI fan would immediately identify as familiar, not to mention the map and the poop both look just like BoI’s map and poop. Cult of the Lamb does also include colony management and crafting elements, and that is how it has an identity totally distinct from BoI while being very similar and familiar.

Another indie game similar to The Finals is Splitgate, they are both team-based arena shooters with a single niche mechanic. In the case of The Finals it is the destructible environment and for Splitgate it is the fact that every player has portals they can use just like the portals in Portal. Between the two games Splitgate feels like an indie game while The Finals doesn’t, and I think it’s because Splitgate has an obtuse and unique mechanic in the form of portals. If you played Battlefield you can do very well in The Finals, even without taking advantage of the destructible environment, by playing a medium or light character who just has to point and shoot. Splitgate on the other hand will punish you severely if you play it like any other shooter, because the other people in the game will use their portals to get impossible sightlines, or will disappear around a corner only to shoot you from behind because you didn’t notice they dropped a portal while running away from you. Indie games really do need something to differentiate themselves in such a saturated market and I think Splitgate found an incredible solution to that problem and in the process created a very fun and unique game.

Finally I want to talk about the most recent Indie game I’ve looked at which is The Bloodline. Similar to Kenshi, The Bloodline is a one-person project which sets out to create a new world for you to explore. The best way for me to explain it is Oblivion meets Roblox tycoon game meets Breath of the Wild. You level up by using abilities and the dev added a little dash of modern RPG by picking skills to learn once you reach a high enough level in that given skill. The hook is that your character can slow time and see the future, so you know ahead of time when a big battle will take place or when important story beats are impending. Right now the game is so new I can’t even imagine exactly what other unique qualities it will have in a few years but it excites me to think that the very basic village building, basic crafting system, and basic everything will be much more in depth in the future. For now the game offers dozens of different buildings to improve your castle village, hundreds of spells to cast, a very intriguing system for leveling up magic by translating nordic runes into anglo words, and a robust physics engine that permits you to use the thrust of your pyromancy spells to fly up sheer cliffs or just climb them for non-magic users. Indie games so very often have much more intricate and complex systems because they don’t have the same pressure AAA studios have from their shareholders and employees to offer very wide, very shallow experiences. I’m not saying indie devs have no interest in making money; what I am saying is that when you are the only person working on a project it is way easier to survive off of early access game sales, holding out for the big 1.0 release to make the entire project fiscally viable. Indie games are made by anyone outside the AAA game sphere, but are there terms to differentiate the Treyarchs from the Activisions from the Bethesdas? How about terms to differentiate the (Kenshi’s developer) from the Supergiant Games (Hades’ Developer)? Well, I wanted to know that as well.

There are three more terms I want to share with you. I do lie however, because the first term is actually two terms that I do not believe are particularly helpful in the discussions between gamers when measuring quality of a game against the size of the developing studio; after all we aren’t here learning for self-improvement we want to win arguments with our friends! The terms are AAAA and AAA+, which blew me away because I never thought of a reason to classify anything above AAA which I understood to be the gold standard. AAAA games and AAA+ games are different from AAA games in one of two ways: either the games are particularly high quality, high budget (God of War Ragnarok, Cyberpunk 2077), or have extra monetization besides the initial price tag (micro-transactions, subscriptions, paid mods). I do not believe these terms are particularly helpful because they seem to almost be used as insults or just generally terms used to diminish the accomplishments of a given game. You call a game AAAA not to say that its that good, you call it AAAA so that when you notice clipping issues or camera problems you can feel justified in getting angry. I might also merely be detached from the wider gamer culture not being an X user or a reddit user, so take it with a grain of salt. The term AAA+ seems like it exists to point at any games with micro-transactions or other fees associated with using the product you already paid for so you don’t actually need to analyze the context and can scoff at the game without considering larger implications like “what genre is the game”, “is the game going to be supported for the next decade plus”, “does the game actually fail to provide a fun and fulfilling experience without paying for additional content”. At this point I’m just on a soapbox so I’ll move on to the next term: AA.

You could refer to a game or game studio as AA when the quality or scope of the game is AAA quality, but is not actually owned by one of the big AAA studios. Funny enough, as much as I praise Cult of the Lamb for being an amazing indie game, Devolver Digital is actually considered a AA publisher even though Massive Monster, the developer, is an indie studio by all metrics. Therein lies the issue though, because AA is not a legitimate term until it has a robust definition. Right now AA basically is used to describe games that are nice looking, well-polished, and usually published by a large or AAA studio without actually being developed by a AAA studio. It seems to me that AA is a sub-category of the larger label of indie. Some AA games like Cult of the Lamb simply feel more indie than Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds even though both are independently developed and published by non-AAA studios. The last term I want to teach you is III or triple I: III games are indie games that have a certain je ne sais quois that makes people want to put the game on a pedestal. When I was doing research on Wikipedia, specifically the article on AAA games, I thought it was very telling that I had never heard of two of the examples of III games and the one I did recognize was The Witness. Based on a very shallow investigation into the term III it seems to be attached to quite frankly pretentious games, not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I almost wonder if someone started using the term III as a dig and it accidentally became a term used by fans of these games to separate these artful projects from the rest of the industry. Why is The Witness triple-i but not Hades 2? That is up to you, as long as these terms are so loosely defined you can’t really be wrong calling Kenshi AA or calling The Finals indie.

So, what’s the tl;dr? What does indie game even mean? Well, independently published games are really any games not published by Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo (or the companies they own). An indie game is an independently published game that also usually has a unique mechanic or an experimental facet of its design which clearly distinguishes it from mainstream titles. Indie games are like smut, you know it when you see it. A picture of a naked person can be smut, but sometimes it’s just a picture of a naked person. Sometimes an independently developed game is indie, but sometimes its just an independently developed game. My final opinion is: call games indie if you want to. After reading this article you have plenty of context and resources to form your own opinion and you shouldn’t be worried about saying the “wrong thing” because there just aren’t hard-and-fast rules regarding AAA versus indie development in gaming.

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