The Hands of Time [Editorial]

June 12, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

I keep noticing the parallels between the modern indie scene and the old shareware boom from the early 1990s. For those who missed that train, in the period after the Great Crash of 1984 and before the PC was powerful enough to run much more than King’s Quest, there was a sort of DIY phase in the Western game industry. Even the biggest PC developers, like Sierra and Origin, were a bit provincial, and in the arcades Atari Games and Midway were struggling just to be noticed amongst the flood of Japanese imports — so from a mainstream perspective there was slim opportunity for a young designer.

Much as with modern indie games, the answer was to skirt the mainstream, and distribute games through dial-up bulletin boards and word-of-mouth. There are a few differences, though. For one, the shareware boom happened in an era when one or two or a small handful of people could still produce a major, mainstream game. It was getting rarer, but for context the average Sega Genesis game had only half a dozen key staff. So for aspiring game designers, it was not unreasonable to look at shareware as a sort of a potential back door into the industry. Indeed, that’s where we get id Software and Epic Games.

Fixing a Hole

Another thing is that around the turn of the ’90s the PC was sort of a blank slate. 256-color VGA was still fairly new, and Sound Blaster digital sound was a revelation. A 33-Mhz processor was a firecracker, and extended RAM was a luxury. So suiting the geography, most PC games were either simulations or slow-paced adventure games. When Carmack and Romero found a technique for smooth scrolling, it was a breakthrough worth pitching to Nintendo. Yet much as Atari was uninterested in Nintendo’s hardware, Nintendo saw little potential in the PC game market.

With mainstream developers slow to take advantage of the platform, it was also not unfathomable for a handful of clever young coders to be at the forefront of technology and design. So it is that within about five to seven years a bunch of industry outsider nobodies dragged the platform, and along with it the entire medium, up by its bootstraps. The explosion in graphical accelerators comes entirely out of do-it-yourself designers trying to make a name for themselves, trying to be just like the big guys who they admired in the 1980s.

This, of course, created a culture clash. The PC gamers who had been there the whole time reacted poorly to the insolence and the brashness and the overall style of these upstarts. They liked PC games just fine the way they are. The PC wasn’t just an open-platform game console; it naturally lent itself to a different, slower and deeper, psychological space. And the aesthetic that these newcomers were injecting — sure, it was making the PC more popular for gaming. Yet in its Miyamoto-fueled reverie it was also drowning out demand for the kinds of games that attracted PC gamers to the platform.

There are exceptions, of course, but broadly the shareware boom was an attempt by North American designers to answer the mainstream success of Nintendo and Sega using the only available tools — which meant bending the tools to make them work more like the game consoles of the day, and using those tools to mimic Japanese design aesthetics. Though the movement started small, the best efforts were so revolutionary and so popular that they attracted competition like a four-star restaurant in the bad part of town, gentrifying the PC, driving up development costs, and making the platform much bigger than Shareware’s original form of distribution.

Just around this time the Web took off, further putting the PC in the cultural focus and effectively killing off the dial-up BBS. Even if community-based distribution had still been appropriate to the scale of development and the level of sales and cultural saturation enjoyed by a game like Quake, the communities themselves were vanishing in favor of direct distribution. So the whole shareware concept kind of died off around the time that its children found the success they were after, and the West had its healthy design platform again.

The Information Age

Modern indie games are kind of the next generation of shareware. You still see a bunch of people hoping to “break into” the “industry” by making their own games, or just trying to recreate their favorite games from their childhood — that’s all still there. But, well.

On the first point, it’s nice that there’s a support structure and a place to go for people motivated to take their art into their own hands — and maybe in the long term the influx of original, developed voices will do the industry some good. (Arguably, we’ve already seen some of the effects in games like Portal.) Yet now the industry does exist, and there are several routes into it. And it’s unlikely that an individual developer will abruptly jerk that industry in a new direction, as they could in the early ’90s.

On the second point, tribute games are fine and well but it’s unlikely now that imitation of familiar forms will have the same effect as it might in the days of Commander Keen. So indie games serve a bit of a different role than they used to. A developer might charge a few bucks, and might make a few bucks. He or she might find a job, or a popular following. But the focus is far less on the objective, on overt success, than it used to be. And this is, I think the biggest difference.

For the most part, the flash and bang is over — and the only thing that can fill that space is actual discussion. I don’t mean to get too precious about it, but it strikes me that the standard of the indie scene hits squarely in the rarely-met ideals of the shareware movement: a community, talking both more closely and more broadly than ever before, sharing and demonstrating their observations about game design while trying to use game design to demonstrate their own observations. The distribution channels are more reliable than ever. If you get your game up on Xbox Live Indie Games, or on Steam, or even if you just have a decent website and you spread the word enough, people can find it. If it’s any good, chances are people will talk about it and make an effort to find it.

It’s not a way to get rich, but it’s a way to gain respect. And broadly speaking, the games that get the most respect aren’t the clones and the tributes — the first episode now freely available on the machine you use to do homework — but the games like Passage and Seiklus, that express a remarkable perspective in a remarkable way.

Today, I think the DIY movement is about as healthy as it has been. And now that the grandeur is out of the way, it’s on the right track. Each generation learns from the mistakes of its forefathers, and with the Internet we now have all of time at our hands. And a whole lot of time on our hands, at that.