The computer scene in the earlier days was often dominated by “uber nerds” who would collect lots of hardware and not actually have that much to use for it. My impression was that a lot of games were created for this market in the earlier days.

I love my “uber nerd” friends (“omg my new rig runs Crysis 67 at 3000fps” etc) but the downside to this market is that it encourages the “feature list”. We’ve all seen this – a list of bullet points on the back of a box with goofy names of “systems” (the ultimate blood engine!), gameplay “features” (eviscerate your foes with 70 different finishing moves!) and general masturbation. (9.5 billion polys each with 256 shader layers!) The end result feels like a weird “macho” male stereotype. The downsides of this “macho” illusion spill into misogyny, unnecessarily contentious competition and other silly things.

–Alec Holowka

There used to be a time when games were made by one individual. In fact, Shigeru Miyamoto is often cited as the first person who designed and directed a game without any knowledge of programming. From then on, games began to get more complicated and the technical challenges during the development process required an ever-greater level of expertise and specialization. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of people working on a game at any one time.

These big budget games will not go away of course, but it is interesting to see how the trend towards larger development teams seems to have slowed down somewhat in recent years, while indie developers–which may consist of a single person working out of his dorm room or a “staff”of a couple of dozen (probably working out of their rooms as well)–seem to be increasing in number by the day. There has never been a better time to be an indie developer, thanks largely to the emergence of affordable and easy-to-use development tools such as  Game Maker, not to mention the fact that the internet has made the concept of “distribution costs” all but obsolete. Indeed, it is a great time not only for aspiring game developers, but also for adventureous gamers who want to try more experimental and conceptually expressive approaches to game design.

Of course, a select few of these “experiments” end up as truly great games. Some of these games will fail miserably, while others might present a novel gameplay concept that may be fleshed out in a later effort.  But there are also some real gems that surpass our expectations and expand our notion of what games can achieve as a medium. This is what drives us to keep searching for the next great indie game, even though we know all too well that most of what we’ll encounter along the way will be mediocre at best.

The hard part is beginning the search, which is why this list of 50 great indie games (first published by Derek Yu in this guide) is such a godsend. For newcomers, it serves as an excellent introduction to the indie game scene; and for non-newcomers, it remains an excellent guide to the many great games we’ve yet to play. Better yet, there is a brief description next to every game that explains why each is important in its field. Oh and did I mention that most of them are free? There’s really no excuse not to try them out.

Speaking of which….I should probably end this post now so as to keep working my way down the list. Okay, post ended.

The way in which Western game companies discovered and acquired the rights to Tetris has to rank as one of the strangest Cold War-era stories ever.  David Sheff’s amazing biography of the early days of Nintendo dedicates an entire chapter to this insane East-West encounter, where  several  important players in the game industry fought each other while trying to charm the Soviet government, which in turn grew increasingly suspicious of their motives, since they could not understand why a bunch of random capitalists appeared so eager to purchase rights to the game.

By the way, Sheff’s book is an absolute must-read for anyone that’s even remotely interested in gaming or Japanese culture in general.