Games are bloody mad. That’s just a fact of life, folks. But have you ever thought about the people who make them?
I’m not talking about the huge studios that pump out AAA games like GTA or Destiny, but the small teams that make amazing games on shoestring budgets. The underdogs of a massive industry that’s growth refuses to wane.
Most of these indie game developers have a tough time making it in a world full of CODs and Marios, but some will achieve huge success and as a result, huge paydays.
Here’s a few indie games that hit the big time.
SUPER MEAT BOY (2010)
Featuring in the 2012 documentary, Indie Game: The Movie, Super Meat Boy is Mario-esque platformer that puts you in the shoes of a fleshless little guy that’s just trying to save his girlfriend. It was created by two blokes, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes.
After the successful Flash game, Meat Boy, which was hosted on the Newgrounds website, the duo’s follow-up was released on Xbox 360 and PC.
Development was a rough trot, with the final two months consuming the small team entirely. They would frequently forget to eat and slept around five measly hours a night.
Luckily, it was worth the effort. Super Meat Boy sold over 140,000 copies in the first 2 months of its release on Xbox alone. By January 2012, it had surpassed 1 million sales.
The team has always been hush-hush when it comes to the amount of dough they managed to rake in, but it’s definitely well into the 7 figures.
Edmund is still creating great games including the hugely successful The Binding of Isaac series.
SHOWER WITH YOUR DAD SIMULATOR 2015 (2015)
As the name would suggest, Shower With Your Dad Simulator is all about showering with your dad and it was released in 2015. It tasks the player with matching a son with their showering dad based on clues like hair colour. There’s plenty of nudity, showcased by the 4 pixels-worth of dick and balls on each character.
Originally intended to be a “fake” game by Australian Twitter user, Marben (@bonerman_inc), it garnered far more interest than he had ever intended.
I made a prototype one night so i could record a gif of it and share it with a couple people i played Dota with in 2015,” he told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “For some reason, my teammates had latched on to the phrase ‘do you still shower with your dad?’ as a kind of weird sledge in Dota games. I decided to tweet the gif because i thought it was funny.
Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015: Do You Still Shower With Your Dad #gamedev #indiegame pic.twitter.com/zrgvaYRQ7t
— ??cat no marben-a?? (@bonerman_inc) March 1, 2015
And he was just going to leave it at that, but the gif was then picked up by gaming website Destructoid and even ended up on a Comedy Channel show called Midnight. Given the batshit amount of press it received, Marben worked on an actual game for about 6 months and released it on PC via Steam for 99 cents.
The game ended up doing pretty well at launch and has since sold 350,000 copies. Steam cop about 30% of every sale, but you can still work that out to a very handsome sum for what was initially a joke.
While he’s not working on anything else right now, he’s living a pretty sweet life thanks to simulating showers and dads.
BRAID (2008)
Braid was released in 2008 and was also a title featured in the excellent documentary, Indie Game: The Movie.
Creator, Jonathan Blow, poured around $200,000 of his own money into the project which is now credited as a huge fucking milestone in the development of the indie games industry. Eventually released across all platforms, the game made a whopping $6 million worth of revenue as of 2015.
Braid was purchased by roughly 55,000 people during its first week of sales, with much of the money going into Blow’s 2016 release, The Witness, a gorgeous and completely infuriating puzzle game that was received incredibly well by critics and gamers alike.
While he’s likely earned enough money to live on for the rest of his life, Blow is still working on games. His current project with the working title, Game 3, is scheduled to be a twenty-year development cycle and will be broken into episodic games, each one individually playable.
Not much is known about the subject matter of the project other than it’s not puzzle-based. Get outta here with your stinking puzzles.
THE STANLEY PARABLE (2013)
Created by 24-year-old Davey Wreden and British teen William Pugh, The Stanley Parable is an experimental game that will mindfuck you into submission. It was originally released as a mod for Half-Life 2 in 2011.
Valve, the company behind Steam and the creators of HL2 announced and approved the game via their Greenlight program in 2012 and released it in October of 2013.
The game went off like a frog in a bloody sock, netting the guys $US6.3 million ($8.3 million). This figure is even crazier when you consider the game was only ever released on PC.
Pugh opened his own development studio in 2015 called Crows Crows Crows and released their first game, Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist, in December of that same year.
MINECRAFT (2011)
If you’ve never played Minecraft, it’s essentially the Lego of the modern age. You’re thrust into a randomly generated open world where you can build almost anything you bloody well want. People have built functional computers inside the game. Insanity.
Designed by Swedish developer Markus “Notch” Persson and the small team at Mojang, it is arguably the biggest indie success the gaming world has ever known.
Before it was fully released in 2011, Minecraft shot past 1 million purchases in less than a month of its early access beta. By April of that year the game made an estimated $US33 million in revenue ($43.3 million).
Minecraft is now the second-best selling game of all time and as of February 2017, has sold over 121 million copies across all platforms. In 2014, Mojang and the game’s intellectual property was sold to Microsoft for $US2.5 billion. Fuck.
Notch left Mojang shortly after its acquisition and has since been working on another sandbox title, 0x10c. He also owns an 8-bedroom mansion in Beverly Hills, so, you know, he’s done pretty well.
PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (2017)
PUBG is the latest battle royale game by the genre’s grandaddy, Brendan Greene. I cannot recommend this game enough and am not ashamed to disclose my full-blown addiction to it.
The concept is simple – 100 players get hurled into a huge map and the last one standing wins. Players are constantly herded into a shrinking play area and forced to scavenge weapons and supplies to survive. It’s goddamn thrilling, folks.
Greene previously released an early iteration of the game as a mod for Arma 2 simply titled Battle Royale and a another for H1Z1 called King of the Kill. All had a similar overarching concept, but PUBG is a standalone, “final” version of his vision.
Amazingly, PUBG is still in early access, meaning it isn’t even finished yet. Early access began in March 2017 and sold an incredible 4 million copies in 3 months. The game made $11 million dollars in its first 3 days of early access.
And that number is only going to get bigger, with the title soon to launch on Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
Photo: Super Meat Boy.
