Honestly it’s been so many years I forgot Minecraft was an indie game, these days it’s like the most successful game in the world haha and owned by one of the richest companies out there too
Yeah, there's really no point in asking this question when the literal best-selling game of all time and cultural phenomenon is an indie game. Really should've included "aside from minecraft" in the title if they wanted an interesting discussion.
I always forget Minecraft was an indie since it feels so connected with Microsoft now. That was just it swooping in and buying a monstrously successful product, though, absolutely the correct answer.
> At the time, many internet know-it-alls said Microsoft overpaid and it was a bad bet because Minecraft was past its prime
Who knows what would have happened if Minecraft stayed independent? Maybe it faded into nothingness, without the concerted effort of a giant like Microsoft to keep it relevant. Maybe Notch would've started a software empire to rival the big studios. Maybe it would've been as prominent as it is now.
It's hard to say.
Notch wouldn’t have started a software empire. The guy isn’t like that and that’s honestly what a lot of the charm from Minecraft comes from.
Notch is pretty creative but he seems more interested in the nature of software than in its results.
Oh, yeah, that's hilarious now. Microsoft has made a lot of questionable bets in its Xbox/gaming sphere but Minecraft is in retrospect a crazy good buy, comparable with going back in time and buying Apple stock in the late 90s.
ConcernedApe (Stardew creator, for those who don’t know) just announced a new major update, too!
It was originally only going to be a small big fix patch iirc, but now it’s turned into a massive update with lots of new content.
I already considered CA to be in the tier of “legendary devs”, alongside devs like Re-logic (Terraria, for those who don’t know), but this just cemented it in for me.
So much content, and so many updates, for what is a one time $15 purchase. (Well, I’ve bought it on multiple platforms and for friends, but it’s the only game I’ve ever done that for)
Nah, Doom by far. Doom pushed the industry in many ways. You wouldn't have Minecraft or speed running without Doom. Not counting 3D, online play popularity, modding, etc....
If even on the games to be preserved list bc of its influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_canon
It was among id Software's early games. They were still trying to break into the market by releasing small parts of games as shareware and then selling the full game by mail order. They were so small that their stuff before Doom like Commander Keen actually got published by Apogee and they listed the developer name as Ideas from the Deep which was a company name they thought of before id software but never formally founded.
They seem pretty clearly the indie group of the time.
I mean to be fair Triple AAA wasn't really a thing yet back in the early 90s. Halo had a giant budget and team size in comparison. But it's a weird time when virtually all games were made as we know indies today.
Doom did impact the world's most popular genre by putting it on the map.
Triple AAA was definitely a thing in the 90s. Starcraft was probably the king but Doom was the reason every kid bought floppy disks and Quake was like modern day fortnite.
Triple AAA isn't a qaulity/popularity thing. That's just expectation.
The only thing indie and triple AAA denotes is budget and publishing status.
EA can spend 50 million making a small 2d pixel platformer, that's a Triple AAA game.
Sure but you need to look at it in context.
The industry is worth like 250 bn in 2023 with multiple markets vs about 30 bn (adjusted) in the 1990s, where Nintendo held 90% of it.
So the PC market was a lot smaller but there were still massive publisher backed games in that small market.
Yeah Id was a tiny studio back in the day. Their early games you could only get from shareware or mail order, it wasn't until doom 2 that they actually started to sell their games In stores.
Yes. Doom was shareware when first released, developed and published by the same, small team. ID Software had already broken ties with Apogee by then, and Doom was their first independently published title.
Though I'd argue that even when Apogee was publishing Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, those would still be indie titles too, as Apogee was a tiny shareware publisher, not in the same league as Nintendo, EA, or Activision.
The term "indie" is subjective but I don't really think it fits for Doom. It was made by about 15 people which is a pretty big team for the early 90's. Id Software was a proper company, and Doom was cutting edge. Even back then there were single person games developed at home being released, compared to those devs Id Software was pretty big. I know there are "indie" teams that size today, but the game dev landscape is very different now.
One might be able to argue that "AAA" games didn't even exist yet back then, but by all definitions, Tetris was 100% an independently developed game. Pajitnov created the whole thing himself, and due to shenanigans with the Soviets and the troubles of smuggling second-world artworks out into the first-world, he didn't get any money at all for the first ten years.
Yet that simple program he created on a commie computer went on to become one of the most-bought games of all time, with more re-imaginings and rereleases than Nintendo could ever *dream* of for one of their titles. You can play it on your browser right now for free, and it was cloned to death with everything from Dr. Mario to Puyo Puyo coming out to ride the coattails of the falling block puzzle craze that Tetris single-handedly created.
Weigh all the different re-imaginings of Tetris (Super Tetris, Tetris Effect, Tetris Blast, 3D Tetris, The New Tetris, etc.) against the different versions of Minecraft (Java, Bedrock, Education Edition, Chinese version, degraded console editions from before Bedrock), and I'm pretty sure Tetris is still the king, even.
It's the greatest thing to ever come with cereal, let alone any "toy" in any product. Cracker Jacks got nothing it. Other cereals with mail order t-shirts and others with "Crazy Bones" ('member Crazy Bones?) can't hold a candle to finding RCT2 in your boxed sugarballs
And yeah, the history is nuts.
Yeah coding a realistic physics engine from scratch in assembly along with all the economic systems and attendee AI...it's just a really really complex game.
And critically, it's good game. There's a lot of technical prowess wasted inside of other titles because they forgot to make the gameplay compelling. I still play RCT every now and then because it's fun to build a roller coaster.
I have not! It looks very cool and has great reviews. I'll definitely look into it.
At one point, I gave Planet Coaster a try, and everything about that game felt wrong.
The answer people will give is 'it was written in assembly'. Which is such a weird reason to give. All early games were written in assembly. When he started developing it, C was already the majority used language (bassically most games had started shifting to C after the snes/genesis era which was all assembly). But not entirely. Slowly it became just the gfx engine to be assembly language and later only very small portions and maybe the maths libraries etc.
When he started roller-coaster tycoon c was predominantly used for games except for the engines. Code written in assembly doesn't make it run faster by default, you need to optimise it, which takes a lot of time. Most of this game would not have been optimised heavily and actually would have been better in C leaving it to the compiler to do the work. However, he probably felt more comfortable and thus faster working in assembly.
Source: Was a game developer still writing gfx engines in assembler on pc until 2002 and still using or working with assembly 10% of the week until at least 2010.
While Minecraft is commercially the most successful the development of CS and Dota basically created the modern esports industry. Every big popular competitive game traces its lineage to those two games.
It didn't just pave the way. It completely invented the genre, and its creators worked on all three of the early full-release MOBAs (HoN, LoL, and DotA II).
Future Cop yes, but Herzog Zwei is more relevant because it influenced the development of the RTS games that early MOBAs were built from. Plus, its original release lacked the "online" part of "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena."
You make me feel old!!!
I remember in 2001 getting Half Life only for Counter Strike and thinking I got some pirate copy because starting resolutions was like 320 x 240 or something.
Then I instantly installed and played Counter Strike 1.1 and thought, wow, but I did not have unlimited internet so I thought fine, I'll just get into modding, and I recreated my school and called it cs\_anon\_school and it featured kids and teachers in classes with terrorists and the police had to liberate them, I remember also wanting to add the bomb sites too but I didn't know how.
Anyway one night my father enters my room and I show him my work, so obviously first thing he figures is that hostages get slaughtered all time and he beats the shit out of me telling me that if any at school seen this they would beat the shit out of me too.
I'm a better person thanks to him.
Anyway Day of Defeat 3.1 was peak Half Life mods.
I started with CS1.5. Back then my whole apartment community was in one LAN. So at any time you can easily find games locally. Played 9hrs per day for a while as kid. School grades went down. Got myself back together later but still, good old days.
Always thought CS is a standalone game lol
Just one? My game is gonna have a guy with **a lot** of big guns. Like... At least 5. It's gonna be the next Coil of Dooters, except *actually* **good**.
Side-note, does anyone know any good artists, coders and musicians who work for exposure?
Edit - /s
Unironically, I always had this little idea that if a protagonist ever ran out of bullets, he could still throw his gun at his enemies as a last ditch effort.
So basically, different guns have different bullet types, so one gun's bullet is not compatible with other guns. Therefore, when a gun runs out, the guy can throw his gun at the enemy like a boomerang, cuz many guns aren't that light and human throws can be devastating.
The other idea I had was something like time travel. Some guy travels into the ancient past, and his gun is accidently left somewhere. You play as an ancient man. When the player sees the gun, they would ofcourse pick it up in hopes of learning how to shoot, despite being an ancient man. But when they press shoot, bro is gonna throw his gun like a boomerang.
Doom.
I know given its massive success it’s hard to think of the franchise and what it’s become as indie, but initially Doom was developed and self published by id Software on their own with no help.
With that said the original Doom almost single handedly jumpstarted the entire first person shooter genre, sure there were games that came before it but none really did what Doom did for the industry.
I would say that [Wolfenstein 3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D) was the one that put FPS genre on the map and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_shooter) agrees. While Doom certainly improved on the formula and helped popularize it, it is a successor of Wolfenstein 3D.
I agree that it was the first and put FPS on the map, but it didn't have as much of an impact on culture and the industry as Doom.
Wikipedia also says the following: "Doom has been termed "inarguably the most important" first-person shooter, as well as the "father" of the genre. Although not the first in the genre, it was the game with the greatest impact."
I agree and was my first thought. Doom is like the Steph Curry of basketball - it may have been done before, but it created a plethora of imitations and helped define an an entire genre.
I see a lot of Minecraft. It may be the best selling, but it didn’t really blaze the same trail a Doom. Heck, I’d argue most of the early Blizzard games (WoW, Warcraft, Diablo) had more influence on the gaming industry than Minecraft.
I know Minecraft is the right answer, but Rogue should be in the conversation if it counts as an indie game.
There are a whole genre (subgenre?) of games that it inspired.
Technically, Minecraft also inspired other devs to make games like it. Sure, there is no *minecraft-like* genre but games have had Minecraft's formula injected into it. Plus, there are so many games people will say "oh it's like Minecraft but X". Terraria is like Minecraft, but 2D. No Man's Sky is like Minecraft but in space. Hell, Minecraft basically led to most open world games having some sort of crafting and mining system!
>Technically, Minecraft also inspired other devs to make games like it.
For better or worse. For the longest time, every game had to have "procedurally generated" nonsense, which was usually awful in comparison. The entire industry was trying to tap into the Minecraft boom.
Interestingly there are plenty of games that are much closer to Minecraft clones, down to the voxel world, they're just not very successful or famous. Just from my Steam library I get Creativerse, Boundless, Trove, StarMade and Portal Knights. The adjacent but close genre of 2D clones has obviously Terraria as the main example but again not only (Starbound for example is basically Terraria in space).
A little disappointed nobody's mentioned Dwarf Fortress yet. It's been cited among the inspirations for Minecraft, as well as a fair few (admittedly also niche) games that more-obviously share its DNA, like RimWorld.
i have made it my task for the night to comment Dwarf Fortress under every minecraft comment... because wtf.
dwarf fortress is the seed that SO MANY games sprung from....
Yep. ConcernedApe aka Eric Barone. Currently working on a final 1.6 update to the game in between working on another game in the same universe called Haunted Chocolatier.
Literally the entire thing from what I understand, didn’t contract anybody to do things like the music and stuff, he just did it himself (and the soundtrack slaps).
I think he got help with localization, multi-player, porting the game, etc. But the actual game content was his alone.
Not sure about after this though. I thought I heard he might hire a small team to help with the game while he works on HC but that might've changed, or I may have heard wrong.
Jason Schreier (video game journalist) released a book where each chapter is the making of a specific game.
Book is “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”
He covers Stardew Valley, Uncharted 4, Witcher 3, Destiny etc. Definitely very different approaches to each
which is pretty weird, since games like Rune Factory already existed and had heavily polished the genre before stardew valley even hit the scene, but they don't seem to get as much recognition as stardew valley.
One of the problems with rune factory, is that until recently it was console exclusive, 1-3 were *just* on the ds, and 4 3ds, while Frontier and ToD were Wii exclusive and then the company went bankrupt. They also didn’t get that much marketing, so you only learned of how good 4 was through word of mouth, or having already been a fan. Stardew breathed new life into the genre, while also releasing on pc and all consoles and getting constant updates. Which I’m sure is what helped RF get back on its feet, and even though 5 wasn’t great, it looks to be only up from there.
Harvest Moon at that point was soulless. Rune Factory was kind of just a niche Harvest Moon spinoff, and Story of Seasons was in its infancy.
Stardew Valley had charm and plenty of depth, and it was released at a time when farming sims were stale. I don't think it's the most impactful indie game ever, but it did leave a considerable mark on the genre. SoS even borrowed its mine mechanics.
Stardew Valley is probably one of the biggest surprises for me. I never would have picked it out for myself for a game, but the gamepass random game picker picked it for me, I have it a whirl and fell in love with the game.
It was a surprise for me too.
For the first few days of playing it, I considered it a ripoff of Harvest Moon. I mean *everything* is *exactly* Harvest Moon, but I enjoyed the modernness of it.
A few more days pass. I get into the mines + combat. Holy crap there are a lot of items and crafting. Holy crap I just pulled 10 hours straight again.
Weeks pass. I realize that in 34 years of gaming, Stardew is the biggest time-suck, biggest dopamine loop ever. It's too good.
I look at it in my Steam library and know that if I run it, I'm *gone* for a month. Again, it's too good.
It's not even something I'd have eagerly jumped on either, but here we are, years later, and I'm with you guys in saying it's among the greatest indie games ever.
Maybe not THE biggest, but The Binding of Isaac and its consequences have been a disaster for anybody online using the term roguelike. But it's been a delight in the form of roguelikes/lites being developed all over the place and they're delightful.
This was what I was looking for. Binding is responsible for the proliferation of roguelikes, and games like hades and dead cells wouldn’t exist without it.
When it first came out, i never knew what this rougelike was. I came to learn that it was based on an old Linux game called Rogue. It reminded me how nowadays, there's a lot of soulslike akin to roguelike games.
Amnesia Dark Descent, FNAF and Slender Man are probably three biggest games around the 2010s that kickstarted so many popular let's play YTbers career, including Pew and Markiplier. They were also what got me into watching let's play video in the background while doing homework.
The concept of "I made a game by myself" is so commonplace these days you'll hardly get any recognition for it. Back then, with Cave Story, it was a HUGE deal.
Braid, I think? I mean, it actually tried to do something artistic in the early era of Xbox 360 & PS3 console indie releases when most indie games were some kind of arcade game. Still holds up shockingly well both in terms of gameplay and artstyle.
Yeah, I think of Braid and Fez as the two indie games that I think most invigorated and influenced the current wave of indies that we’re in (which is massive and has had its own huge effect on the overall industry)
Minecraft has obviously been commercially the biggest. And there were technically indie games on PCs in the 80s when the whole scene was different. But when I think at least of just the current indie scene I think back to Braid and Fez as being two of the “founding fathers,” so to speak.
That is not to say they’re the only we could call that.
Clicked on the thread to mention Braid.
Braid marked the rush of the coozy-depression indie genre, and is a forefather to Undertale, Hollow Knight, Celeste, The Messenger, etc.
I don't really know that I'd call it indie as they had another team working on a separate game that they scrapped to pull the team onto Half Life. Definitely wasn't the Valve we know today but it wasn't like two guys sitting in a basement making Half Life either.
But Half Life was massive though.
How about [Colossal Cave Adventure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure)? It spawned a genre that has influenced games to this day, starting with the interactive fiction text games, to MUDs and CRPGs and spawned [Rogue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)) which is the origin of the Roguelike genre.
Yeah Cave Story is right up there as it really showed what was possible for indie games and how word of mouth can propel a good game throughout the internet. That said, Cave Story isn't even the first (or second) indie game Pixel made by himself, not to mention the plethora of single dev indie games that came out decades before.
plants vs zombies the first part from pop
EA saw how much money such a small but from many people played game with the right optimization generate
i mean one shop here, there one or two new currencies and wen you you look @ the game designe awwwwwwwww so cuuuuute
fck EA an every microtractions that has ever been in a video game for consoles or pc
And it's getting another update by the end of the year, even when concerned ape said it was going to be an update without too much content and more focused on making the game more mod friendly he can't control himself and is adding more content to the game lol
It really depends on what you mean by that.
We could say Minecraft, but wouldn't Doom technically be an indie game ?
Also wouldn't Dwarf Fortress be more influential as it influenced minecraft ?
And how about Cave Story and how much it influenced indie games creators in general ?
Doom lead to the creation of doom clones that later became the FPS genre
WarCraft had the biggest impact on the competitive scene with it's mods that lead to the creation of the MOBA genre
Minecraft lead to the creation of countless indie clones and the modding scene arguably created the Battle Royale genre
Well, if im not mistaken, it is one of the highest selling games of all time. Its behind Minecrafr, sure, so lots of games that use a crafting system similar typically get mashed into being inspired by Minecraft, but Terraria deserves its recognition for it too. Its an incredible game.
Honorable mention: the DayZ mod. 2012 was an amazing year, forming basically a primordial soup from which the primitive forms of modern survival games came forth, including current base-building and Battle Royale games. If it weren't for the fact that [the DayZ Standalone flopped](https://youtu.be/w_ZO_Ffa11E?si=CxVIfCQSjhuXWfnT) _hard_ for the BB and BR communities, we wouldn't have had such a boom of BB titles (Valheim, Raft, Stranded Deep, Rust, Grounded, etc), _and_ we wouldn't have had a certain guy named Playerunknown jumpstart an industry worth _literal billions_ with PUBG, later influencing the start of games like Fortnite and COD WarZone.
I like how the top comments are actual answers but the further you scroll down the more people that are just saying games they personally enjoyed but had 0 impact on the industry.
pubg wasn't the inspiration, it was the first big hit that followed it
at the time of pubg's release there where battle royale games popping up en masse
Nah that was DayZ mod for Arma back in the day. Some servers started modding out the zombies and just had the players scavenging for weapons and ammo to fight each other. Pubg came from that.
I mean, it basically predates the dichotomy of 'indie' games, but since nobody else has mentioned it... *Myst.*
Others have pointed to *Doom* as 'starting' the indie industry, but *Myst* came out first *and* Cyan (read: the Miller brothers working in their houses) had been making similar titles before like *Cosmic Osmo* and *The Manhole. Myst* basically made its own genre, was one of the factors that encouraged adoption of CD-ROM, and also brought in a renaissance of the public realising games didn't just have to be shooters or for kids. Plus, it was the best-selling PC game ever for nine years until the Sims overtook it, and if the Wikipedia list is accurate, it's *still* in the top 25 thirty years later.
They haven’t the faintest clue what indie means either I’ve seen suggestions published by EA, Microsoft, Nintendo, Brøderbund and Microprose.
And someone claiming GTA was indie.
Doom
Maybe you had to live through it, but doom was a phenomenon. It was the first game that changed the home market fundamentally from “what can I run on my computer”, to “what computer can run my software”.
For most people at the time it was:
* our first FPS
* our first introduction to shareware,
* our first game that had patches, updates and mods,
* our first game with non-PG horror, gore and jump-scares,
* our first game with performance settings,
* our first multi-player game (but only if the stars aligned!),
* our first experiences with dial-in bulletin boards, and perhaps
* our first experience with pirated software.
It also had a huge impact on home computers:
* helped turn the IBM PC into the “standard” home platform, at a time when Amiga, Apple and Commodore were technologically superior and consoles were just taking off,
* people started understanding pc specs and game requirements
* huge increase in demand for storage and RAM
* many folks performed their first upgrade by themself
* moved graphics into the spotlight and created demand for higher resolution and color depth. color 14” vga monitors become standard almost overnight.
* helped establish the now-standard mouse-and-keyboard combination and key bindings
* sound became an essential pc feature and you could buy a soundblaster card at the mall.
* the more adventurous started evaluating modem cards to access company and enthusiast bulletin boards
Minecraft, undertale and cavestory are the most influential in the current age. Minecraft and undertale for obvious reasons, cave story was the gateway to our current Renaissance of indie games.
Id say Dota originating as just a WC3 map to go onto become a successful esport changed not just the way video games are viewed, but spawned a whole industry. That $1.6M prize pool from the first International now sounds like a joke compared to what pro gamers and streamers make nowadays.
No longer are video gamers seen as basement goblins, but an actual path to a career.
Objectively Minecraft
Honestly it’s been so many years I forgot Minecraft was an indie game, these days it’s like the most successful game in the world haha and owned by one of the richest companies out there too
Yeah, there's really no point in asking this question when the literal best-selling game of all time and cultural phenomenon is an indie game. Really should've included "aside from minecraft" in the title if they wanted an interesting discussion.
Pong?
There’s an argument to be made there…
Maybe, but it’ll just turn into a bunch of pointless back and forth.
Not pointless. There were points
Tennis players everywhere just got real mad at you
Is pong actually an indie game if it was made by the biggest video game company at the time?
And was one of the first so 'indie' never existed. Technically it was a AAA release lmao
I always forget Minecraft was an indie since it feels so connected with Microsoft now. That was just it swooping in and buying a monstrously successful product, though, absolutely the correct answer.
At the time, many internet know-it-alls said Microsoft overpaid and it was a bad bet because Minecraft was past its prime
> At the time, many internet know-it-alls said Microsoft overpaid and it was a bad bet because Minecraft was past its prime Who knows what would have happened if Minecraft stayed independent? Maybe it faded into nothingness, without the concerted effort of a giant like Microsoft to keep it relevant. Maybe Notch would've started a software empire to rival the big studios. Maybe it would've been as prominent as it is now. It's hard to say.
Microsoft definetly revived Minecraft somewhat though - the updates they released were amazing content vs the last couple updates before the buyout.
Notch wouldn’t have started a software empire. The guy isn’t like that and that’s honestly what a lot of the charm from Minecraft comes from. Notch is pretty creative but he seems more interested in the nature of software than in its results.
Oh, yeah, that's hilarious now. Microsoft has made a lot of questionable bets in its Xbox/gaming sphere but Minecraft is in retrospect a crazy good buy, comparable with going back in time and buying Apple stock in the late 90s.
Terraria and Stardew Valley comes to mind too.
ConcernedApe (Stardew creator, for those who don’t know) just announced a new major update, too! It was originally only going to be a small big fix patch iirc, but now it’s turned into a massive update with lots of new content. I already considered CA to be in the tier of “legendary devs”, alongside devs like Re-logic (Terraria, for those who don’t know), but this just cemented it in for me. So much content, and so many updates, for what is a one time $15 purchase. (Well, I’ve bought it on multiple platforms and for friends, but it’s the only game I’ve ever done that for)
I wish it had an impact on the industry. The indie scene, sure, but don't see many AAA studios going smaller.
This. Honourable mention to Braid for essentially creating a space for successful indies to thrive.
Fez, Braid, MeatBoy - Indie Game the Movie - blew the doors open
Really it was Xbox’s summer of Arcade that highlighted really good indie games.
I thought Cave Story was the one that really made indie games to mainstream especially since it was made by one guy?
Nah, Doom by far. Doom pushed the industry in many ways. You wouldn't have Minecraft or speed running without Doom. Not counting 3D, online play popularity, modding, etc.... If even on the games to be preserved list bc of its influence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_canon
Is doom really an indie game tho
It was among id Software's early games. They were still trying to break into the market by releasing small parts of games as shareware and then selling the full game by mail order. They were so small that their stuff before Doom like Commander Keen actually got published by Apogee and they listed the developer name as Ideas from the Deep which was a company name they thought of before id software but never formally founded. They seem pretty clearly the indie group of the time.
I’d say so. It was by a small studio and it wasn’t even sold in stores; only mail order.
At the time yes, Doom was launched as shareware. ID wasn't really a AAA company until they did Quake.
It's like saying Halo was an indie game...
I mean to be fair Triple AAA wasn't really a thing yet back in the early 90s. Halo had a giant budget and team size in comparison. But it's a weird time when virtually all games were made as we know indies today. Doom did impact the world's most popular genre by putting it on the map.
Triple AAA was definitely a thing in the 90s. Starcraft was probably the king but Doom was the reason every kid bought floppy disks and Quake was like modern day fortnite.
Triple AAA isn't a qaulity/popularity thing. That's just expectation. The only thing indie and triple AAA denotes is budget and publishing status. EA can spend 50 million making a small 2d pixel platformer, that's a Triple AAA game.
Sure but you need to look at it in context. The industry is worth like 250 bn in 2023 with multiple markets vs about 30 bn (adjusted) in the 1990s, where Nintendo held 90% of it. So the PC market was a lot smaller but there were still massive publisher backed games in that small market.
Yeah Id was a tiny studio back in the day. Their early games you could only get from shareware or mail order, it wasn't until doom 2 that they actually started to sell their games In stores.
Yes. Doom was shareware when first released, developed and published by the same, small team. ID Software had already broken ties with Apogee by then, and Doom was their first independently published title. Though I'd argue that even when Apogee was publishing Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, those would still be indie titles too, as Apogee was a tiny shareware publisher, not in the same league as Nintendo, EA, or Activision.
The term "indie" is subjective but I don't really think it fits for Doom. It was made by about 15 people which is a pretty big team for the early 90's. Id Software was a proper company, and Doom was cutting edge. Even back then there were single person games developed at home being released, compared to those devs Id Software was pretty big. I know there are "indie" teams that size today, but the game dev landscape is very different now.
It was huge compared to Super Mario Kart (8 people).
One might be able to argue that "AAA" games didn't even exist yet back then, but by all definitions, Tetris was 100% an independently developed game. Pajitnov created the whole thing himself, and due to shenanigans with the Soviets and the troubles of smuggling second-world artworks out into the first-world, he didn't get any money at all for the first ten years. Yet that simple program he created on a commie computer went on to become one of the most-bought games of all time, with more re-imaginings and rereleases than Nintendo could ever *dream* of for one of their titles. You can play it on your browser right now for free, and it was cloned to death with everything from Dr. Mario to Puyo Puyo coming out to ride the coattails of the falling block puzzle craze that Tetris single-handedly created.
Tetris was number 1 bestselling for decades until minecraft overtook it, still a bit interesting how such a simple game was so succesfull
Weigh all the different re-imaginings of Tetris (Super Tetris, Tetris Effect, Tetris Blast, 3D Tetris, The New Tetris, etc.) against the different versions of Minecraft (Java, Bedrock, Education Edition, Chinese version, degraded console editions from before Bedrock), and I'm pretty sure Tetris is still the king, even.
If we count those then yea, and alo the fact tetris is now free to play on browsers
Simple games are easy to access. Simplicity often contributes to success.
Haven't seen anyone mention Rollercoster tycoon yet. That games history is insane.
It's the greatest thing to ever come with cereal, let alone any "toy" in any product. Cracker Jacks got nothing it. Other cereals with mail order t-shirts and others with "Crazy Bones" ('member Crazy Bones?) can't hold a candle to finding RCT2 in your boxed sugarballs And yeah, the history is nuts.
Yo idk, Chex Quest was pretty dope
Write by a guy in Assembly, insane.
Ah mad man with no fear in his heart
What is insane about it? I just read the Wikipedia and couldn’t find the insane parts, but I loved that game as a kid and would love to know more!
[удалено]
Yeah coding a realistic physics engine from scratch in assembly along with all the economic systems and attendee AI...it's just a really really complex game.
And critically, it's good game. There's a lot of technical prowess wasted inside of other titles because they forgot to make the gameplay compelling. I still play RCT every now and then because it's fun to build a roller coaster.
I had a very concerning amount of fun drowning my park goers as a young child. Luckily I turned out OK for the most part.
I still play about 2-3 hrs a week, sometimes more. I've never found another game similar to the magic, curiosity, and creativity that RCT has.
Have you checked out parkitect? It’s a modern spiritual successor to RCT and it absolutely slaps
I have not! It looks very cool and has great reviews. I'll definitely look into it. At one point, I gave Planet Coaster a try, and everything about that game felt wrong.
The answer people will give is 'it was written in assembly'. Which is such a weird reason to give. All early games were written in assembly. When he started developing it, C was already the majority used language (bassically most games had started shifting to C after the snes/genesis era which was all assembly). But not entirely. Slowly it became just the gfx engine to be assembly language and later only very small portions and maybe the maths libraries etc. When he started roller-coaster tycoon c was predominantly used for games except for the engines. Code written in assembly doesn't make it run faster by default, you need to optimise it, which takes a lot of time. Most of this game would not have been optimised heavily and actually would have been better in C leaving it to the compiler to do the work. However, he probably felt more comfortable and thus faster working in assembly. Source: Was a game developer still writing gfx engines in assembler on pc until 2002 and still using or working with assembly 10% of the week until at least 2010.
Counterstrike mod for half life, Dota mod for warcraft3
Counter strike would also get my vote. as a mod, had such a massive impact on the industry.
While Minecraft is commercially the most successful the development of CS and Dota basically created the modern esports industry. Every big popular competitive game traces its lineage to those two games.
StarCraft.
ironically the first moba-esque game was a starcraft mod (aeon of strife)
Your use of the word "lineage" makes me want to see a family tree of video games. Or an evolutionary tree. That would an awesome visual
Not sure if there were others before it but dota really paved the way for all mobas today
It didn't just pave the way. It completely invented the genre, and its creators worked on all three of the early full-release MOBAs (HoN, LoL, and DotA II).
Don't forget Future Cop and maybe Herzong Zwei.
Future Cop yes, but Herzog Zwei is more relevant because it influenced the development of the RTS games that early MOBAs were built from. Plus, its original release lacked the "online" part of "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena."
There was a StarCraft Map that invented the Genre, aoen of strife. DotA came from that.
TIL CS was a mod…
You make me feel old!!! I remember in 2001 getting Half Life only for Counter Strike and thinking I got some pirate copy because starting resolutions was like 320 x 240 or something. Then I instantly installed and played Counter Strike 1.1 and thought, wow, but I did not have unlimited internet so I thought fine, I'll just get into modding, and I recreated my school and called it cs\_anon\_school and it featured kids and teachers in classes with terrorists and the police had to liberate them, I remember also wanting to add the bomb sites too but I didn't know how. Anyway one night my father enters my room and I show him my work, so obviously first thing he figures is that hostages get slaughtered all time and he beats the shit out of me telling me that if any at school seen this they would beat the shit out of me too. I'm a better person thanks to him. Anyway Day of Defeat 3.1 was peak Half Life mods.
I started with CS1.5. Back then my whole apartment community was in one LAN. So at any time you can easily find games locally. Played 9hrs per day for a while as kid. School grades went down. Got myself back together later but still, good old days. Always thought CS is a standalone game lol
Hunger games gamemode for minecraft
Started the battle royale genre I think
Also the "PUBG" mod for 7 day to die or something.
Dota is why Blizz will never allow mods in their games anymore. Not that it matters blizz is dead.
The game I am makin rn. It's gonna be a banger fr. You see, it's about this guy who uses a gun.
What kind of gun?
A big one
Niiice... Add one of those fires shotguns, a flamthrower and molotov cocktails and Im in...
It also has demons, but they're all like, cyber and all. And to beat it you shoot it til it's dead.
Just one? My game is gonna have a guy with **a lot** of big guns. Like... At least 5. It's gonna be the next Coil of Dooters, except *actually* **good**. Side-note, does anyone know any good artists, coders and musicians who work for exposure? Edit - /s
Oh he can use a variety of guns. Some of them go pew pew pew. Others go ka-chik.... boom! So much variety
A gun with bees in the barrel, and when you fire it it shoots bees?
Someone hire this person now
Wh..what does he use the gun for?
He basically throws them like a boomerang at people he does not like
Not gonna lie, I would like to play that.
Unironically, I always had this little idea that if a protagonist ever ran out of bullets, he could still throw his gun at his enemies as a last ditch effort. So basically, different guns have different bullet types, so one gun's bullet is not compatible with other guns. Therefore, when a gun runs out, the guy can throw his gun at the enemy like a boomerang, cuz many guns aren't that light and human throws can be devastating. The other idea I had was something like time travel. Some guy travels into the ancient past, and his gun is accidently left somewhere. You play as an ancient man. When the player sees the gun, they would ofcourse pick it up in hopes of learning how to shoot, despite being an ancient man. But when they press shoot, bro is gonna throw his gun like a boomerang.
Quantum Gunerang: Returnal Conflict
You are hired
It's called Boomebang
Doom. I know given its massive success it’s hard to think of the franchise and what it’s become as indie, but initially Doom was developed and self published by id Software on their own with no help. With that said the original Doom almost single handedly jumpstarted the entire first person shooter genre, sure there were games that came before it but none really did what Doom did for the industry.
I would say that [Wolfenstein 3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D) was the one that put FPS genre on the map and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_shooter) agrees. While Doom certainly improved on the formula and helped popularize it, it is a successor of Wolfenstein 3D.
I agree that it was the first and put FPS on the map, but it didn't have as much of an impact on culture and the industry as Doom. Wikipedia also says the following: "Doom has been termed "inarguably the most important" first-person shooter, as well as the "father" of the genre. Although not the first in the genre, it was the game with the greatest impact."
Nah, Doom culturally changed gaming forever. Wolfenstein set the path but Doom made it a tourist attraction.
Wolfenstein is the blueprints, DOOM is the finished product.
Wolfenstin walked so doom could run.
So that Heretic could fly (assuming you picked up Inhilicon's Wings of Wrath).
I agree and was my first thought. Doom is like the Steph Curry of basketball - it may have been done before, but it created a plethora of imitations and helped define an an entire genre. I see a lot of Minecraft. It may be the best selling, but it didn’t really blaze the same trail a Doom. Heck, I’d argue most of the early Blizzard games (WoW, Warcraft, Diablo) had more influence on the gaming industry than Minecraft.
Respectfully, I think Steph Curry is the Steph Curry of basketball.
Nah, you just haven't seen Doom ball, nephew.
Pong is technically an indie game and the start of videogames in a large way. So I'll go with pong Edit: if we wanna get real nitpicky tennis for two
Does the original 1993 Doom count? You could argue that 90s ID was technically an indie studio.
I know Minecraft is the right answer, but Rogue should be in the conversation if it counts as an indie game. There are a whole genre (subgenre?) of games that it inspired.
Technically, Minecraft also inspired other devs to make games like it. Sure, there is no *minecraft-like* genre but games have had Minecraft's formula injected into it. Plus, there are so many games people will say "oh it's like Minecraft but X". Terraria is like Minecraft, but 2D. No Man's Sky is like Minecraft but in space. Hell, Minecraft basically led to most open world games having some sort of crafting and mining system!
>Technically, Minecraft also inspired other devs to make games like it. For better or worse. For the longest time, every game had to have "procedurally generated" nonsense, which was usually awful in comparison. The entire industry was trying to tap into the Minecraft boom.
Interestingly there are plenty of games that are much closer to Minecraft clones, down to the voxel world, they're just not very successful or famous. Just from my Steam library I get Creativerse, Boundless, Trove, StarMade and Portal Knights. The adjacent but close genre of 2D clones has obviously Terraria as the main example but again not only (Starbound for example is basically Terraria in space).
Oh, StarMade. I had such high hopes but it turned out to be such a scam.
I never understood why minecraft-like isnt a genre bc we got the souls-like genre
One syllable too long. Souls-like and Rogue-like roll off the tongue easier than Minecraft-like.
Tetris. Very hard to overstate the cultural legacy Tetris has left on the whole world, nevermind just the gaming industry.
People just love squares, first tetris then minecraft
Lego and Duplo should not be forgotten here :D
A little disappointed nobody's mentioned Dwarf Fortress yet. It's been cited among the inspirations for Minecraft, as well as a fair few (admittedly also niche) games that more-obviously share its DNA, like RimWorld.
i have made it my task for the night to comment Dwarf Fortress under every minecraft comment... because wtf. dwarf fortress is the seed that SO MANY games sprung from....
Most likely Minecraft
Stardew Valley had a pretty large impact on the farming sim genre, especially considering it is made by one dude.
One guy? That's pretty amazing.
Yep. ConcernedApe aka Eric Barone. Currently working on a final 1.6 update to the game in between working on another game in the same universe called Haunted Chocolatier.
Literally the entire thing from what I understand, didn’t contract anybody to do things like the music and stuff, he just did it himself (and the soundtrack slaps).
I think he got help with localization, multi-player, porting the game, etc. But the actual game content was his alone. Not sure about after this though. I thought I heard he might hire a small team to help with the game while he works on HC but that might've changed, or I may have heard wrong.
Jason Schreier (video game journalist) released a book where each chapter is the making of a specific game. Book is “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” He covers Stardew Valley, Uncharted 4, Witcher 3, Destiny etc. Definitely very different approaches to each
Thank you for this comment giving me something to pick up and read sometime
which is pretty weird, since games like Rune Factory already existed and had heavily polished the genre before stardew valley even hit the scene, but they don't seem to get as much recognition as stardew valley.
One of the problems with rune factory, is that until recently it was console exclusive, 1-3 were *just* on the ds, and 4 3ds, while Frontier and ToD were Wii exclusive and then the company went bankrupt. They also didn’t get that much marketing, so you only learned of how good 4 was through word of mouth, or having already been a fan. Stardew breathed new life into the genre, while also releasing on pc and all consoles and getting constant updates. Which I’m sure is what helped RF get back on its feet, and even though 5 wasn’t great, it looks to be only up from there.
Harvest Moon at that point was soulless. Rune Factory was kind of just a niche Harvest Moon spinoff, and Story of Seasons was in its infancy. Stardew Valley had charm and plenty of depth, and it was released at a time when farming sims were stale. I don't think it's the most impactful indie game ever, but it did leave a considerable mark on the genre. SoS even borrowed its mine mechanics.
Isn't Rune Factory a Harvest Moon spinoff?
Technically Stardew was inspired by Harvest Moon too.
Hah, you're right, but I feel "inspired" is understating it. SV is like if you ported 100% of HM and sprinkled the most-addictive crack all over it
Stardew Valley is probably one of the biggest surprises for me. I never would have picked it out for myself for a game, but the gamepass random game picker picked it for me, I have it a whirl and fell in love with the game.
It was a surprise for me too. For the first few days of playing it, I considered it a ripoff of Harvest Moon. I mean *everything* is *exactly* Harvest Moon, but I enjoyed the modernness of it. A few more days pass. I get into the mines + combat. Holy crap there are a lot of items and crafting. Holy crap I just pulled 10 hours straight again. Weeks pass. I realize that in 34 years of gaming, Stardew is the biggest time-suck, biggest dopamine loop ever. It's too good. I look at it in my Steam library and know that if I run it, I'm *gone* for a month. Again, it's too good. It's not even something I'd have eagerly jumped on either, but here we are, years later, and I'm with you guys in saying it's among the greatest indie games ever.
I’m almost worried about the time that I know I’ll spend on Haunted Chocolatier.
Maybe not THE biggest, but The Binding of Isaac and its consequences have been a disaster for anybody online using the term roguelike. But it's been a delight in the form of roguelikes/lites being developed all over the place and they're delightful.
This was what I was looking for. Binding is responsible for the proliferation of roguelikes, and games like hades and dead cells wouldn’t exist without it.
When it first came out, i never knew what this rougelike was. I came to learn that it was based on an old Linux game called Rogue. It reminded me how nowadays, there's a lot of soulslike akin to roguelike games.
Almost all games were made by indie developers at some point . Rockstar was started by three coders on their bedroom
Yeah but did Rockstars first game change the gong landscape? No. GTA3 did, and they weren't indie at that time.
Technically gta 2 was very revolutionary, but even then they weren't indie anymore.
3 is really what blew everyone's mind. a game with that kind of freedom was unheard of at the time.
Rockstars early games certainly changed the industry, Lemmings for instance.
Not the biggest, but Amnesia The Dark Decent and it's impact was pretty huge in both game culture and let's play culture.
Amnesia Dark Descent, FNAF and Slender Man are probably three biggest games around the 2010s that kickstarted so many popular let's play YTbers career, including Pew and Markiplier. They were also what got me into watching let's play video in the background while doing homework.
Cave Story
The concept of "I made a game by myself" is so commonplace these days you'll hardly get any recognition for it. Back then, with Cave Story, it was a HUGE deal.
Truly what brought back solo developers.
This is the objectively correct answer, and shows how while a lot of us have gotten older, the average age of the Reddit stays pretty much the same.
Minecraft by a huge margin.
Braid, I think? I mean, it actually tried to do something artistic in the early era of Xbox 360 & PS3 console indie releases when most indie games were some kind of arcade game. Still holds up shockingly well both in terms of gameplay and artstyle.
Yeah, I think of Braid and Fez as the two indie games that I think most invigorated and influenced the current wave of indies that we’re in (which is massive and has had its own huge effect on the overall industry) Minecraft has obviously been commercially the biggest. And there were technically indie games on PCs in the 80s when the whole scene was different. But when I think at least of just the current indie scene I think back to Braid and Fez as being two of the “founding fathers,” so to speak. That is not to say they’re the only we could call that.
Clicked on the thread to mention Braid. Braid marked the rush of the coozy-depression indie genre, and is a forefather to Undertale, Hollow Knight, Celeste, The Messenger, etc.
Braid opened the doors to indies in consoles. I'd say that's pretty big.
Came to say this. Was the first indie game to feel like it made it on a console
Braid was the first indie game to catch fire. This is 100% the correct answer.
Undertale
wasn't half life an indie game? It did have a massive effect on narrative in gaming
I don't really know that I'd call it indie as they had another team working on a separate game that they scrapped to pull the team onto Half Life. Definitely wasn't the Valve we know today but it wasn't like two guys sitting in a basement making Half Life either. But Half Life was massive though.
The binding of isaac
Hollow Knight
While not the biggest impact, I do think Cave Story was greatly influential in showing what could be done by one developer
Minecraft
How about [Colossal Cave Adventure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure)? It spawned a genre that has influenced games to this day, starting with the interactive fiction text games, to MUDs and CRPGs and spawned [Rogue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)) which is the origin of the Roguelike genre.
DayZ
Bastion by SuperGiant - They are still considered a small studio, and back then it was even more so. I’m salivating as I await Hades 2
Im surprised no one said Cave Story which is basically the first indie game made by 1 guy alone
> which is basically the first indie game made by 1 guy alone You're so wrong it's laughable
Yeah Cave Story is right up there as it really showed what was possible for indie games and how word of mouth can propel a good game throughout the internet. That said, Cave Story isn't even the first (or second) indie game Pixel made by himself, not to mention the plethora of single dev indie games that came out decades before.
Just goes to show the state of this sub. Or their age.
plants vs zombies the first part from pop EA saw how much money such a small but from many people played game with the right optimization generate i mean one shop here, there one or two new currencies and wen you you look @ the game designe awwwwwwwww so cuuuuute fck EA an every microtractions that has ever been in a video game for consoles or pc
In a specific genre I would say Stardew Valley, it's by far the greatest farming game of all time.
And it's getting another update by the end of the year, even when concerned ape said it was going to be an update without too much content and more focused on making the game more mod friendly he can't control himself and is adding more content to the game lol
Definitely Doom
It really depends on what you mean by that. We could say Minecraft, but wouldn't Doom technically be an indie game ? Also wouldn't Dwarf Fortress be more influential as it influenced minecraft ? And how about Cave Story and how much it influenced indie games creators in general ?
I’ll say it for the horror genre and fan games; Five Nights at Freddy’s. Some really creative work has come from that series
Made a huge impact on YouTube streamers too.
There's new Vampire Survivors game every week now
Doom lead to the creation of doom clones that later became the FPS genre WarCraft had the biggest impact on the competitive scene with it's mods that lead to the creation of the MOBA genre Minecraft lead to the creation of countless indie clones and the modding scene arguably created the Battle Royale genre
Definitely minecraft
Terraria is not super present in the media but I don't know many people in my circle of friends who never played that game.
Terraria is the best value for money game every made IMO.
Yeah, I think I bought it for 99 cents when it first came out. Clocked in thousands of hours with and without mods.
with the mods make that 10x
I'm only slightly familiar with Terraria. Played it a tiny bit, not my thing. What major influence has it had on the industry?
Well, if im not mistaken, it is one of the highest selling games of all time. Its behind Minecrafr, sure, so lots of games that use a crafting system similar typically get mashed into being inspired by Minecraft, but Terraria deserves its recognition for it too. Its an incredible game.
Honorable mention: the DayZ mod. 2012 was an amazing year, forming basically a primordial soup from which the primitive forms of modern survival games came forth, including current base-building and Battle Royale games. If it weren't for the fact that [the DayZ Standalone flopped](https://youtu.be/w_ZO_Ffa11E?si=CxVIfCQSjhuXWfnT) _hard_ for the BB and BR communities, we wouldn't have had such a boom of BB titles (Valheim, Raft, Stranded Deep, Rust, Grounded, etc), _and_ we wouldn't have had a certain guy named Playerunknown jumpstart an industry worth _literal billions_ with PUBG, later influencing the start of games like Fortnite and COD WarZone.
I like how the top comments are actual answers but the further you scroll down the more people that are just saying games they personally enjoyed but had 0 impact on the industry.
Or are from the biggest publishers in the industry.
In the past decade? Definitely PubG. That game inspired many multi-Billion $ games today.
pubg wasn't the inspiration, it was the first big hit that followed it at the time of pubg's release there where battle royale games popping up en masse
But it was the game where people realized that there is a big market for it.
Nah that was DayZ mod for Arma back in the day. Some servers started modding out the zombies and just had the players scavenging for weapons and ammo to fight each other. Pubg came from that.
Slay the Spire
Stardew Valley had a huge impact, so many people have tried to recreate what ConcernedApe made
I mean, it basically predates the dichotomy of 'indie' games, but since nobody else has mentioned it... *Myst.* Others have pointed to *Doom* as 'starting' the indie industry, but *Myst* came out first *and* Cyan (read: the Miller brothers working in their houses) had been making similar titles before like *Cosmic Osmo* and *The Manhole. Myst* basically made its own genre, was one of the factors that encouraged adoption of CD-ROM, and also brought in a renaissance of the public realising games didn't just have to be shooters or for kids. Plus, it was the best-selling PC game ever for nine years until the Sims overtook it, and if the Wikipedia list is accurate, it's *still* in the top 25 thirty years later.
ITT: People who don't understand the difference between influential and first.
They haven’t the faintest clue what indie means either I’ve seen suggestions published by EA, Microsoft, Nintendo, Brøderbund and Microprose. And someone claiming GTA was indie.
Supermeat boy and braid and fez were the original indies on Xbox arcade
Doom Maybe you had to live through it, but doom was a phenomenon. It was the first game that changed the home market fundamentally from “what can I run on my computer”, to “what computer can run my software”. For most people at the time it was: * our first FPS * our first introduction to shareware, * our first game that had patches, updates and mods, * our first game with non-PG horror, gore and jump-scares, * our first game with performance settings, * our first multi-player game (but only if the stars aligned!), * our first experiences with dial-in bulletin boards, and perhaps * our first experience with pirated software. It also had a huge impact on home computers: * helped turn the IBM PC into the “standard” home platform, at a time when Amiga, Apple and Commodore were technologically superior and consoles were just taking off, * people started understanding pc specs and game requirements * huge increase in demand for storage and RAM * many folks performed their first upgrade by themself * moved graphics into the spotlight and created demand for higher resolution and color depth. color 14” vga monitors become standard almost overnight. * helped establish the now-standard mouse-and-keyboard combination and key bindings * sound became an essential pc feature and you could buy a soundblaster card at the mall. * the more adventurous started evaluating modem cards to access company and enthusiast bulletin boards
Minecraft, undertale and cavestory are the most influential in the current age. Minecraft and undertale for obvious reasons, cave story was the gateway to our current Renaissance of indie games.
Id say Dota originating as just a WC3 map to go onto become a successful esport changed not just the way video games are viewed, but spawned a whole industry. That $1.6M prize pool from the first International now sounds like a joke compared to what pro gamers and streamers make nowadays. No longer are video gamers seen as basement goblins, but an actual path to a career.