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‘Independent’ isn’t a useful title for what you’re talking about, MG. It’s largely inseparable from its meaning in a business sense and doesn’t mean much as a genre heading. I guess what you’re talking about is something that doesn’t fit into any of the current genre specifications, or at least veers away from them enough that it stands out from the crowd?
The Web can provide more than just crappy film tie-ins or rejected college projects. Pompom got quite a bit of press (in the UK, at least) for Space Tripper and, more recently, Mutant Storm. There’s also the legendary Jeff Minter’s recent remake of Gridrunner which, again, bypasses the need for a publisher by being available online. Sure, they’re all titles that look to the past, but they honestly feel fresher than nearly all the big budget, mainstream releases (Gridrunner especially – I strongly recommend downloading the demo version, it’s one of the best examples of ‘zone’ gaming currently available).
The main obstacle to the ‘smaller development period, smaller development budget’ ideal is the console market. Simply put, you just can’t self-publish a console title. The fundamental problem that once existed – the proprietary format – seems to be disappearing (with the prevalence of CD-based machines) but the impact of cartridge-based titles is likely to be felt for a long time and prevent people from attempting to publish their own games. Even with cart-based machines you can step around the problem (a Flash Advance cartridge, for example, will let you download home-made titles to play on yr GameBoy), but it’s all a bit of a legal grey area (what with those self-same cartridges allowing you to play downloaded copies of ‘proper’ releases).
I’ll probably come in for some stick for this (if I was to say it about music I’d – justifiably – get a verbal kicking), but what’s currently lacking is an educated, demanding audience. As long as Fifa 2483 and Doom 21 keep selling there’s not any great need for innovation in the eyes of games publishers. Developers may well want to push at the boundaries simply for the sake of it, but without the budget that the big publishing houses provide there’s not really any motivation to do so. And you’ve just got to look at the ridiculous amount of space that’s been given over to Doom 3 in the PC gaming press based on its looks alone (and static looks at that) to see that innovation in terms of how a game plays, how it involves the user, is somewhere down the bottom of the list of priorities.
Your attempt to draw a comparison with film is an interesting one. Each of the directors mentioned could be described as creative visionaries, in that their films are nearly always identifiable as being theirs – in other words, an Allen film feels like an Allen film. Even without that type of director, a film is still largely seen as being the director’s baby. “A Martin Scorsese Picture” scream the posters. Games, in contrast, are always attributed to the publishing house first, the developers second and the creative visionary – if there is one – never. This wasn’t always the case, of course; Tony Crowther, Matt Smith, Jeff Minter, Braben & Bell, Archer MacLean, Jez San, the names of the programmers used to be blazoned across the box, loading screen and promotional material of games. Obviously, as programming teams became bigger and roles within them more segregated this was going to happen less, but I still find it a bit odd that you don’t see the words “A Shigeru Miyamoto Game” anywhere. Yes, most of those old names have pretty much disappeared from view (there’s only Minter and Crowther who ever seem to release anything nowadays), but there are visionaries out there, people whose games always have their own flavour – Miyamoto, Yuji Naka, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Yu Suzuki… (notice a trend?) Again, though, we’re talking about developers with access to some of the biggest budgets around.
That said, there are teams that constantly innovate and have some measure of success but aren't big-bucks players. Treasure are fairly well known and, I should imagine, have enough cash behind them to keep themselves secure, but they’re far from the top league of earners; their titles only rarely make it out of Japan and into the US and Europe. This is undoubtedly because they take risks, because they create games that don’t conform to genre stereotypes and, therefore, aren’t guaranteed earners in the eyes of the big publishers. They’ve got a small, rabid fanbase in their home territory and abroad, which suggests that the support for your non-genre, ‘independent’ titles is there. It needs feeding, though, before it dies out. The more ‘me too’ games come out the harder it is to find the jewels amongst the dross and the less those jewels sell. There’s no willingness to experiment amongst the larger, Western publishers, and fewer sales for non-genre titles inevitably means that fewer non-genre titles get released over here.
Capcom have got an interesting experiment underway at the moment (an experiment which could really only have come from Japan – US and European publishers wouldn’t touch something like this in a million years). They’ve created a number of small development teams within their own organisation whose sole purpose is to create the New, to push at those boundaries and see how far they’ll stretch. The thinking seems to be that because they’re small teams, if the projects fail the financial loss will be minimal. The titles shown so far all appear to look back to older, largely deserted genres for inspiration and imbue them with new life (two of the titles, Killer 7 and Viewtiful Joe, look totally individual, if nothing else) .
Er… does any of that go some way to answering the original questions? |
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