I'm not sure what you mean. If I go to photos.google.com, I can easily select a range of photos (Shift-Click to select an entire range) and download them all as a zip folder.
Sierra started with Ken and Roberta Williams working out of their house on Mystery House, in their spare time while Ken held down a full time job. Later, of course, they became a big company and so no longer indie.
Yeah, that's a bit of an odd thing to say. It may rightfully be considered among the first indie games that got mainstream attention, but 'original indie game' is rather an overstatement.
This is very true. However, I recall it being in the first crop of commercially successful indie games: World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, Castle Crashers, Braid.
"Indie" doesn't just mean independent. It is (or was) a specific scene, centered to an extent around TIGSource and its forums. The games that came from this scene are what put the genre in its current spotlight.
I would say that that's a redefinition/hijacking of a word that's been in use since long before 2008 to mean exactly "independent" in many different art forms.
EDIT: You may find it interesting to read Jordan Mechner's journals about the making of Prince of Persia as a solo dev (published by Broderbund, so not quite fitting the indie self distribution model today, but otherwise fairly similar). They used to be available online, which may not be true anymore, but it's certainly worth $8 or whatever they may be asking for.
Still, that's how the word is used today. Many, if not most, "indie" games are either made by those original TIGSource people, or were strongly influenced by contact with that community.
"It was first released on December 10, 1993, when a shareware copy was uploaded to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin."
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm sure they published it later via a variety of publishers, but they made a ton off of the shareware version. Masters of Doom is a fantastic read, if you haven't read it.
Actually, this was around 2008 or so, so Steam was already out for a few years. Most of those games hit it big on XBLA before heading to Steam a few years later.
Well, it is also not hard to think of other successful independent games that predate 2004. Or 1994. Or 1984. It seems to come down to what you mean by it? Without access to the author's mental definition of the term we can't really quibble successfully.
It is just an easy narrative trope to throw if you are a lazy journalist having to write an article.
Braid was a very successful indie game. Even if you don't consider the early games such as Doom as indies, there has been cult games like Uplink way before Braid.
It just arrived at the right time in order to be published on consoles as well (and with the right portable gameplay).
Actually it kind of died out for a bit. During the PS1 and PS2 era, with the introduction of optical media and a push for mainstream quality, low-budget (and hence only moderately profitable) games slowly died out, while high-risk, high-return 'AAA' games dominated. That's not to say that people didn't make independent games at this time but they were rather niche. The Indie movement was in part a rebellion against that.
We were making commercial games from our bedroom in the 80's and 90's but we were not calling ourselves "indies".
I'm pretty sure industry comparisons with indie filmmakers and indie music bands started before Braid (IndieCade was founded in 2005), but as a widely used and popular term, I think it's fair to choose 2008 as a turning point [1], and Braid as the poster child.
That segment of the market has gone through many names. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom as "shareware" which defined a fairly large chunk of the indie market back in the early 90's. Before that there were people putting games out on BBS systems that you could buy the full versions of by mailing in checks of money with your return address. You don't get much more "indie" than that (but you can).
> Professionals, managers, and executives with a smartphone spend 72 hours a week (including the weekend) checking work e-mail.
No, they spend 72 hours a week "interacting with work" in any way. Though the thought of an executive sitting and refreshing an inbox for 10+ hours a day is quite amusing.
It's a fun competition, but I had the exact same experience as oulipian. I co-created RAPT, which won "Most Fun", and we never received Dreamweaver, a Think Vitamin sponsorship, or "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja". However, we did receive a box containing t-shirts, Buckyballs, and Mozilla swag.
