There's a New (Video) Game in Town

(March 16) -- Like Hollywood, the video game industry has been dominated by huge companies with large teams and endless budgets. Those big companies tend to stick with safe bets -- recognizable genres and endless sequels.

But also like Hollywood, video games have begun to see the development of an army of young independents unafraid of risks. The advent of platforms like the iPhone, Facebook, the iTunes App Store and Xbox Live Arcade is giving the kind of exposure to independent developers that they can't get on the retail store shelves.

Randy Smith is the co-founder of Tiger Style Games, the creator of Independent Games Festival "best mobile game" winner "Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor." Tiger Style Games has only two full-time employees. The company uses independent musicians and friends from college when it needs extra help. Employees share in profits rather than receive salaries.

Smith couldn't have imagined creating his slapdash studio five years ago.

"Because of the App Store, we had the opportunity to be an indie company that could succeed and be sustainable," he says. The iTunes App Store "gave us the chance to do something interesting, a little crazy, and let it get recognized."

Noah Falstein, a freelance designer, has been making games since before people thought to put pingpong on a computer. To him, the recent surge of small developers isn't new at all. It harkens back to the early '80s, where one designer would go to his house and come out three months later with a game.

Testing a new game then was as easy as putting the machine in the corner of an arcade and seeing if people played it.

"Now that games have gotten simpler again, there are many one- or sometimes just two- to three-person teams," Falstein says.

The prevailing attitude at the Games Developers Conference five years ago was that if you weren't making a $50 million game with a 100-person team, Falstein says, there was no future for you in the industry.

"It's wonderful to see that turn around, because that was a very soulless and unpleasant future," he says.

That startup spirit, combined with low-budget companies that don't have investors or boards to answer to, has produced a new wave of experimentation in an art form that typically tends toward a few reliable tropes to make blockbusters. A development community used to dragons and machine guns was shocked by the runaway success of FarmVille, a Facebook game that promised nothing more exciting than planting and harvesting crops.

Independent games, like independent movies, tend towards the quirky, the esoteric and the strange. The basic game mechanic in the browser game "Today I Die," involves moving words around in a poem. Another game, "AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!," mostly allows the player to fall.

Falstein says the penchant toward the strange also echoes the early '80s, when developers had no idea how consumers would respond to a brand new medium. Back then, Pac-Man was as surprising a success as FarmVille.

"Who would have thought that picking up little dots would have been so addictive?" he says.

Veteran designers like Falstein as well as young developers looking to make a name are flocking to these new forms. Computer gaming sage Sid Meier has plans to bring his award-winning Civilization series to Facebook.

Changes in game style and distribution come with the largest audience that games have ever seen, and some developers are having trouble adjusting to what is being regarded as a sea change in the development community.

"Some are beginning to realize that indeed it is a permanent change," says Joseph Olin, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. "We now have an audience in interactive entertainment consumers who are not looking for immersive experiences."

Jason Cirillo of Robotube Games, a small company working on developing a downloadable game for Nintendo Wii, has watched the transformation of indie development from the nearly impossible to financially feasibility in five years.

"It's the best time ever to be an indie developer, hands down," he says.