History
The origins of indie video games may be traced back to the 1970s, when there was virtually no established computer gaming industry. As video game firms developed they employed more programmers. Nonetheless, independent programmers continued to make their own games. During the 1990s, indie games were most commonly distributed as shareware or shared from friend to friend and therefore known as "shareware games".
Before the mid-1990s, commercial game distribution was controlled by big publishers and retailers, and developers of indie games were forced to either build their own publishing company, find one willing to distribute their game, or distribute it in some form of shareware (e.g. through BBSs). With the rise of online shopping, it has become possible to sell indie games to a worldwide market with little or no initial investment by using services such as XBLA or PayPal.
By the mid 2000s, many indie (computer) game developers have also taken the opportunity to make their games open source, thus rendering the group of possible participants much larger depending on the interest a project generates. This approach enables games to become much more complex as well as to succeed where a closed source version would be restricted due to limited resources, risking the possibility of vaporware. Several online communities have formed around independent game development, like TIGSource, Ludum Dare, PixelxCore Independent Gaming and the indiegames.com blog.
Read more about this topic: Independent Video Game Development
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)