The Bottled Lightning Myth
The independent gaming scene has exploded within the last decade. We have seen a swell of easy-to-use game development software, ranging from the simple but direct RPG Maker series to the hilariously powerful Unity engine, each with their own wealth of cheap and accessible premade assets that allow for quick iteration on ideas. Alongside this ease of access to development capital, the coming of sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, independent game developers with gaming ideas too strange for the AAA industry to monetize have found a platform perfectly suited to find the people who will pay for their work before the work is even completed. These tools, combined with the wealth of available digital sales outlets like Steam allowing anyone to upload everything they can make to the service for an easily accessible fee, have made self-publishing a viable option for independent developers. Even advertising a new title has become easier, with numerous social media platforms and a thirsty-for-content review industry allowing developers to get the word out for practically pennies.
And yet, every time we hear about an independent success, we hear the same thing; “Oh, that was a lightning in a bottle moment, that couldn’t possibly happen again.” Early in the independent boom, this might have made a certain amount of sense. After all, we didn’t really hear about that many independent titles before these things hit the mainstream, so it was difficult for a given title to get out there. But in this recent boom, calling a successful independent title a flash in the pan or lightning in a bottle is insulting. We see successes almost daily these days, with indie developers like Scott Cawthon managing to build small empires based on simple premises. While we do still see wave upon wave of independently produced games being lost by the wayside, the number of successful titles is on the rise, so what is it that these successful titles do differently?
Quite a bit, if we’re being honest with ourselves, but let’s get specific. The big two games that people think of when they talk about indie success stories, Scott Cawthon’s Five Nights at Freddy’s and Toby Fox’s Undertale, made strong use of everything discussed above. Social media presence, the vast sea of independent reviewers and Let’s Plays, easy to use development software (Clickteam Fusion and Game Maker, respectively), strategic use of Steam and embracing the low cost culture of the platform, and while Five Nights failed to make any headway with kickstarter, Undertale was a Kickstarter smash hit, doing as much to make Kickstarter famous as Kickstarter did to make Undertale famous.
But these aren’t the only things these titles did to differentiate themselves. Both of these titles used a unique art style in a genre that the AAA industry had long since decided were dead. Survival horror and menu-driven RPGs had all but disappeared from the AAA landscape, driven to near extinction by publishing companies that had decided that they simply were not viable genres and in doing so created a vacuum in the industry. Yet by combining a relaxed, goofy, almost non-sequitur art style with the simplistic freedom of form that menu-driven combat (or in this case, menu-driven conversation) can bring, Undertale managed to become a smash hit in a genre that was declared dead. Combine these elements with the engaging meta-narrative of the story, the uniqueness of the game’s more esoteric mechanics, and the killer soundtrack, Undertale couldn’t help but be a smash hit.
Meanwhile, while survival horror games began to dilute themselves with action elements in the AAA environment, Scott Cawthon was able to mix the inherently creepy aesthetic of animatronics with stress-inducing time management gameplay in Five Nights at Freddy’s, creating one of the indie scenes few multimedia sensations out of what is essentially a series of jump scares. These elements alone would make for a strong survival horror title, but there is an additional factor that brought not just Five Nights, but Undertale as well, to nearly cult status, which is simply that these games are just as fun to watch as they are to play.
Gaming is inherently an interactive medium, but YouTube personalities have managed to figure out a way to involve players in ways that were previously unheard of, and these titles managed to capitalize on this new form of entertainment in unexpected ways. For Five Nights at Freddy’s, the use of still images and the lack of a soundtrack create a perfect interest curve when juxtaposed against the jump scare when the player fails and the often exaggerated fright of the YouTube personality. This allowed viewers to cathartically enjoy the scares of the game without the stress of playing through it, whether that enjoyment came from having someone to be scared alongside of or having someone to laugh at for being scared.
Undertale also managed to take advantage of this through a completely different angle. By creating a strong and intriguing narrative that requires multiple playthroughs to see all possible endings, each viewing feels different and unique when combined with the YouTube personalities that play it. While on the surface this happens in many different games, Undertale takes it a step further with the Fun Value. For the unaware, the Fun Value in Undertale is a background number generated at the start of a given playthrough that affects numerous small events. These events could be anything from a phone call that wouldn’t otherwise happen, to entire new rooms appearing in seemingly familiar halls. By adding this Fun Value, Toby Fox managed to create a different viewing/play experience for every player, making most Let’s Plays of Undertale into unique shows of their own even before the various YouTube personalities added additional flair.
Not only were these games fun to watch, but these two titles in particular enjoyed another benefit: Theorist Culture. Cawthon and Fox managed to pack their games to bursting with easter eggs, hidden stories, and secret lore that led players on furious scavenger hunts to dig up as much information as they could so they could piece together these hidden stories. Entire communities sprung up around the what-ifs and maybes of these two games, with channels like Game Theory seeing a MASSIVE increase in viewers whenever they covered these topics. Scott Cawthon would even go on to pander specifically to these communities with Alternative Reality Game (ARG) websites, hidden images, and Twitter clues to lead them to the correct conclusions or to simply drive the conversation.
And these two are just some of the bigger successes. This doesn’t include Minecraft, an indie title so successful that it could easily be considered the progenitor of the Indie Golden Age, or Slime Rancher, a smaller indie success story built around exploration in a (relatively) safe environment with constant free updates to keep the game fresh and new. The list of recent indie success stories beyond those is so laughably long that it would take a small book just to list all the titles. To call any of these success stories lightning in a bottle is to do a disservice to the hard work of their developers, as well as the ingenuity and passion that they clearly packed into every byte of their games.
