Iconic video game doc Indie Game: The Movie already feels like a relic

I attended a screening of Indie Game: The Movie, which is probably still the most famous documentary about video game development, in early 2012. It was held at the Game Developers Conference — “the definition of a home crowd,” as I wrote at the time — and it earned a standing ovation from a huge audience in the main hall of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The Kickstarter-funded film had already screened at the Sundance Film Festival by that point, but this was the debut before its true audience: people who love games, people who make games, people who dream of making games. Naturally, they lapped up the movie’s confident storytelling, larger-than-life characters, and romanticization of the artist’s struggle.

Rewatching the movie now — it’s available to rent or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV — is a strange experience. Twelve years is not a very long time in film, or in the real world, and you could hardly call the movie dated. The people in the film inhabit a world recognizable as the one we inhabit now; they use smartphones and check the discourse on Twitter and YouTube. The film itself, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, is a slick, well-edited documentary in the contemporary style, and is notable for how cleverly and stylishly it uses video game footage — still a rarity now. As a warts-and-all portrayal of video game development it’s been surpassed, particularly by the two astonishingly frank Double Fine documentary series, but you can’t hold that against it.

In video games, however, 12 years is a lifetime. The world of indie game development — of all game development — has changed unrecognizably since then, and the fates of the movie’s main characters since tell a thorny, sad story that doesn’t fit the filmmakers’ aspirational narrative.

The movie has two main strands of story. In one, Team Meat — indie developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes — ready their anarchic platformer Super Meat Boy for release on Xbox Live Arcade in late 2010. In the other, Polytron’s Phil Fish prepares to show his game Fez at the PAX East gaming expo in early 2011. Fez has been in development hell for years, and an acrimonious split with Fish’s former business partner has seemingly put the game’s future in legal peril. Meanwhile, Jonathan Blow comments from the sidelines about the success of his 2008 breakout Braid, an early harbinger of the indie game explosion, like some wizened oracle. (Braid has just been rereleased in a new Anniversary Edition.)

It’s funny to see the developers wielding Xbox 360 controllers and discussing the Xbox Live Arcade marketplace as the be-all and end-all of indie-game distribution; Steam is only briefly discussed, not much mention is made of mobile app stores, and PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t even in the conversation. Refenes stresses out when Super Meat Boy appears not to get a promised-for placement on the Xbox front-end, which seems quaint compared to the launch-day worries of most indie developers in 2024, hoping to get noticed at all among hundreds of new releases every day across half a dozen key storefronts.

The amount of noise developers need to cut through, and the sheer volume of games released, might be the biggest change in the indie gaming scene between 2012 and now. But there have been major cultural shifts, too. Indie Game: The Movie is honest about the human struggle of game development, up to a point. McMillen and Refenes talk movingly about the crushing stress and overwork of launching their game, while Fish and Blow open up about the frustration and alienation associated with finding themselves the focus of online discourse.

Image: Indie Game: The Movie

But this was a couple of years before that discourse would be weaponized by online harassment campaigns, before unhealthy working practices as a fact of life in game development would start to be challenged, and before the privilege of these four white, male, rockstar game developers would be seriously checked. Fish saying he will kill himself if he can’t finish Fez, and appearing to mean it, is a genuinely shocking moment. But the movie ultimately seems to buy into the anguished state of these developers’ mental health as a badge of their artistic authenticity, and by extension that of the whole video game medium. Look, they’re just like Sid Vicious or Vincent Van Gogh, Swirsky and Pajot seem to suggest. They don’t have the foresight to challenge the necessity of making games in this way.

At the time, I was frustrated by Indie Game: The Movie’s casting. The filmmakers chose to focus on stars in the making whose success was either already established or seemed guaranteed, whatever the drama that might surround it. What about the majority who don’t sell a million copies, or bag the promotional deal with Microsoft, or pay off their parents’ mortgage? That’s still a serious omission in the film’s portraiture, although it’s given a strange, poignant twist when you consider what happened to these four men next.

Blow and Fish both ended up tanking their reputations with public remarks that were misguided at best, offensive at worst. Refenes and McMillen split up. Repeat success has been elusive. McMillen, the most grounded of the bunch, did follow up Super Meat Boy with another smash, The Binding of Isaac, but has spent much of the past decade on a frustrated quest to make a game called Mewgenics, first with Refenes and then without him. Blow, always a philosophically remote figure, spent nine years making a brilliant but inscrutable puzzle game called The Witness, then somehow talked his way into being a public COVID-19 conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. Fez turned out to be a masterpiece, but the hot-headed Fish imploded soon after its release in a mess of brash comments; he announced Fez 2, canceled it almost immediately in an apparent fit of pique, and has yet to make another game. (He seems calmer and happier now, in relative obscurity.)

Image: Indie Game: The Movie

It’s as if Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson had only managed to come up with one-and-a-half hit movies between them after they broke out in the ’90s, then faded into obscurity — an obscurity they might even welcome. It seems as if the game industry is almost as bad at supporting its most talented independent creators when they succeed as when they fail.

Or, maybe, what Indie Game: The Movie misses in its rush to hero-worship these lone-wolf artists is that making video games has always been a collective endeavor. Between the releases of Super Meat Boy and Fez came another XBLA hit, Bastion, by Supergiant Games. This tight collective carried on making more games, sometimes with publishers, sometimes without. They supported each other and grew carefully. They made their own masterpiece, Hades, and managed not to flame out afterward. Now they’re following it up, and the sequel seems just as good. That’s not a sexy story to put in a video game doc, but maybe it’s one we all need to hear.