Indie Game: The Movie is only 12 years old, but it feels like a relic
polygon.comI 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
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