An “indie” game is simply a game where the people creating the game don’t answer to any outsiders when it comes to its creative direction. Generally, people think of indie games as having low budgets and small teams, but that’s not actually a requirement to be independent.

At the same time, there are low-budget games with small teams that are not indie, such as Dave the Diver. There are some games that, to look at, might not trigger the idea of what an indie game should be in your mind. Here are some examples that I think are indie games (though surely you can argue against it) despite it not feeling entirely right to call them that.

10

Minecraft

This is perhaps the most successful indie game of all time, but I don’t think anyone could argue that Minecraft isn’t an indie game. Sure, it stopped being indie when Notch Persson sold it to Microsoft, but the base game upon which this massive media empire was built is largely the work of one man, who had a little help from a talented composer, and a lot of community beta testers.

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This is basically the ultimate example of a bedroom coder making it big. All respect to Concerned Ape and Localthunk for Stardew Valley and Balatro, but in terms of success, Minecraft stands at the top of the indie mountain as far as I’m concerned.

9

Jazz Jackrabbit

Today, Epic Megagames has finally lived up to the audacity of its name, and is a major video game publisher and platform holder. Not to mention the owner of the most popular video game engine, for better or for worse.

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However, when it made one of my favorite games ever–Jazz Jackrabbit– Epic Megagames was just a handful of people, including Cliff Bleszinski. This was the game that kicked off his career, leading to his role in games like Unreal and Gears of War. Technically, the game is a marvel, with programmer Arjan Brussee managing to give us the sidescrolling speed of a Sonic game on the PC, which traditionally didn’t do so well with this type of game. Brussee, by the way, is the co-founder of Guerrilla Games. The studio behind Killzone and Horizon: Zero Dawn. It’s amazing how humble beginnings can lead to so much!

You can buy Jazz Jackrabbit on GOG, where it’s part of the GOG Preservation Program.

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That belongs in a museum!

8

DOOM

DOOM is arguably the biggest game of all time, but it was made by a core group of just five people: John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud, and Tom Hall. The credits for the game list just 15 people total!

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At this point, ID Software had worked with Apogee as a publisher for games like Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM was developed and published by ID Software, and used the shareware model to distribute the game, selling copies directly by mail order to people who contacted them. You could, of course, argue that this is only indie by modern standards, and that this was a pretty typical development team size for the time, but having a look around other popular games from the 90s, having such a small core team is still notable, so I’m going to count DOOM as an indie.

7

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Source: Sandfall Interactive

This is the newest game on the list and really the whole reason I wanted to write it in the first place. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is made by independent French studio Sandfall, with a core team of around 30 people (and dozens of contractors who helped on and off).

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It doesn’t feel like an indie because its budget level is more on the AA game level, and it uses modern Unreal Engine graphics along with full voice and motion capture of professional actors. However, all this really shows is that game development technology now allows indie developers to achieve much more with far less. It means you probably have to recalibrate what “indie” means to you, because this is it.

6

Marathon

Today, Bungie is known for Halo and Destiny, and is owned by Sony. So its indie days are long behind it, but back in 1994, just 17 people developed and published Marathon for the Mac.

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Not only that, but they made the engine for it from scratch, and if it wasn’t for DOOM coming out the year before, we might have called first-person shooters “Marathon clones” for the rest of the boomer-shooter era instead.

5

No Man’s Sky

This is one of the first indie games where people thinking it was an AA or even AAA game backfired hard. Sean Murray and a very small handful of people (19 roles in the credits) created this space survival and exploration game using the magic of procedural generation. In other words, most of the content isn’t hand-crafted, and is instead generated on the fly using clever programming.

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The hype for the game was just blown out of proportion, and when it released, players were disappointed that the game they got was not the epic space adventure that was (supposedly) promised. Yet, over the last decade, Hello Games has just kept plugging away at the game, updating it and expanding it. Now it’s a highly-regarded title and a far cry from that first overly-ambitious indie.

4

Cuphead

This is perhaps one of the most famous indie games that, although it got a leg up from Microsoft in the marketing department, was independently developed and published by Studio MDHR. Starting off with a core team of just three people, culminating in around 25 people working on the game.

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The main reason this game isn’t always clocked as an indie is the insane level of polish and detail involved. Cuphead uses a 1930s bendy animation aesthetic, and it’s all hand-animated and captured at incredible quality. It’s a true labor of love, and it’s one of the hardest games ever made to boot. The studio is still independent, yes even though there’s a Cuphead Netflix show, no one has snapped them up yet. Imagine that.

3

The Witcher (2007)

OK, I know there’s going to be some push-back to my arguments for the first Witcher being an indie game, but hear me out. It might stretch the definition a bit, but I think we can make it work!

This is the first game developed by CD Projekt RED, which is a game studio formed by game distributor CD Projekt. However, this is basically just a legal distinction. CD Projekt was at the time a scrappy little company that built up its business doing translation and localization work of games for sale in Poland, where most people simply pirated English games. It gained enough experience working on other developer’s games that the company wanted to make its own original game. It owned the rights to the Witcher books for game development purposes and, despite having no idea how to make games, a team of just 15 people started development of The Witcher using the licensed Aurora Engine used for Neverwinter Nights 2, but heavily modified.

The budget went a little higher than expected, and by the end of development the team size had grown to around 100, but given the scope and size of this game (which I have about 200 hours in), I still feel that in spirit this was an indie, if not by the strictest letter of the definition. Also, it was published by Atari, but plenty of indie games sign publishing deals without affecting their indie status, so there.

2

Rocket League

Has it really been a decade since the smash-hit car soccer game Rocket League launched? It’s still an ultra-popular esports staple today and my little brother is pretty addicted to it (and also very good).

While developer Psyonix is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Epic Games as of 2019, when it made Rocket League it was a true-blue indie studio, and nothing will ever change that.

1

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2? An indie? That Half-Life 2? Yes, this is another one you can fight me on, but I think it qualifies. Why not Valve’s first game Half-Life? Well that was partly funded by Sierra Games, so I don’t think it counts, but just like ID Software, Valve made enough money from its first game and other titles prior to Half-Life 2 that it didn’t need any help funding or publishing the game.

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Added to this, Valve is famous for its novel flat hierarchy and how development teams and roles are dynamically formed as needed internally. Even the team size for the game was on the smaller side for 2004, with around 80 people. Valve isn’t even publicly listed, despite being a massive company today with pretty much full dominance of game distribution on PC. So Lord Gaben answers to no one. No shareholders, no board, no hope of getting Half Life 3 until he says so.

Honestly, the whole debate about “what is an indie” gets old fast. The truth is that the word has always been a little meaningless and fluid, so maybe it makes more sense to concentrate on whether a game is good, and if the people who made it were properly rewarded rather than the boring details of a company’s structure.