IGF KEEPS INDIE SPIRIT ALIVE IN GAME INDUSTRY

Each year, aspiring filmmakers trek to Park City for the Sundance Film Festival with their self-funded, labor-of-love projects hoping to get noticed by Hollywood players -- or just get noticed by an appreciating crowd. The vibe at the festival is its focus on the independent vision, at odds with the formulaic approach to many Hollywood films or involving projects that would just never get made there.

One might ask why there's not a similar event for video games, an industry criticized for relying on sequels, licenses and not enough original ideas. Wouldn't that be a terrific place to show off the creativity of up-and-coming independent developers who might themselves move on up to the big time?

The fact is that, for the last eight years, the Independent Games Festival (IGF) has done exactly that -- judged hundreds of games, handed out monetary awards and done its best to spread the word that independent game development is alive and well and ought to be more visible. The IGF held its latest gathering in San Jose in March.

If you've never heard of the IGF, perhaps independent games need more visibility still.

"Unfortunately, that's where the comparison between Sundance and the IGF breaks down to some extent," says Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). "For the most part, nobody who's making large-scale PC or console games really cares about the IGF in a material way, simply because it's not their business. If I'm a big publisher who's putting out $10-million Xbox games, seeing some little, cool indie game at IGF has absolutely no relevance to my business. Given the current state of affairs at retail and in games publishing, I cannot take what's at IGF and put it in a box and sell it in the stores."

Indeed, few if any gamers will have heard of any of the titles that the IGF lists as "success stories" on its Web site -- "Terminus," "Tread Marks," "Wild Earth," "Oasis," and "Alien Hominid."

That's because, unlike at Sundance, the big game publishers aren't snapping up indie titles, winners or otherwise.

"The publishers aren't looking to be inspired; they just want to repeat what sold last year," notes Della Rocca. "They become more risk-averse as time goes on and less likely to be reinvigorated by the stuff that's happening on the indie scene via the IGF. That doesn't mean the IGF isn't important; it's just not having the impact that it should have."

But success at IGF isn't necessarily measured by how many games are picked up by commercial publishers, says Simon Carless, chairman of the IGF, which takes place in a pavilion inside of the annual Game Developers Conference. Unlike Sundance, he says, quite a few indie developers have no interest in, say, an Activision or an Electronic Arts publishing their games or hiring them for future projects.

"Many of the ideas that surface at IGF aren't necessarily in the mainstream and aren't necessarily the kind of thing that the average gamer wants to play," he notes. "There's a lot of really great stuff, but it doesn't always cross over, like many independent films do. And so, while there's a market for indie games, it may not be on a very large scale."

Instead, says Carless, many developers come to IGF seeking recognition from their peers, perhaps some visibility that will make funding the next project easier than the previous one.

That's why Tom Arundel came to San Jose two weeks ago, having entered his company's game "Darwinia" (for PC) in this year's competition. Tom oversees business development for London-based Introversion Software.

"Darwinia" is an action game about a virtual theme park running entirely inside a computer network with a population of sentient evolving life forms. Gamers find that Darwinia has been overrun by a computer virus and their task is to destroy the infection and save the populace from extinction.

"We decided that if we could win -- even a small prize -- it would add a lot to our credibility in the industry and improve our profile," Arundel explains. "People have asked us if, at some point, a large publisher came to us and said they'd like to buy Introversion or hire us, would we do it? Our answer is always the same -- not really. Our goal is to be like Valve Software [the independent developer and publisher of the award-winning "Half-Life" series], who we think are quite inspirational. They are coming up with their own ideas, putting out the best products they can, not taking money from anybody and retaining ownership of their IP."

As it turns out, Arundel and his team won the first prize at IGF -- the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize. That money will now be applied to other projects, including porting "Darwinia" to several other platforms and continuing work on Introversion's next game, an online multiplayer title called "Defcon (Defense Condition)" which is expected to be released this September.

"We have two options right now," Arundel confides. "We can either go out and hire people and try to grow the company. Or we can stay small and do things the way we've been doing. If we did the former, we might wind up so big we'd have 250 mouths to feed. And, in that condition, with perhaps just six months' worth of cash on hand, we'd get pretty desperate to take whatever deal comes along. That's not what we want. So I think we'll stay the size we are."

According to the Introversion Web site, that means four directors and a staff of six, including Arundel's sister who handles the PR and the father of one of the co-founders, whose job it is to package and ship the game boxes from his garage.

In addition to developers like Introversion -- which choose not to be employed by large publishers -- the indie space is populated by developers who have been there, done that, and now want to work on their own.

"Rich Carlson built first-person shooters at Ion Storm, left to start Digital Eel, and turned out the indie game 'Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space,'" says the IGF's Carless. "Now he just wants to do his own thing. Similarly, Andy Schatz had worked in the mainstream industry and left, describing himself as 'a game industry burnout in a dead-end career.' He went on to do his own indie game, 'Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa,' and I'm guessing that even if Electronic Arts knocked on his door, he'd have no interest."

One veteran of big publishers is Brian Kingsley who put in his time as a senior producer at EA, Activision, and Sega. When he left to go out on his own, he took a different path. Instead of developing his own games, he opened Wayzata, MN-based Moondance Games in 2003 to publish those of other developers.

"Brian noticed that independent developers would often submit game ideas -- or complete games -- to publishers that were really fantastic, but they were slightly different from everything else on the retail shelves," says Sarah Borchers, Moondance's CEO. "And that was often enough to scare away the big publishers."