SXSW Review: Indie Game: The Movie
Super Meat Boy is your typical boy-meets-girl story. The protagonist goes to world's end, avoiding hazard after hazard, all in the name of rescuing his damsel in distress: Bandage Girl. Fez tells the story of namesake Fez, who makes his way through a Brazil-like world in search of love. Braid takes place in a time-shifting multi-dimensional universe. The lead character Tim travels through time and space solving riddles in order to save, yes you guessed it, a princess. Are these the titles of new indie movies that took SXSW 2012 by storm? No, these are descriptions of three independent video games covered in the delightful documentary Indie Game: The Movie.
We live in a culture of mass entertainment. We love our movies, our music, our sports and we especially love our video games. Alongside our love of mass entertainment we also love our underdogs. You know, the lady (or gentleman) who against all odds strives to overcome adversity and triumphs. Indie Game: The Movie is the story of video games and underdogs. In this case the underdogs are the people known as independent game developers.
No industry rivals motion picture development like videogames. The games we currently play on PCs and consoles take millions of dollars and hundreds of people to create. But just like independent filmmakers, there are independent video game developers. These developers pursue making videogames not necessarily for the money but to get ideas out of their heads onto the video screen.
Indie Game: The Movie highlights the lives of four different independent game developers. The first is Jonathan Blow. Jonathan is the creator of critical and financial success story Braid. Jonathan is the guy all independent game developers strive to be. An artist with the freedom to create whatever he wants. The second set of developers consists of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes. Edmund and Tommy are in the final stages of building their game Super Meat Boy. The last developer is Phil Fish, a developer who has been working to build and release his game Fez.
This movie tells a compelling story of the lives of each of these developers. Blow is an artist who built a game to scratch an itch. That scratching lead to a lot of "scratch" as well as artistic freedom. McMillen and Refenes are two struggling developers hardly able to make it, struggling through that last 10 percent of development (you know, the 10% that takes another 90% of the time). And finally we have Fish, struggling with early successes and seemingly incapable of shipping his game.
The documentary is well constructed and tells a fair and captivating story of the people behind the games. The movie has it all: family, friends, heroes, villains, betrayal, failure and triumph. All of these elements combine to make Indie Game: The Movie one of the highlights of SXSW 2012.