The world of independent music is well-known. Even though huge record companies dominate the industry, it has often left an indelible mark upon the history of popular music. Creation records alone made rock stars of Primal Scream, Oasis, and My Bloody Valentine. Independent labels and artists add a freshness to the business that keeps the major labels in business, brewing up new genres, fads, trends and ideas.

So why not video games? It is still dominated by large companies - Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Sega, Enix, Capcom, Activision-Blizzard, et cetera. Where the hell is the thriving indie scene?

Hey, hey, 16k

If you’re of a certain age, you might remember the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64 – so-called because it has a whopping 64kb of memory (note: my family had an Acorn Electron). When you turned any of these on, you got a blank screen and a command line.

Not too dissimilar to MS-DOS, huh? This was a fully functioning command line in BASIC. From the absolute start, you were given a tantalising glimpse of how computer code worked. You could write out a program from here – graphics, sound, text, everything – before you even got anywhere. Okay, sure, half of us never got past

10 PRINT "penis"
20 GOTO 10

Which is every schoolboy’s introduction to recursive logic (it would end up in an infinite loop printing penis all over the page). The point was, though, that you had all the tools available to you to become an indie programmer. Most of these devices had a tome of a manual that introduced you to BASIC and taught you through programming concepts and syntax. Since games were on audio tapes and played on cassette recorders, you could easily record your own program on a blank tape. And people did – many games back then were a labour of love, crafted in bedrooms by dedicated nerds. Some became the seeds of successful development studios. It was a golden age for indie development, celebrated by acoustic funnyman MJ Hibbett here:

Consoles killed the radio star

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m really a child of the NES and SNES era. But Nintendo, by dominating the video game scene so completely, practically killed off indie gaming. Super Mario Bros is an amazingly innovative, playable, and beautiful game. Cartridges are way easier to use than tapes (tapes often had painful loading times, only to have a read error and restart the process). But there was no way to easily sell an indie game on the NES, thanks to this chestnut:

The Seal of Quality was basically a licence to create games on Nintendo consoles. To get the development kit to program a game, and to get games on cartridges (the only way to play games on the NES), you had to go through quality control at Nintendo HQ. This was for a good reason – to stop a dirge of mediocre, bad games plaguing the console – but it also meant it killed off home-brew development. It doesn’t mean there weren’t some awful games on the NES, but it did stop a lot of the really terrible stuff coming through (which pretty much destroyed Atari beforehand).

Homebrew still existed, but for a long time, console companies had the advantage. They controlled the medium and access to consumers. PC gaming wasn’t dead – but most households didn’t have computers yet, and they certainly didn’t have the internet. Speaking of which:

Steam Powered

We’re in a very different world now. If you’re reading this, chances are you have a computer and unlimited access to the internet. Literally hundreds of games are available and ready to play with no extra hardware cost. /v/, a video game image-board, has an incredibly good list of freeware games here. Personal favourites include Indiana Jones style Spelunky and a game about a modern-day thief, Trilby: The Art of Theft (by the author of Zero Punctuation, snarky animated reviews).

Flash games are in their thousands, usually for free, at places like Armor Games or Kongregate. If you’re willing to shell out some money, Valve (makers of Half Life) have some of the greatest indie games on Steam, in what amounts to the iTunes Store for games (XBox Arcade and Wiiware are console based adoptions of this model).

Even better, it’s surprisingly easy to pick up the coding or tools you need to produce your own game. Freeware abounds – you can code in a free C++ compiler, do artwork in GIMP, or just download RPGmaker. No longer can quality control keep out aspiring developers when the barrier to entry is so low.

I’m firmly of the belief that gaming is in a very exciting era. In the past few years, Braid and Minecraft – both independently designed, beautiful and creative – have been some of the most talked about games. Neither are available in shops. Neither are anything like mainstream games. Braid is a 2D puzzle platformer, when most consoles are designed for 3D performance, with watercolour backdrops and an orchestral soundtrack. It has a heavily artistic feel, with subtle and diabolically complex puzzles. Minecraft is a 3D platformer and creation tool, with primitive, blocky graphics – that has absolutely no story, or clearly defined goals. You just build stuff. Lego never had any ‘objectives’: that didn’t stop it from being amazingly fun. The majors could never take chances on gameplay so innovative. Videogames are quickly becoming stagnant, with bland WW2 shooters, football games, post-apocalyptic alien invasions, and LOTR-esque fantasies. This is why you need indie developers. They take chances, because they have nothing to lose.