In 2006, I am hunting down the obscure corners of the internet for a game called Dokustu Monogatari. It’s the Japanese, pre translated to english title of a game called Cave Story. On an obscure pixelart forum where eyeballs pour over the final parts of the games portrait style, the cool people know about Doukutsu Monogatari. It’s a new game by a solo developer. A strange artist who goes by the name Studio Pixel. Through a labor of love, fans of this scrappy game have put together a psuedo directors cut that puts the player in the role of planner and gives us access to music, graphics, and a cave story planner to make our own scenario.

We don’t know at the time, but this small scrappy game is going to kickstart something that can’t be taken back. A domino that once felled can only push over more, the ripples in the creek we watch during childhood. All of these big aphorisms come home because of one small game about a Boy Who Could, nothing more and nothing less.

Gunning between matches of The Finals. It’s its own kind of spectacular failure: balance and AI issues, but not the kind with bots. Hinging on sound-a-like AI voice actors, the game struggles in its latest quarter. Strange balance changes and a dwindling playerbase.

Failure as the success market for indie games, here we are: no discourse is unavoidable and I pretty much am guaranteed to have to have something to say. The soldiers we lost along the way though, that’s more than anybody can pay for on a playstation network or xbox live arcade. Unavailability, failure, doomed repetition of floating to the top of the ocean and then back down.

there’s cycles and then there’s Cycles, you know? Are we trapped in this thing or is it trapped in here, with us. We can’t quite create a videogame hollywood (Indie Game: The Movie) and have spectacularly failed at creating videogames: comic books, kentucky routes zeroed and simultaneously written as if they can never truly, really, be experienced again: and so they haven’t. There is, at least not at this time, a pressing urge for the gaming public to go play it. We are fraught with the past at all times, simultaneously ashamed to move forward from it at all.

You know, I think it’s time I tell the audience the truth: I really only was in for the first one of these Haunted PS1 Demo Disc Things when it was sprite and new. Even now, with the release of one of our community darlings (Crow County) on STEAM and Itch.IO, our own torrid binary we seem to be stuck with – a rotting app and a desiccated storefront that shovels Deals for a group of midwestern videogame players cum EDM concert goers every holiday season as if it was stewarding a relationship to some kind of fraught and horrifying Now America: And You Can Too celebration, for videogame players of the whole world: I am still waiting for games from the first edition to release full celebrated versions (is that true?)

Every once in a while memory and internet searches take me to dead itch.io pages. It’s the new internet and it’s here and it’s dead in equal turn. Pink and yellow text telling me the downloads are left if I want them, to not reach out. Say nothing and look at the graveyard, learn in equal terms as a writer and a human being that no one should go investigating the dead.

There’s a pain that comes with surfacing a dead link back to the shore of the internet ecosystem, of trawling through archive.org looking for an uploaded version of art that had to be abandoned. Art that becomes fully abandoned doesn’t risk anything other than the rest of us, decaying on a hyper-light line of information until that game we played yesterday turns into language we can only vocalize. Conversation mixed down until we’re all saying “I wish I could show you” over and over again in reference to the art we can’t find.

a pitch black void of nothing: the end state of dead web when it doesn’t turn into white pages and broken links. Who are these ruins for? not me, not you. To remove ourselves from the internet, to abandon art for comfort, security or whatever else: it’s crawling and feeling inside at all times. There is the failure: we make something and it gets somewhere, but we can only weaponize the attention of strangers for so long. Things must move on, and so must we. Abandonware is a term created for the internet by the internet, and it is where all things must eventually go. I am looking for Cave Story again, and I can find it now on every platform. It was followed by Kero Blaster, but at the time I wasn’t able to play it.

I was drinking, buried deep in a bottle in some hotel room at an anime convention, hating myself and puking in a toilet while a friend played Injustice 2. That night, I’d have a hallucination of coming out on the other side after all of the people I met led me somewhere. I was always looking to follow then, always willing to. There was no audience and it felt like anything was possible at the time. Earlier in the night, I’d spoken to someone in a Gaming Hall that had a group of artist pay for independent developers to showcase their games. He was hopeful for that this would be a showcase for him – his way to break into the industry.

We cut out a few thousand people from the game industry every year. I say we almost as if there’s some kind of shared responsibility between players and developers. That’s why it feels bad, right? We’ve upscale the fast food worker that gets a raise and watches their hours double while the store loses staff. People just aren’t buying enough. “We’re sorry.” handed down heavy to artists who just were hoping they could have a chance.

I never played Cart Life, but the other game by the developer, Type Dreams is a fever induced poetry rhythm game that becomes real for the woman inside me who fantasized about hitting keystrokes over and over again in a rush to finish a novel. A pain of stupid, inconsequential blogging that pushed my typing skills into a perfect three-digits a minute harmony.
Let’s talk labor: fuck powerwashing, I want to type! I want to type the devils poetry, and I did, and you can too.

Websites, pop culture social media, aspirant blogging. There’s not a word that can sum up what it’s like to be around, to be a permanent resident in what feels like a house for perpetual fucking runaways. We leave little pieces of us everywhere. Making art online seems to consume so many people there could be a memorial for the people that don’t make it every week: videogames add twice their own load with the way developers get harassed, journalists never step into another kind of writing and it feels like there’s a party down the bloc that you just cant reach.

The vanishing ecosystem of x means even the parasocial function of tracking down the art we like as an audience to maintain that there’s Output happening is broken now too: unless you make an account and buy that ticket again, anyway. I don’t wonder what happened to Hofmeier and I don’t want to look. Indie development is an escalating series of failures where the end result always seems to be watching artists watch us choose inevitably to move on.

Almost as a sense that there’s a negative: no, a death drive to what becomes of these independent art scenes every ten or twenty years when the people with money move on to the next relevant slice of culture and start digging up everything they can on the way out. Whatever is getting made has to get made in smaller and smaller places, underground bunkers of creativity where releasing something both locks us out of the forever feedback of social media, but also leaves words like “sustainable” irrelevant. All parts of art are unsustainable at all points in time forever: the old act of killing an animal: by hunting it, finding it, bringing it into ourselves.

The culture of the last indie scene, the public one – the one discussed by journalists and given over to readers one byline at a time went to video where the ecosystem is different. Comments are telling me the best youtubers now are people who will tell you how long a game is and if it is worth buying. The TV stays on. There has to be a new barrier to entry, our ocean of publications is getting poisoned by toxic waste dumping. Not the kind of toxic waste where we can rise to the top of the garbage pile and be heard asking for room service and the club sandwich.

Type Dreams is now only available through an archive.org link – when you plummet into the recesses of a website like itch.io it’s not too hard to find dead end pages and disintegration. No forwarding, no last call, no page under construction. Frozen in place and dead forever: sometimes I wonder if the artists gave it up for better jobs or just simply going back into the fold with the rest of traffic. Are they underground like I want to be? Will all independent video games be hoping for the call or the studio to pick us up?

In the 1970s, the underground comix scene and yeah you gotta use the x, there, man, distributed itself in head shops and neighborhood hippie emporium. In the demise of the cultural costume (will be, always was) it’s easy to look at the decade from where we are now and say that people moved on and adopted suits because they never really cared. Nobody ever cared before we got here, and then the time of caring can only be today. It’s making me anxious. Comic books got handed out, distributed, sometimes by hand to local shops that sold and traded in art.

It wasn’t until the Miller V. California act of the 1970s that the top down function of government ruled that obscene materials couldn’t be protected by the first amendment. Head shops, already risking legal backlash from the paraphernalia and connected to the most heinous of all United States Drugs, started getting leery and stopped carrying published material by freaks, weirdos, and concrete ramblings of lives not lived.

That failure then, became the holy mark of underground comics. A procession that there might in life be a more true way of success, of not finding an audience: is there a space there for being creatively obscene, then? Is that why our short hikes and fishing games rise to the monument of “Indie Game”. A nervous publisher looks into my eyes and back to the screen, “it doesn’t make you nervous, right?”.

The comics that came around at the next boom of the industry, when the gates went up and the head shops closed and everything had to get Big, Approachable, Marketable was the forever superhero book boom of the 1980s. As alternatives disappeared, the wages stayed low and the work got longer. Now there’s haves and want mores, and the want mores are always looking for a Job to have. It’s taken the industry almost forty years to recover from obscenity rulings, do I catch myself wondering if there will be another call coming from inside the house?

What’s your town like? How much art can be in a building before it has to be classified as a porn shop, an adult bookstore. “I know it when I see it!” was the cry of that generation of lawmakers, and it echoes down into red tape and civic law. Dressed in outfits just like the hippies did, socially acceptable. Cleaned up. Guided and established with clear language that I’m certainly not in the position to judge the meaning of. Are you?

We’re hunting and looking to kill something. If we can find a name for the shape, we can describe it to everyone. In those names are meanings, and we love to hold onto them a little too much. What does independent video game mean? I see in the meaning coarse bandages of failure and wounds. Mummification rituals on digital storefronts. All of the art left behind like so many ruins. Look upon my work and see something in yourself, quiet mausoleums appearing when we’ve just had enough.

In failure, there’s space for obscenity still – Yuri Cannibal visual novels, Typing Simulations, indiecade and ludum dare game jam obsessives all next to each other. For now, but forever cant even be wished for.
Success comes for us all sooner or later.