Swaying softly in the late-morning breeze, a SNES controller, suspended from a thick telephone wire, hangs in the air above the street. It's a visual metaphor that could mean a number of different things in a documentary about indie games. Resembling a shot from a public information film about the danger of overhead power lines, it could represent the perils facing a small team of creators It might refer, perhaps, to the many projects discarded partway through development, abandoned by their makers when the going got too tough. You could even say this old-school controller is indicative of the dominant genre featured in the film: Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez are all, after a fashion, sidescrolling platformers. And the phone wire? Well, that obviously speaks to the online distribution boom that first sparked the indie gold rush in the mid-to-late 2000s - when Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and WiiWare provided opportunities to a new wave of bedroom coders.
Whichever meaning you settle upon, this distinctive image feels like a very deliberate construction. Yet, as if to prove the notion that truth is often stranger than fiction, it was a moment of pure serendipity. Directors Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky had just emerged from breakfast at a Winnipeg café, having recently returned from GDC, flushed with excitement about a project they had begun to pursue recently: a documentary about indie games. They were, as Pajot says, "young and energetic", but also "a little bit on the fence" about the idea, Swirsky adds. The two had been discussing the possibility of following Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen, and the expense of the trip to make it happen. Could they really afford two weeks in Santa Cruz at $300 per night? "Literally, we walked out of the place, and there it was, just like hanging in the sky in front of us," Pajot says, matter-of-factly. "That was like a sign that we should do it," Swirsky adds. He grabbed his camera and filmed it, and before any other footage had been shot, Indie Game: The Movie already had its title screen. "So thank you to whoever threw it up there!" Pajot laughs.
The story, however, really began before then. Swirsky and Pajot were video producers, doing commercial work and lifestyle TV pieces for CBC. They had always wanted to move into documentary work, Swirsky says, but weren't sure what their first project should be. "Then we were hired by this organisation called New Media Manitoba to do a series of profiles on interesting stories in tech happening in Winnipeg. It was just going to be eight fluffy pieces about Winnipeg success stories." One of those stories was Alec Holowka and Derek Yu's Aquaria. "It did end up being a cute little puff piece," Swirsky admits. "But as we talked to [them], we learned that the story behind the game was so much more intriguing. This whole idea of games as personal expression seemed really new to us at the time. And we figured it would be new on a larger scale to a lot of people. Like, if these guys were filmmakers, they'd make a film. If they were writers, they'd be writing a book. But it just so happened that they were making videogames."
Inspired by Gary Hustwit's Helvetica, the 2007 documentary exploring the role of typography in contemporary culture, the pair wondered if they could make something similar about indie games. At GDC, they met Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, and were introduced to other leading figures from the indie scene, including Adam Saltsman, the man behind seminal auto-runner Canabalt, and World Of Goo creator Ron Carmel. Having made several connections, Pajot and Swirsky decided to hit the road, using their savings to drive around North America and start shooting footage of a variety of creators. Originally, Pajot says, it was "around ten different stories", but soon they realised it should be whittled down, so they could focus more intently on a smaller number of games. Three proved to be the magic number, representing past, present and future.
"In 2008, I actually got contacted by three different documentary crews that were all doing the same thing," Edmund McMillen tells us. At the time, he and Tommy Refenes (collectively known as Team Meat) had recently started making Super Meat Boy, a followup to hit Flash game Meat Boy, which McMillen had created with Jonathan McEntee. "I was filmed by a few different crews beforehand, and then Lisanne and Jamie appeared." Aside from displaying a more authentic interest in the topic, McMillen says he felt a kinship with the pair, in part because their approach was similar to that of prototyping a game. "They were feeling it out - seeing what worked and what didn't, and I appreciated the obvious thought and experimentation that was going into everything they were doing."
The result of this early experimentation was a short feature called Growing Up Edmund, which focused on Aether, a monochromatic sci-fi puzzle adventure developed by McMillen with sometime collaborator Tyler Glaiel (with whom he has since partnered on The End Is Nigh, and is currently reunited for the long-gestating Mewgenics). "It was everything we hoped that this movie could possibly be," Swirsky says. "A story about a game that was so personal that Ed didn't even realise how personal it was until afterwards, when he had these revelations about it. It became the thesis of the film: games as personal expression." It didn't just prove to Pajot and Swirsky that their project had legs, but also helped convince their subjects to come aboard. "Although there was never a huge amount of pushback," Swirsky says. "They were actually all very welcoming."
Super Meat Boy might have been Team Meat's tilt at the big time, but with more than three dozen Flash games to his name prior to Meat Boy, McMillen already had plenty of experience. Seeking a story with a fresh angle, Pajot and Swirsky really needed a newcomer - and found the perfect candidate in Phil Fish, who alongside programmer Renaud Bédard was in the process of making his ambitious debut: a 2D pixel-art platformer set in a world with a hidden third dimension.
Fez's protracted development - then relatively unprecedented in the indie-game sphere - and Fish's falling-out with previous collaborator Shawn McGrath (blamed on the classic, oft-cited "creative differences") already made for an intriguing story, not to mention its win at 2008's IGF awards. The subsequent groundswell of interest prompted Fish to form Polytron Corporation with a loan from the Canadian government so he could work on the game full-time. Fish didn't require much convincing that being followed by a pair of documentary makers during development would be worthwhile. "I don't think that's a conversation we had to have," he recalls. "The benefits seemed obvious: as a broke-ass first-time dev, you're looking for any kind of exposure you can get."
That wasn't the case for Indie Game: The Movie's third subject. Released in August 2008, Jonathan Blow's time reversing puzzle-platformer Braid was already a success: the second biggest seller of that year on the Xbox Live Arcade service, it attracted near-universal critical acclaim. Pajot and Swirsky approached Blow when the film was still an ensemble piece, he tells us. "It was like: 'OK, we're covering a ton of projects to give people an idea of what indie game development is like', and I was interviewed originally as part of that." The two returned after a while, when their warts-and-all portrayal of the development of Super Meat Boy and Fez needed a counterpoint: a view from someone who had already been there and done that.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/HI7Cv1cC71658837322001/cSwbWOEbq1658838063274.jpg]
"I had done a bunch of interviews about Braid, with some magazines and TV spots and whatever, so I was kind of used to doing interviews about the game, before Indie Game: The Movie came along," Blow says. "From that standpoint, it just sort of slotted into a bunch of stuff that I had already been doing. I wasn't trying to get anything out of it. It was more just like: 'Yeah, let's talk - I'm interested in games, let's talk about games'." From the filmmakers' perspective, Blow's role may have been smaller than the others', but his story was equally important. "I think Jon was in an introspective place at the time," Pajot recalls. "He had gone through a whole personal journey to understand it. You got through this big life event of having one of the biggest indie games ever. And then it's like, what happens after? Who are you after you've made this big success?" Or, as McMillen succinctly puts it: "You do the veteran, the people in process, and then the guy who's starting. You know, you kind of need that stoic genius in silhouette."
Having settled upon a tripartite structure, the next challenge facing the filmmakers was one that Pajot says they have been trying to tackle for the past dozen years: "the battle of telling a story about somebody sitting in front of a computer". It's a problem that McMillen recognised from the outset. "As much faith as I had [in Pajot and Swirsky]," he adds, "I had no idea what was going to happen. Because when somebody says, 'Hey, I'm going to make this documentary about indie game development', to 99 per cent of people it sounds like the most boring fucking documentary in the world." On top of that, it had to be approachable to an audience beyond games. "We wanted to make the film accessible for our aunts," Pajot laughs. "Or just random people that might watch it - [we needed to] explain enough about videogame development so you understand what's happening. So there's a few different things to cram in there." All that while pulling off an extreme form of killing your darlings: the two had originally recorded more than 300 hours, which had to be trimmed to a little over 90 minutes. "And the movie should still be like 15 minutes shorter," Pajot says.
One of the secrets behind Indie Game: The Movie's success, as McMillen puts it, is its universality - it feels less a film about videogames than a portrait of "independent artists attempting to make art." The trick, Swirsky says, was to not spend too long explaining the medium to a non-gaming audience. "We have an explainer section that hopefully gives you the bare minimum of what you need to know about the world of videogames and indie games in particular," he says. Elsewhere, it finds ways to tell each person's story while smuggling in details about game development. "You know, let's get to know this person more through the things that they care about the most their game," Pajot explains.
And this all comes after an opening that cleverly presages the human drama to come. The first thing we see is a despairing Refenes wondering where Super Meat Boy is on the Xbox dashboard on the game's release date - and biggest sales day. And Fish's stated desire to "have a say in what becomes of videogames" is juxtaposed with a comment from Kill Screen co-founder Jamin Warren, who wonders whether it will be remembered for its qualities as a game, "or for never coming out". Indeed, Fish himself wondered whether that might come true, saying the documentary raised the stakes for Fez: "If we failed to actually finish the game, it would have been a very well documented failure. I don't know if it added pressure as much as it made us even more aware of it. It just amplified everything."
Indeed, the film certainly doesn't shy away from the hardships of game development. In one scene Fish admits to a panic attack when it seems his former associate is going to prevent him from exhibiting Fez at PAX. And tempers fray as Team Meat are subject to an exhausting period of crunch when financial difficulties lead to them reluctantly agreeing to wrap up development ahead of schedule so Super Meat Boy can feature in Xbox Live Arcade's Game Feast promotion - hence Refenes' early exasperation when the game doesn't appear to be there.
Blow, meanwhile, says he got "the nice job" by comparison. "It's a weird situation where I do have a prominent role in the movie, but also not because the movie isn't really about me, right? It's about Super Meat Boy and Fez, and I sort of show up for like, five or ten minutes in the middle of all that. So that's nice in some ways, because you don't get to see all the hard times of what I did." Still, through Blow we do get to see the double-edged sword for creators that is witnessing players' reactions to your game. Having spent more than three years developing Braid in isolation, he says, the experience was addictive at first. But things soon soured, as he felt the game had been widely misunderstood - that players hadn't connected with it in the way he'd hoped. Before long, he gained an unwanted reputation for regularly commenting on online articles about Braid, to disagree or correct misconceptions, which led to a shift in the public perception of him. To some, he had become a figure of fun.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/HI7Cv1cC71658837322001/1418035887.jpg]
Q+A: PHIL FISH
One of the main themes of the film is the idea of creators finding video games the most effective way to express themselves as people. Do you feel that Fez says a lot about who you are?
I don't think you can make a game with such a small team without everybody putting a lot of themselves in it. It wasn't really the intent for me, but yeah, it definitely ended up being that way. Just lots of little things I've always done since I was a kid, making up alphabets and things like that. I don't know exactly what it says about me, but there's definitely a lot of me in it.
Near the start of the film, you say that one of your ambitions is "to have a say in what becomes of videogames". Recently, we've seen games such as Tunic and Animal Well that have been clearly influenced by Fez. Do you feel that Fez has helped you achieve that goal?
Ha ha, no. I'm not so sure I achieved that goal. Until Tunic came along, I never really felt like Fez had much of a legacy. Maybe that's starting to change now, as a younger generation of devs are starting to make games inspired by the games they played as kids. Which, Jesus Christ. That's... I'm old now.
If the right idea came along to make another game as ambitious - and potentially time-consuming - as Fez, would you pursue it? Or are you happier keeping a lower profile these days?
I don't think those two things are necessarily mutually exclusive.
Though at the time he didn't feel the film had misrepresented him, in retrospect he says there is one particular moment about which he'd like to set the record straight. "People put all this together to suggest that I was mad at Soulja Boy," he smiles. "And that's actually not true. [Braid artist] David Hellman, when the Soulja Boy thing happened, emailed me and said, 'Have you seen this?' And we both actually thought it was super-cool, because it's like: here's a major pop-culture person having a good time with your game, right? But it's become this weird thing where every time somebody on Twitter wants to make me mad, they send me a message like 'You remember that time Soulja Boy made you cry' or whatever. And I'm like: no, we thought it was cool that he was playing the game."
His response, he says, was more about the reception from a particular body of critics, whose roots were in academic criticism. "They were loudly broadcasting ignorant things about what the game was about. And even saying that is a weird thing for a creator to say, because who am I to determine how people receive something? But yeah, I felt very misunderstood, because Braid was one of those games where it came out and people were talking about it for a long time." He laughs: "And a lot of those conversations drove me nuts."
In some respects, Indie Game: The Movie could easily be viewed as a cautionary tale, though for his part, Fish says that he wasn't concerned about how much of himself, or his process, he was revealing. "I thought that was the point - [to] show how the sausage gets made," he says. "The simple act of putting something to film and showing it to people has a romanticising effect, so I think it was important to show the hardships too. Making games is impossible. If you're thinking of getting into that field, you should know that." Indeed, McMillen says that with hindsight the film perhaps doesn't go far enough. "I wanted to be as honest as I possibly could about everything, especially when doing something like this," he says. "But in the first three or four years of the movie coming out, I would get people coming up to me and shaking my hand, and 'Can I get a picture with you?' And then they're like, 'I quit my job at EA and now I'm independent. I've got a wife and kids'. And it's just like: what the fuck are you doing? Why did you do this? This is the riskiest shit ever! This is the starving artist of today, you know what I mean?"
Still, both McMillen and Fish admit to being overwhelmed when they first saw the final cut. "Well, I was well and truly an emotional wreck around that time," Fish laughs. "I cried at everything. But yeah, seeing the movie for the first time only heightened [everything] I was feeling about the game." McMillen says it far exceeded his expectations. "I was floored. [Pajot and Swirsky] did a really good job. And I never felt manipulated, I never felt like they were feeding ...
Whichever meaning you settle upon, this distinctive image feels like a very deliberate construction. Yet, as if to prove the notion that truth is often stranger than fiction, it was a moment of pure serendipity. Directors Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky had just emerged from breakfast at a Winnipeg café, having recently returned from GDC, flushed with excitement about a project they had begun to pursue recently: a documentary about indie games. They were, as Pajot says, "young and energetic", but also "a little bit on the fence" about the idea, Swirsky adds. The two had been discussing the possibility of following Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen, and the expense of the trip to make it happen. Could they really afford two weeks in Santa Cruz at $300 per night? "Literally, we walked out of the place, and there it was, just like hanging in the sky in front of us," Pajot says, matter-of-factly. "That was like a sign that we should do it," Swirsky adds. He grabbed his camera and filmed it, and before any other footage had been shot, Indie Game: The Movie already had its title screen. "So thank you to whoever threw it up there!" Pajot laughs.
The story, however, really began before then. Swirsky and Pajot were video producers, doing commercial work and lifestyle TV pieces for CBC. They had always wanted to move into documentary work, Swirsky says, but weren't sure what their first project should be. "Then we were hired by this organisation called New Media Manitoba to do a series of profiles on interesting stories in tech happening in Winnipeg. It was just going to be eight fluffy pieces about Winnipeg success stories." One of those stories was Alec Holowka and Derek Yu's Aquaria. "It did end up being a cute little puff piece," Swirsky admits. "But as we talked to [them], we learned that the story behind the game was so much more intriguing. This whole idea of games as personal expression seemed really new to us at the time. And we figured it would be new on a larger scale to a lot of people. Like, if these guys were filmmakers, they'd make a film. If they were writers, they'd be writing a book. But it just so happened that they were making videogames."
Inspired by Gary Hustwit's Helvetica, the 2007 documentary exploring the role of typography in contemporary culture, the pair wondered if they could make something similar about indie games. At GDC, they met Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, and were introduced to other leading figures from the indie scene, including Adam Saltsman, the man behind seminal auto-runner Canabalt, and World Of Goo creator Ron Carmel. Having made several connections, Pajot and Swirsky decided to hit the road, using their savings to drive around North America and start shooting footage of a variety of creators. Originally, Pajot says, it was "around ten different stories", but soon they realised it should be whittled down, so they could focus more intently on a smaller number of games. Three proved to be the magic number, representing past, present and future.
"In 2008, I actually got contacted by three different documentary crews that were all doing the same thing," Edmund McMillen tells us. At the time, he and Tommy Refenes (collectively known as Team Meat) had recently started making Super Meat Boy, a followup to hit Flash game Meat Boy, which McMillen had created with Jonathan McEntee. "I was filmed by a few different crews beforehand, and then Lisanne and Jamie appeared." Aside from displaying a more authentic interest in the topic, McMillen says he felt a kinship with the pair, in part because their approach was similar to that of prototyping a game. "They were feeling it out - seeing what worked and what didn't, and I appreciated the obvious thought and experimentation that was going into everything they were doing."
The result of this early experimentation was a short feature called Growing Up Edmund, which focused on Aether, a monochromatic sci-fi puzzle adventure developed by McMillen with sometime collaborator Tyler Glaiel (with whom he has since partnered on The End Is Nigh, and is currently reunited for the long-gestating Mewgenics). "It was everything we hoped that this movie could possibly be," Swirsky says. "A story about a game that was so personal that Ed didn't even realise how personal it was until afterwards, when he had these revelations about it. It became the thesis of the film: games as personal expression." It didn't just prove to Pajot and Swirsky that their project had legs, but also helped convince their subjects to come aboard. "Although there was never a huge amount of pushback," Swirsky says. "They were actually all very welcoming."
Super Meat Boy might have been Team Meat's tilt at the big time, but with more than three dozen Flash games to his name prior to Meat Boy, McMillen already had plenty of experience. Seeking a story with a fresh angle, Pajot and Swirsky really needed a newcomer - and found the perfect candidate in Phil Fish, who alongside programmer Renaud Bédard was in the process of making his ambitious debut: a 2D pixel-art platformer set in a world with a hidden third dimension.
Fez's protracted development - then relatively unprecedented in the indie-game sphere - and Fish's falling-out with previous collaborator Shawn McGrath (blamed on the classic, oft-cited "creative differences") already made for an intriguing story, not to mention its win at 2008's IGF awards. The subsequent groundswell of interest prompted Fish to form Polytron Corporation with a loan from the Canadian government so he could work on the game full-time. Fish didn't require much convincing that being followed by a pair of documentary makers during development would be worthwhile. "I don't think that's a conversation we had to have," he recalls. "The benefits seemed obvious: as a broke-ass first-time dev, you're looking for any kind of exposure you can get."
That wasn't the case for Indie Game: The Movie's third subject. Released in August 2008, Jonathan Blow's time reversing puzzle-platformer Braid was already a success: the second biggest seller of that year on the Xbox Live Arcade service, it attracted near-universal critical acclaim. Pajot and Swirsky approached Blow when the film was still an ensemble piece, he tells us. "It was like: 'OK, we're covering a ton of projects to give people an idea of what indie game development is like', and I was interviewed originally as part of that." The two returned after a while, when their warts-and-all portrayal of the development of Super Meat Boy and Fez needed a counterpoint: a view from someone who had already been there and done that.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/HI7Cv1cC71658837322001/cSwbWOEbq1658838063274.jpg]
"I had done a bunch of interviews about Braid, with some magazines and TV spots and whatever, so I was kind of used to doing interviews about the game, before Indie Game: The Movie came along," Blow says. "From that standpoint, it just sort of slotted into a bunch of stuff that I had already been doing. I wasn't trying to get anything out of it. It was more just like: 'Yeah, let's talk - I'm interested in games, let's talk about games'." From the filmmakers' perspective, Blow's role may have been smaller than the others', but his story was equally important. "I think Jon was in an introspective place at the time," Pajot recalls. "He had gone through a whole personal journey to understand it. You got through this big life event of having one of the biggest indie games ever. And then it's like, what happens after? Who are you after you've made this big success?" Or, as McMillen succinctly puts it: "You do the veteran, the people in process, and then the guy who's starting. You know, you kind of need that stoic genius in silhouette."
Having settled upon a tripartite structure, the next challenge facing the filmmakers was one that Pajot says they have been trying to tackle for the past dozen years: "the battle of telling a story about somebody sitting in front of a computer". It's a problem that McMillen recognised from the outset. "As much faith as I had [in Pajot and Swirsky]," he adds, "I had no idea what was going to happen. Because when somebody says, 'Hey, I'm going to make this documentary about indie game development', to 99 per cent of people it sounds like the most boring fucking documentary in the world." On top of that, it had to be approachable to an audience beyond games. "We wanted to make the film accessible for our aunts," Pajot laughs. "Or just random people that might watch it - [we needed to] explain enough about videogame development so you understand what's happening. So there's a few different things to cram in there." All that while pulling off an extreme form of killing your darlings: the two had originally recorded more than 300 hours, which had to be trimmed to a little over 90 minutes. "And the movie should still be like 15 minutes shorter," Pajot says.
One of the secrets behind Indie Game: The Movie's success, as McMillen puts it, is its universality - it feels less a film about videogames than a portrait of "independent artists attempting to make art." The trick, Swirsky says, was to not spend too long explaining the medium to a non-gaming audience. "We have an explainer section that hopefully gives you the bare minimum of what you need to know about the world of videogames and indie games in particular," he says. Elsewhere, it finds ways to tell each person's story while smuggling in details about game development. "You know, let's get to know this person more through the things that they care about the most their game," Pajot explains.
And this all comes after an opening that cleverly presages the human drama to come. The first thing we see is a despairing Refenes wondering where Super Meat Boy is on the Xbox dashboard on the game's release date - and biggest sales day. And Fish's stated desire to "have a say in what becomes of videogames" is juxtaposed with a comment from Kill Screen co-founder Jamin Warren, who wonders whether it will be remembered for its qualities as a game, "or for never coming out". Indeed, Fish himself wondered whether that might come true, saying the documentary raised the stakes for Fez: "If we failed to actually finish the game, it would have been a very well documented failure. I don't know if it added pressure as much as it made us even more aware of it. It just amplified everything."
Indeed, the film certainly doesn't shy away from the hardships of game development. In one scene Fish admits to a panic attack when it seems his former associate is going to prevent him from exhibiting Fez at PAX. And tempers fray as Team Meat are subject to an exhausting period of crunch when financial difficulties lead to them reluctantly agreeing to wrap up development ahead of schedule so Super Meat Boy can feature in Xbox Live Arcade's Game Feast promotion - hence Refenes' early exasperation when the game doesn't appear to be there.
Blow, meanwhile, says he got "the nice job" by comparison. "It's a weird situation where I do have a prominent role in the movie, but also not because the movie isn't really about me, right? It's about Super Meat Boy and Fez, and I sort of show up for like, five or ten minutes in the middle of all that. So that's nice in some ways, because you don't get to see all the hard times of what I did." Still, through Blow we do get to see the double-edged sword for creators that is witnessing players' reactions to your game. Having spent more than three years developing Braid in isolation, he says, the experience was addictive at first. But things soon soured, as he felt the game had been widely misunderstood - that players hadn't connected with it in the way he'd hoped. Before long, he gained an unwanted reputation for regularly commenting on online articles about Braid, to disagree or correct misconceptions, which led to a shift in the public perception of him. To some, he had become a figure of fun.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/HI7Cv1cC71658837322001/1418035887.jpg]
Q+A: PHIL FISH
One of the main themes of the film is the idea of creators finding video games the most effective way to express themselves as people. Do you feel that Fez says a lot about who you are?
I don't think you can make a game with such a small team without everybody putting a lot of themselves in it. It wasn't really the intent for me, but yeah, it definitely ended up being that way. Just lots of little things I've always done since I was a kid, making up alphabets and things like that. I don't know exactly what it says about me, but there's definitely a lot of me in it.
Near the start of the film, you say that one of your ambitions is "to have a say in what becomes of videogames". Recently, we've seen games such as Tunic and Animal Well that have been clearly influenced by Fez. Do you feel that Fez has helped you achieve that goal?
Ha ha, no. I'm not so sure I achieved that goal. Until Tunic came along, I never really felt like Fez had much of a legacy. Maybe that's starting to change now, as a younger generation of devs are starting to make games inspired by the games they played as kids. Which, Jesus Christ. That's... I'm old now.
If the right idea came along to make another game as ambitious - and potentially time-consuming - as Fez, would you pursue it? Or are you happier keeping a lower profile these days?
I don't think those two things are necessarily mutually exclusive.
Though at the time he didn't feel the film had misrepresented him, in retrospect he says there is one particular moment about which he'd like to set the record straight. "People put all this together to suggest that I was mad at Soulja Boy," he smiles. "And that's actually not true. [Braid artist] David Hellman, when the Soulja Boy thing happened, emailed me and said, 'Have you seen this?' And we both actually thought it was super-cool, because it's like: here's a major pop-culture person having a good time with your game, right? But it's become this weird thing where every time somebody on Twitter wants to make me mad, they send me a message like 'You remember that time Soulja Boy made you cry' or whatever. And I'm like: no, we thought it was cool that he was playing the game."
His response, he says, was more about the reception from a particular body of critics, whose roots were in academic criticism. "They were loudly broadcasting ignorant things about what the game was about. And even saying that is a weird thing for a creator to say, because who am I to determine how people receive something? But yeah, I felt very misunderstood, because Braid was one of those games where it came out and people were talking about it for a long time." He laughs: "And a lot of those conversations drove me nuts."
In some respects, Indie Game: The Movie could easily be viewed as a cautionary tale, though for his part, Fish says that he wasn't concerned about how much of himself, or his process, he was revealing. "I thought that was the point - [to] show how the sausage gets made," he says. "The simple act of putting something to film and showing it to people has a romanticising effect, so I think it was important to show the hardships too. Making games is impossible. If you're thinking of getting into that field, you should know that." Indeed, McMillen says that with hindsight the film perhaps doesn't go far enough. "I wanted to be as honest as I possibly could about everything, especially when doing something like this," he says. "But in the first three or four years of the movie coming out, I would get people coming up to me and shaking my hand, and 'Can I get a picture with you?' And then they're like, 'I quit my job at EA and now I'm independent. I've got a wife and kids'. And it's just like: what the fuck are you doing? Why did you do this? This is the riskiest shit ever! This is the starving artist of today, you know what I mean?"
Still, both McMillen and Fish admit to being overwhelmed when they first saw the final cut. "Well, I was well and truly an emotional wreck around that time," Fish laughs. "I cried at everything. But yeah, seeing the movie for the first time only heightened [everything] I was feeling about the game." McMillen says it far exceeded his expectations. "I was floored. [Pajot and Swirsky] did a really good job. And I never felt manipulated, I never felt like they were feeding ...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2022