Score: 8 of 10

GameLoading: Rise Of The Indies is an independent video game developer documentary from StudioBento. There have been a couple of these types of documentaries come out in the past couple years, Indie Game: The Movie comes to mind. But unlike Indies Game: The Movie, this isn’t about how Phil Fish is an asshole. This was more about how a lot of these indie developers are artist.

The filmmakers talks to developers who look at games in some completely different ways. They talked to the couple from Tale of Tales who think video games should be visual art, and not the shooting and killing that most games are today. They also talked to Robin Arnott, who’s game, SoundSelf, is all about sound and very little visual beyond a fancy audio visualizer.

While watching this documentary, I started to see comparisons between indie games and the first video games. Then once someone in the documentary also made the same comparison, it was even more clear. Back in the day, when you could find them in plastic bags tacked onto a cork board in a computer store (before my time obviously) and there wasn’t some big marketing campaign that costs millions by some multi-million dollar publisher. Back then, there were no game publishers the developers had to copy the disks themselves and take them to the stores. Once game consoles came onto the scene and names like Nintendo and Sega were introduced big money started going into making, publishing, and marketing these games. That kind of left the guy coding on his Commodore with no way to make a any headroom for himself with getting a job at one of these big game companies.

Once Steam and Xbox Arcade and Playstation introduced digital distribution and the need for smaller games came in demand. Small development teams could make games again they way that they wanted to and still reach the same large audience that the big boys were. Thus the “Rise of the Indies”.

That’s only a small portion of what this documentary covers. If someone one doesn’t think games as an artform, don’t show them Call of Duty or GTA. Instead show them an indie game like Papers Please or The Dragon Cancer. Cause while big companies do have have some great art and story the true artists of the video game world are the indie developers. And that’s what this documentary shows.

I scored this an 8 out of 10. the reason I knocked off two points was because it seemed to bash a little too hard on the triple A games. And it almost felt like it was bashing on it’s fans as well.  I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys something other than the next Call of Duty from time to time.

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