I’m debating whether or not to spend $60 of the cold hard Black Friday cash I earned on Immortals: Fenyx Rising, the new open world megalith from Ubisoft. It has green fields and purple-pink trees and massive cliffs you can climb and an open sky you can glide through. There are next-gen graphics (at least on the PS5 and PC- not so much on my quaint switch) and voiceovers from Greek Gods. I will probably love it and waste my life away on it for a few weeks.
But like… where’s the VISION, man…?*
Fenyx Rising looks like a blockbuster movie, something that’s actually worth the $60 they charge for it but devoid of the artistry and weirdness you would find in a game by a much smaller development team. I’ve spent most of my gaming time in recent weeks writing reviews for Bonus Stage of games with microscopic dev teams. Three of them have had dev teams of one person, and those three games- Azurebreak Heroes, Tracks: Toybox Edition, and especially Super Blood Hockey were the best of the bunch. So what is it exactly that makes these one dev wonders such great games?
It might take a village to raise a child or invent a nuclear weapon, but it certainly doesn’t take one to make a video game. Numerous classics were created by tiny dev teams. Donkey Kong, the game that gave us Mario, was developed by two guys** and Tetris was created by the Soviet wunderkind Alexey Pajitnov. It might seem hard at first glance to argue that these games were the work of auteurs; Donkey Kong was the work of a large toy company and Tetris the product of none other than the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But looking at the later works of these developers, we can see that their interests and game design philosophies shine through as much in these early games as they do in later ones. Pajitnov went on to have a lengthy career designing other simple puzzle games like Hexic that were also easy to play and built around spatial awareness. And Miyamoto and Yakoi went on to become titans of the industry. Miyamoto in particular is looked upon as perhaps the greatest game designer ever, and the gameplay loop of trial and error and sheer obsession with fun-for-fun’s-sake that are hallmarks of Miyamoto’s later Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda*** are on full display in Donkey Kong.
Nintendo and the Soviet Union were not the only entities publishing games with small development teams in the 1980s. Every game you know from the NES era or earlier is likely the product of either a very small team or a single person. There are a few reasons for this. The video games industry was much smaller, for one thing. But perhaps more importantly, the hardware of that time was incapable of running the sorts of blockbuster experiences that have become de-rigeur for AAA gaming in the past twenty or so years. As hardware capable of running ever-larger experiences was released, larger dev teams were required in order to build these games from the ground up. It simply isn’t possible for the same person to write a script, design geography, program, design characters, and engineer graphics for a game like Immortals: Fenyx Rising. And so, at least according to one youtube video that I did not have the journalistic patience to sit through, it takes a full forty minutes to watch the credits.
Because so many people and so much work is required for a game like Immortals: Fenyx Rising, decisions about the content and design are made not by an auteur, but by a committee of corporate executives who are there to ensure that Ubisoft’s investment in its production is worthwhile. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Like I sad, I will almost certainly buy this game and eat it up. But is it possible for a committee of corporate executives to make a work of art? Or is it just a(n awesome looking) commodity?
Dev teams like those that had created Donkey Kong and Tetris for large companies (or universities) went into hibernation for a long period of time until the PC gaming platform Steam spurred the great indie game boom of the late 2000s. A man named Pixel, nee Daisuke Amaya, was the John-the-Baptist figure that predated this flood of games. In 2004 he released Cave Story, one of the greatest games of all time, as a freeware download. Cave Story was no shovelware. It was a 12 hour long throwback to the pixel art of the NES that featured a narrative filled with tragedy and pathos. It was a truly mind-blowing experience to everyone who played it at the time and inspired a generation of game developers. Games like Cave Story aren’t exactly a dime a dozen now, but in 2004 the idea that some random dude would not only be able to make something of this size and scope but release it for free was the gaming equivalent of Bigfoot.
When asked in an interview with gamasutra why he made Cave Story, Amaya responded “because I like those types of games.” This is the beauty of single dev auteur-driven games; they often exist purely because somebody wanted to share their love of games with others and put their spin on the genres that they loved growing up. Cave Story was buzzed about for years and years afterwards and is still thought of by many as one of the best ever games by a single developer.
After Cave Story came the flood. Braid, Super Meat Boy, Minecraft and Fez all premiered in the latter half of the 2000s, each featuring tiny dev teams. Fez was designed by a single eccentric designer named Phil Fish, who was doxxed during a twitter argument and eventually announced his exit from the games industry (the mid 2010s were a nasty time for conversations about video games). Fez was a beautiful game, completely unlike anything else on the market at the time or now. Something inbetween a puzzle game and a metroidvania that almost encourages you to get lost in its wonderful pixelated world, Fez deserves to be talked about along with games like Minecraft as one of the great auteur experiences of the indie boom.
Nowadays there are so many one dev wonders that they almost seem ubiquitous. The three games I wrote about recently for Bonus Stage- Azurebreak Heroes, Tracks, and Super Blood Hockey- have all arrived on the scene lacking the buzz that accompanied Super Meat Boy and even Fez. The beauty of these games is that they either wouldn’t be made in the same form or made at all by bigger development teams. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the massive market for a game like Immortals doesn’t really exist for a trainset simulator like Tom Malinowski’s Tracks or an extremely bloody and hilarious multiplayer hockey game like Loren Lemcke’s Super Blood Hockey. But it should fill us all with happiness that they were made at all and readily available for anybody who wants to play them.
The irony of the games industry’s past decade is that the games with the widest scope often lack the vision of smaller games. When a game is built specifically as an attempt to appeal to everybody (or at least a wide cross section of PS4/5 owners), it loses something. Luckily we have games like Fez and Super Blood Hockey that seem primarily focused on being something that a single exceptionally creative developer wants to play.
*It is spectacularly unfair of me to criticise a game I haven’t played that isn’t even out yet at the time of writing
**Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi, nintendo’s OG dynamic duo
***These two NES classics were also designed by just two people, in both cases Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka