I had the great pleasure of editing this in-depth feature by Sam Machkovech, on the making of World of Goo, one of the first indie darlings of the modern era. We're doing a whole package on 2008 games (we're calling it Flashback: 2008, because a few of our stories were just WAYY TOO BIG to come together in one month/week) and what they said about that particular time in the history of games.
Sam is a fantastic writer, and found some really wonderful anecdotes from his interviews with creative director Kyle Gabler and (at the-time) Nintendo's Dan Adelman.
First, there is the story of how 2DBoy started, which involves a cat named Madonna, her shampoo, and a Frog named Fisty
Gabler says the duo was introduced to each other by a mutual friend at Pogo who "knew we both wanted to start a business." That mutual friend, Jim Greer, would go on to co-found the casual gaming portal Kongregate shortly after, and Gabler admits that during that lean period of his life, he and his cat Madonna "lived and slept" in Kongregate's back office for his new company's first year. (Gabler also admits that he saved money by using the same cat shampoo as Madonna.)
2DBoy began life in the form of a weekend-long, two-person game jam, and the resulting prototype, dubbed Fisty, revolved around a "large, sad frog that you'd squeeze to make it shoot out a physically simulated tongue and catch stuff." The development process was more fun than the game, Gabler says, and while the prototype went into a dust bin, Fisty the Frog lived on as a prominent character in World of Goo.
There is a lot of insight into early WiiWare, casual game storefronts at the time, division of labor on tiny teams, and plenty of thoughts on the game from 15 years of hindsight:
He admits feeling "silly when he reflects on how on-the-nose some of the game's meta-commentary turned out. "The goo balls stare up into the sky and wonder what's up there. Pure little balls of curiosity and wonder. Meanwhile, a vast international corporation with a global pipe network slurps up goo balls from every corner of the globe—processing them, packaging them, and selling the product to customers as food, oil, and beauty cream. It's not one-to-one, but when you're a young game developer who earnestly wants to make something beautiful, you can feel an awful lot like those curious goo balls."
Yet even his silliest answers align with the point of the game, which remains as enchanting and captivating now as it did during its launch. "It's a silly game about goo balls that's also somehow about beauty, progress, surveillance, and that feeling of exploring a big, scary world that doesn't care about you," Gabler says. "There's a lot of stuff sloshing around in there, and the game [is] just kinda has fun without trying to convince anyone of anything."
I often find a lot of inspiration in these retrospectives (and in our entire Developer Insights section) as a budding teeny-game-maker myself, and I love the honesty that Gabler shows here.