Do you have any idea how games like Cave Story were "discovered" by Americans? I can ascribe some of that to Aeon Genesis' prompt translation, but Pixel wasn't ever the kind of guy to aggressively market himself in the same way that indie devs are told to now. There was no YouTube, no Steam, no Twitch, no Fangamer merchandise, no fellow indie game crossovers. How did he make a good free game and it just rose to the top of its own accord?
Before youtube and twitch and twitter, virtually everything that wasn't aggressively mainstream passed through word of mouth. Stuff like Eternal Daughter, Soldat, Warning Forever, Tumiki Fighters, all these games spread through word of mouth, even before the post-Cave Story boom. The separation at the time felt more like. "Flash Games" (N or Alien Hominid), freeware games(like Soldat, Nethack, whatever version of Scorched Earth), and weird Japanese games people only kinda understood where they came from. I know at least I didn't understand what a doujin release REALLY meant (from shit like Princess Maker to Melty Blood), but w/e. Also I guess the fourth class of poverty gaming was emulation but w/e.
The point is, most of us were broke back then (and honestly, kinda still now) so we'd all be on forums, or IRC, or even fucking 4chan trying to share stuff that you could play for free. Back then everything under ""real games"" was either free or might as well have been free(said japanese doujin releases, emulation). Downloading a cool looking game online was pretty normal back then, so all it took was a few people on IRC or forums or w/e. Hell, IWBTG was getting crazy popular before youtube and twitch too. Both platforms extended it's life, but it all started by people just saying "hey I found this cool thing".
I think it's hard to think about it now because very few indie games are free, and those that are are drowned out by a huuuuge waves of itch.io games (flash kinda eventually had this same issue). Like who would know to even try a game if they had to spend 5 bucks or more to try it out. But back then it was slimmer pickings (basically, anything that felt like a "real game" and wasn't flash was a gift), so quality games got talked about a lot. Even the post-Cave Story indie boom feels alien compared to the time before it. It was much harder to get noticed AFTER Cave Story, once a lot of us decided it was time to give game making a real go. Though even then you went from '10s of free games' to '100s'. Still managable.
I was there when Cave Story became popular. I won't say it was the only path by which it became popular, but it might serve to understand how things worked back then:
- We knew about Ikachan, Pixel's earlier game, from Home of the Underdogs, who kept itself fairly well updated regarding doujin games (for the kids less than 30 years old, that's what we called "japanese indie games") Also, back then JayIsGames was an actual website with actual news about actual new games instead of a pile of shit.
- Similarly, we already knew some works from the Aeon Genesis team (they had translated Warning Forever, Rockman & Forte, Live-A-Live and I think Clock Tower by then) They didn't hang on the same circles as I did, but we certainly had some people in common.
- Cave Story's translation comes out and we play the hell out of it.
- One colleague happens to be writing about indie games for a new site called 1up.
- The rest is history.
