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Kayin
@Kayin
P-Tux7
@P-Tux7 asked:

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.


zaratustra
@zaratustra

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.

drmelon
@drmelon

There's something very important in that 1up article that I think people forget about Cave Story - the line about how it rivalled in scope mainline series GBA games of the time. Being just about 12 years old when Cave Story reached me through these channels, downloading the game at school (as I didn't have internet at home just yet) and taking it back with me and discovering that this free game had as much (if not more) heart and character and interesting gameplay as anything that could be found on the shelves by the biggest names was nothing short of a complete and total hotwire to the center of the creative part of my brain.
I credit Ratchet & Clank 2's Insomniac Museum with highlighting to me how games were imperfect things made by human beings who had to make decisions about what to keep and what to leave - introducing me to the idea that maybe, just maybe, I could be one of those people; but it felt like a far-off dream, something intangible to me, a rural kid with terrible math grades.
But Cave Story made me realize that I could make games. Anyone could make games. Here was a single person, making things in their spare time between their life and job, and giving them away for free - making things for the love of making them, telling stories so that the stories would be told. It changed my life.


dosmeow
@dosmeow

Cave Story dropping on the ZZTer IRC channel of the time got the whole crew playing it over the course of a week or two, slowly learning about some of the hidden weapons and its good ending. The IRC topic at the time had somebody calling somebody else the f-slur, a link to meatspin.swf (do people remember that one? It's uh, explicit.), and a link to a pirated copy of Quake 1.

This is from January 31st 2005 and onward

[19:32] <gofer-chan> i found a fucking awesome sidescroller
[19:32] <gofer-chan> xr7
[19:33] <gofer-chan> i think this may be the kind of thing you wanted
[19:33] <XR7> yaaaaaay
[19:33] <gofer-chan> http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA022293/FreeSoft/Doukutsu.html
[19:33] <gofer-chan> here's the english patch
[19:33] <gofer-chan> http://agtp.romhack.net/download/doukutsu.zip
[19:33] <gofer-chan> it plays like a metroid type game
[19:33] <gofer-chan> except it's a really fucking huge and awesome freeware japanese game

[22:33] <Nadir> i have a puppy on my head in this game

[22:35] <Nadir> everyone should play this game
[22:35] <Nadir> ever
[20:06] <Nadir> huzzah!
[20:06] <Nadir> balrog is amazing
[20:06] <Nadir> i love that guy
[20:06] <mOdac> huzzah?
[20:06] <gofer-chan> that's balrog
[20:06] <gofer-chan> he's my hero

[20:21] <gofer-chan> who puts a dog in a chest >:( jeeze

[16:47] <Dr_Dos> :O
[16:47] <Dr_Dos> King
[16:47] <Dr_Dos> what a compelling story this is
[16:49] <Dr_Dos> Toroko D:
[16:50] <Dr_Dos> King D:
[16:50] <Nadir> Dos D:

My favorite part of all of it is how we do not have the word Metroidvania. My second favorite thing is that while it consumes so much of the chat for days, nobody fuckin puts the link to the game in the channel topic.

There are two wolves inside me, with one saying "nobody has ever wanted to read IRC logs" and the other saying "This is a primary source to how folks reacted to Cave Story shortly after its release and that's super important historically" so here u go.


surasshu
@surasshu

if i still had my old irc logs from that time there's probably a similar event like that around the same time. another very memorable event was downloading hoot.exe and discovering (primarily) ryu umemoto's incredible pc98 work together with coda, which lead directly to the creation of tree of knowledge


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in reply to @Kayin's post:

i know my finding cave story and thus indie games even existing as a whole was absolutely jayisgames, just a game review site that did indie games and really let my fill my pockets with all sorts of really interesting stuff.

i think i learnt about IWBTG from a game maker forum/community called robosquid. distinctly remember reading the phrase "oh you have to shoot the spike"
a lot of random folks who were active there made it big, cactus and JW from vlambeer come to mind. beau blyth was there too i think as teknopants
i get nostalgia for that space every so often, i do miss those small forums. was always rly cool seeing random tiny prototypes and such from those guys

in reply to @zaratustra's post:

man, i almost forgot about home of the underdogs. what a great site for discovering new and exciting things back in the day! i first found out about it from an "Obscure Games" thread on the Team17 Worms fan forums; the first forum i joined way back when i was just a kid.

JayIsGames was such a good site, it's just been shambling for years. :/

Special shoutout to both Dan-Ball and On with Eyezmaze, I spent so much time with their games thanks to JayIsGames

I remember playing Falling Sand Game a bunch before Powder Game took off too

in reply to @dosmeow's post:

[19:59] [mOdac] what the fuck are you talking about
[19:59] [gofer-chan] CAVE STORY
[19:59] [mOdac] what the hell kind of poorly named thing is that
[19:59] [Nadir] fuck you

Separated by almost two decades, I still feel a sense of closeness.

When I was a kid, my dad got me the Wii Ware version of Cave Story. It was one of if not the first indie game I’d ever played. I remember being blown away by the fact that it was made in its entirety by only one person. Then a few years later I came back to it on my 3DS (not via Cave Story 3D, thank the gods) and looked online to find that there’s a secret ending. Absolutely life-changing game for me, just by the simple fact of its existence and its quality.

in reply to @surasshu's post: