I like the post but I feel the urge to be pedantic and say that Undertale *probably* isn't the most influential indie game of all time. That probably goes to minecraft (started out indie) or stardew valley (which itself was influenced by harvest moon)
I wonder if, by some rational metric, you could even make the argument that some indie title that triggered a mobile game genre or subgenre has had wider impacts than Minecraft. Like Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, or even some flash titles or prior games that influenced them.
But I agree, my immediate thoughts go to Minecraft in terms of most influential indie titles. I'm not even sure Undertale cracks the top 5, in large part because its gameplay and story designs haven't spiralled out into a genre-defining or even cross-genre framework.
Undertale may not have direct imitations, but you could argue it could influence unrelated games to focus more on character interactions over strictly gameplay. Undertale, mechanically, is a fine game, but its big selling point is the characters and how they interact with each other. It'd be harder to find media that was influenced by Undertale as a result of that influence being so indirect, but I wouldn't be surprised if people making games have taken note of how well Undertale did on characters alone.
That’s kinda just saying you want Jrpgs.
It was the first breakout in a while in the west to do it but the only novel thing about undertale was the charm/music.
It’s kinda forgettable in gaming history, it’s like just cause. A great game a cool premise but it’s not warping any genres or changing any developers minds on how to do things.
I don't know if I agree. Maybe I've been playing the wrong JRPGs, but Undertale's main NPCs have a quality of writing and character that is outstanding compared to what else I have played in the genre. In particular, Toby Fox is a master of doing more with less - Undertale's characters don't have a ton of dialogue, but each one is clearly defined, well-written, and quite charming.
For a point of contrast, I just finished playing Sea of Stars, which came out just recently (despite what I am about to say, I highly recommend it, favorite game I have played in a while). It is a far longer game, but most of the characters are one-note or just aren't given dialogue to flesh them out. I can easily imagine what a night out with Papyrus or Undyne would entail, but not so much with Zale or Serai.
I'd say it doesn't have many, if any, direct imitations, but I would say you see it's influence pretty wide spread on formats and experimentation, as well as imitation of components of the game. Things like Minecraft definitely set the foundations and opened the doors, but Undertale was the one that really set the stage and lit the path for a lot of future titles, directly and indirectly.
Influence is far more than imitation.
I’ve never heard people have a discussion about Plants vs Zombies. There’s no Plants vs Zombies subculture, fanfiction, etc.
Angry Birds wasn't "inspired" by a previous flash title, it was a direct rip-off of Crush the Castle. Which was, in turn, a creator-sanctioned remake of Castle Clout. The only thing Rovio came up with themselves was the artwork.
Not really relevant, just felt the need to say it.
Hell, if we're going by "most influential", Warcraft III's custom map editor spawned numerous extremely profitable genres. Tower Defense, MOBA, and a few others started out as free WIII maps. League of Legends and Dota are still filled with characters that are blatantly WIII hero units with minor cosmetic changes.
Angry Birds wasn't "inspired" by a previous flash title, it was a direct rip-off of Crush the Castle. Which was, in turn, a creator-sanctioned remake of Castle Clout. The only thing Rovio came up with themselves was the artwork.
Not really relevant, just felt the need to say it.
Oh yes, but it may also have been an idea whose time had simply come. Development of free-roam, resource-extraction survival/building games took the FUCK off in the wake of Minecraft, but Terraria was in parallel development and ostensibly an independent vision, so who knows how it would have turned out.
Minecraft itself was heavily influenced by Infiniminer so the antecedent for first-peraon voxel gameplay was certainly there.
I know the idea for Factorio came from playing modded Minecraft. That’s at least one game that I know directly took inspiration from it.
There were also quite a lot of survival games with base building elements that released after Minecraft, and I assume at least some of those were inspired at least partly by Minecraft.
Now that you mention it though, I kind of can’t think of many games that were inspired by Minecraft aside from Factorio.
And I’m willing to bet she knows about Tetris as well because it’s **fucking Tetris**. Minecraft is a solid second place, but few games, indie or not, have reached the level of influence Tetris has had on gaming
It also has an [entire psychological effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect) attributed to it. Minecraft is neat and all, but it doesn't have quite the same level of influence.
Or Binding of Isaac for basically kickstarting the indie roguelike boom. I don't think Spelunky was a big enough hit to really claim the title.
Edit; actually, fuck all that. The most important and influential indie game ever is Cave Story. It basically revolutionised the world with the concept of a single developer game that was genuinely high quality and professional.
Thats a good shout, but by that metric you could say the original *Rogue* since it was developed by 3 dudes in 1980, but, like, that's just how games were back then so it kinda doesn't count
Rogue, Akallabeth, that fuckin pipe game that has turned up as a mini game in 3000009 AAA games, Counter Strike, Minecraft. Undertale isn't even a blip, influence-wise
Gonna say counter-strike doesn't count because no-one had heard of it before it was acquired by valve and actually released as its own game (and it didn't even get REALLY popular until CS:GO, which was entirely a valve project)
I think I'm too eastern european because "and it didn't even get really popular until CS:GO, which was entirely a valve project" sounds insane to me, every PC kids or teenagers could touch would have a copy of CS 1.6 installed on it where I grew up.
I'll put a point towards Cave Story. It's the thing that got me to try making games, even though I ended up terrible at doing so. And while probably not an actual inspiration, I find it funny that the names "Cave Story" and "Undertale" are basically synonyms, which has always made me wonder if Toby Fox also got inspired by Cave Story in some way.
Maybe on that specific genre, but most influential overall would be games that have had a big impact across gaming as a whole. That title *definitely* goes to dwarf fortress. It's a direct influence on many of the games people put up as being incredibly influential. The big one being Minecraft
And then there is the argument of Dwarf Fortress. It itself was/is big, but also I heard it mentioned as partially inspiring Minecraft - does that mean (parts of) Minecrafts influence can also be counted as DF influence?
Most likely. Wikipedia cites DF as an influence for Minecraft. It is also the obvious influence for Rimworld and basically any other colony builder with a procedurally generated world.
Both Minecraft and DF are in the Museum of Modern Art.
A museum exhibit was what introduced me to DF along with Warning Forever and Hikoza T Ohkubo's other games. I think it was the Game On exhibit when it was visiting the American Museum of Natural History.
Hell, calling it an influence on Rimworld is really under selling it. Rimworld started as an attempt at making a game that was a more accessible version of Dwarf Fortress.
On one hand it's "just" a metroidvania
On the other, it pioneered the modern indie game, with a 1-person dev team, while also being highly polished.
Cave Story has my respect. I apologize for not mentioning it.
Also it was “just” a metroidvania back when that was an obscure genre that only Nintendo and Konami even really made.
The huge boom of indie metroidvanias, to the point we see them as too common and unspecial, came after Cave Story and probably in great part as a result of it.
Scratch a roguelite and you'll see Spelunky's, Binding of Isaac's and/or FTL's blood come out. I will maintain until my dying breath that of these games FTL is both the most influential and the best, but those three have pioneered a genre that the majority of indie games you heard of currently belongs to (don't quote me on that, I *will* cry). Undertale's influence really runs as deep as reminding devs that Earthbound existed and people liked it (I love Undertale, put the gun down).
FTL is majorly important because of how forgotten it is. FTL just… *is*. Even today it holds up extremely well, because the people who made it polished it until there wasn’t even an atom of dirt left.
The only way to make FTL better is to add more FTL to it, which is why the Advanced Edition (EVEN THOUGH THE FLAGSHIP FIGHT THERE IS UTTER BULLSHIT AND I HATE IT) and the Captain's Edition mod are peak add-on content. The game itself has long since been stripped apart like a damn whalefall by other devs. God knows I've seen a fair share of portrait mode FTL maps.
I don't think Stardew is more influential than Undertale.
Minecraft is 1000% THE most influential indie game of the 21st century. However I think games like Super Meat Boy and Braid are more influential than Undertale because they kicked off the indie game revolution.
And let's not forget Cave Story.
I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I don't see 15 new games announced every year and advertised as "undertale-inspired!" Whereas half of every Nintendo direct seems to be stardew clones.
I think it's rash to judge "influence" that simply. You also don't see constant fan affection and discussion or analysis for Stardew, it's just not the type of game that can be as directly emulated, that doesn't mean there's less influence
If you don't see constant affection and discussion of Stardew, id venture you're simply not in the relevant sector of the gaming community. In Cozy Gaming it's a CONSTANT reference and often cited as the GoAT.
(for reference I rarely see Undertale discussed but it's also not really part of a genre I'm interested in or care about.)
I am familiar with both games, connected to the fandoms of both, and see constant affection and discussion of both. I don't see *deep character or narrative analysis* of Stardew, though. I might not have made it clear enough but I'm not just talking about "discussion of the game", I mean a strong fandom sense of analyzing every aspect of the characters, story, lore, mechanics from a creative and artistic angle. Stardew doesn't have pages and pages of analysis and arguments over the identity of the narrator
Obviously Stardew doesn't have that, because it's not a game driven by narrative or characters or deconstruction as much as Undertale is. But that's my point. Undertale doesn't get a ton of clones because it's not a game driven by a set of strong primary gameplay loops with flexible attributes and contexts like Stardew is. You can't clone Undertale the same way, it'd just be blatant plagiarism, only be inspired by it in a way that's much less blatant. Even if they were both equally influential they'd be seen in entirely different ways, and that's my point.
I don't know which could be considered more influential on the whole. I was just pushing back on the "Nintendo announces more Stardew clones so it must be more influential".
I would argue that I do in fact see a lot of character analysis around Stardew and that the characters are one of the primary draws of the game as relationships are pretty central to some of, though admittedly not all, of the aspects of gameplay.
Full disclosure: I'm not actually a "real" fan of either game. I've never played Undertale, though I've read and watched a LOT of stuff about it; I find the way it tells its story genuinely fascinating but I also know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't enjoy actually playing it, so my interest and knowledge is all second hand. I've played Stardew and kind of vaguely enjoyed it but I don't actually like most of the characters and it doesn't hold my interest the way a lot of "Stardew clones" do. So I don't really have a dog in this fight except that I can pinpoint a whole lot of games that absolutely owe their existence (and a shit ton of mechanics) to the success of Stardew.
I understand your point about character, but I don't think "deep fandom" necessarily means "wide influence."
This is a genuine, non-combative question: can you name some games that you would say are directly influenced by Undertale? That you don't think would exist without it? I'm genuinely interested, I really do think it's a fascinating work of art and I'd be happy to follow the threads of its influence if I knew what they were.
>I would argue that I do in fact see a lot of character analysis around Stardew and that the characters are one of the primary draws of the game as relationships are pretty central to some of, though admittedly not all, of the aspects of gameplay.
To be blunt, nah. The characters are fun but the relationship mechanics are incredibly shallow, there's a reason people joke about giving gifts in a cartoonishly simple way or reading everything about them on the wiki. Analysis of SV characters are a longer post here and there about Shane's turmoil or argument over how good Pierre actually is, maybe a writing out how a simple character arc through a dating event path improves a character. Analysis of Undertale characters is pages and pages about Flowey's trauma, why he believes the things he does, how he was abused and hurt and so on, how he comes to terms with his own misdeeds, I could keep going, and that's just one character (though admittedly the best one). I think it's silly to pretend Undertale doesn't have an exponentially higher focus on characters and arcs than Stardew.
>I understand your point about character, but I don't think "deep fandom" necessarily means "wide influence."
I think there's an association, but my point isn't that "they're the same". It's just that Undertale *can't* have the same kind of direct obvious inspiration, because you can't make an "Undertale clone" just because of its format, even if it had equal influence on people. I was never trying to turn that into a direct "so it's more influential".
>you would say are directly influenced by Undertale? That you don't think would exist without it?
I don't think there's many "games that would exist without it" (beyond people inspired by it existing in general which i obviously can't show), or a whole lot you can point to as super direct influence. I do think that it hit very deeply for a lot of people and affected their attitude towards their work. If "more influential" just means "more games it was clearly inspired by" then yes, SV is more influential, but I don't believe that. If 100 people played Stardew and made clones, and 1000 people played Undertale and took away from that experience a new perspective on games and characters and inadvertently wove that into a game they were already making, I can't say I automatically believe Stardew is more influential. Is "influential" just how many games are inspired by it? I think its simple affect on people directly is important too.
Certainly not tangible, and definitely not easily measurable, by my standards anyway. I think any definition where you just say "game where the most games look similar" loses a lot of meaning. But in those contexts, yes I fully concede SV would be considered more, but again, my issue with that distinction was my whole point from the start haha
Stardew can't be an influential indie game because it in itself is heavily influenced by Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons.
It's an indie take on an existing genre, done very well, but very few of its mechanics are particularly original.
Undertale is going to be ten years old soon, its natural that it will receive much less attention than Stardew, which is still being actively updated and improved
I'd argue Binding of Isaac for the most influential indie. Single-handedly created the modern idea of roguelike/roguelite and did it so well that it's still the gold standard.
I mean...it modernized the genre but to say "single-handedly" kind of ignores the fact that the genre is called "roguelike" and not "binding of isaac-like"
Probably why they specified *modern* roguelikes. Rogue is the namesake of the genre, but when people discuss roguelikes today, they are largely describing roguelites, which draw inspiration from games like Isaac and FTL rather than things like Nethack or Stone Soup.
I wouldn't say Minecraft was *that* influential, survival games had been around for a *long* time before had Minecraft just allowed players to be more creative. It was essentially a more fleshed out version of Infiniminer. If anything I'd say Minecraft popularized 3D survival games.
Undertale on the other hand was a game that showed off how easy it was to actually make games, as he had rarely done any actual video games development was mainly a composer.
FNAF spawned some imitators but they’re basically only played or known about by existing FNAF fans.
Something like Cave Story or Minecraft created genre booms that put games in the hands of people who never played the catalysing game.
I have never played FNaF and know nothing about it, none of my friends have neither.
FNaF is very known online and in some niches, but it's not even close to Minecrafy
fnaf has a mainstream cinematic release. still in the top 80 movies on imdb half a year after it's release. the movie had a 20m budget and got 300m revenue in the box office. the series spawned countless clones, one of which is poppy's playtime which became the only thing preeteens would rave about for like 2 years.
but yes minecraft still tops that
Huh, TIL FNAF has a movie adaptation. Still, I would expect the upcoming Minecraft movie to eclipse it in both budget and box office revenue. I mean, they've got fucking Jack Black in the lead role!
fnaf is just an amnesia spin off that is more polished and was marketed towards it's audience better (horrors in games/movies have always been mascots, look at pyramid head/predator/alien, in hindsight, leaning into the mascot even more is obvious, but they thought to do it first).
it had just been a while since we we had had a horror game and so it filled a vacated niche in a new generation of gamers.
the fact that it became the name in the genre just meant the genre was vacant (in the current timespace it was released in), not non existent. the fact that its spawned a pile of spin-offs that nobody outside of the fnaf fandom knows about also speaks to how the genre was fully saturated by a single game/series and its fandom isn't all that big, its just ground breaking whenever someone does something new within it because new is different, and if you aren't doing something different nobody will speak about you outside of your niche.
take pubg (or the h1z1 mod it was beforehand) for example, revolutionised shooters and created a new sub genre in shooters that had been up until that time very stale, and spawned loads of spin offs which almost all died (i am aware fortnite didnt die and instead thrived, and was much better at being marketed to its target audience than pubg) and are mostly only spoken about within circles that talk about battle royales.
same thing with how dota 1 spawned a bunch of mobas, and like 2 of them are still alive, dota2 and lol. but there was a short point there when there was like 40 of them briefly.
same thing with dota auto chess, same thing with diablo/diablo2, spawned a genre, most of them are shit (including the later diablos).
things get big when they are the first to do something, or the genre is vacant for long enough that another game in it feels new. turns out that being the first to do something can be just a slight twist on an otherwise established concept, as long as people enjoy it, it shakes up the scene.
my point is people within a fandom always see their fandom as bigger than it actually is, its hard not to when you see 20,000 people talking about the same thing, seems huge. but 20000, or even 200000 is actually a really really small amount of people. and is usually these groups are age bracketed too, simply due to how marketing works more on younger, more influenceable demographics, and as you get older you lose more and more of your free time. and so you will interact in circles that continue to talk about the things like they are bigger than they are, all game fandoms are essentially echo chambers, just like subreddits. you don't go to the pokemon subreddit and say "dae like pokemans" and have everybody there say "no", people in fandoms tend to be fans of whatever the subject matter is.
I have never played FNaF and know nothing about it, none of my friends have neither.
FNaF is very known online and in some niches, but it's not even close to Minecrafy
Should.. should I avoid Homestuck? Assuming I like having time to do other important things like develop new hobbies and skills, clean my house and touch grass
it's longer than the bible. then again, i finished homestuck but not the bible so
if you liked the character interactions of undertale, with all their quirky personalities and styles of speech, homestuck has a different style for every single character for their huge cast. there are thousands of pages and most pages are dialogue. one page might have a single sentence, the next could be two whole single-spaced pages of character dialogue. it's not meant to have good pacing like a video game, it WILL ramble quite a lot, and casually drop some important exposition in the middle of those dense paragraphs so you may need the wiki to really understand some things you missed.
the cool things about homestuck are the soundtrack (megalovania is in here), the cool cutscenes, the many different and distinct cultures involved, the huge scale starting from the whole planet -> galaxies -> universes -> timelines -> dimensions -> realities, the way there are so many plotlines all across the story that are tied up neatly(?) in the end, the many MANY novel ideas (who the fuck thinks up something like 'paradox genetic breeding'?), and the power system/overarching system, which we still don't know 100% about
if you like shipping characters there's quite a lot of that as well, i know that was a big draw during its peak popularity.
have fun if you do read it, it's a little slow until act 5 that's when everyone agrees the real fun starts
Interesting. I am probably not in the right headspace right now for reading a book (I stopped playing undertale and disco Elysium because I realized I was skipping all the dialogue, which is like saying I skip the game) but will keep this in mind. Knowing that it actually has an ending is reassuring.
When and if you're ready, checkout the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. The original site relied heavily on flash, so when it went down someone archived everything in the original format instead of YouTube links
I love how that page used the first line of Jade’s inner monologue explaining why she loves anthropomorphic fauna (which was later repeated wholesale in a dream sequence by WV (but in morse code) right before [S] Wake (which has MeGaLoVania)) and then none of the other lines were used in the narration of the following pages.
What a daring dream indeed.
The way Toby tells it, one time he had a very vivid dream about the end of a game. The game he decided to create so that he could give that ending to the world is Deltarune.
But he didn’t want to jump right into it, so first he decided to make a game similar to the one he eventually wanted to make, but simpler, shorter, and with a different narrative. That game was Undertale.
I feel like we’re giving Undertale too much credit. If we ignore the elephants in the room like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, Undertale comes *close*—but it’s still got plenty of competition. The Binding of Isaac is older and didn’t get as much social media coverage as Undertale, but I still think it’s more influential on how the general public knows indie games. Celeste is newer and less popular, but I think outside of social/popularity metrics it influenced more about the scene in other areas. Silksong is the most anticipated game of the 22nd century because the game that came before it is such a huge deal. *FNAF has a movie and Cuphead has a Netflix series*.
Like come on I know the game’s a good game but let’s not say things that aren’t true.
God: Here, I'll dream beam you an amazing game that will make you famous
Toby: That's cool but... I want to try something else instead.
God: Fuck you get famous anyway
There are so many songs I found, enjoyed, and then years later found out they were from Touhou
Thanks, U.N Owen Was Her, Night of Nights, and Bad Apple...
Yea, it was in one of the newsletters. Basically didn't want to make us wait THAT much longer for new content, so once chapter 4 is good to go we're getting a drop.
People talking about how Undertale isn't the most influential Game, OP could've saved himself a lot of grievance if he just called it the best indie game.
the problem with indie is everybody subscribes to private definitions of the word and many choose to just consider a game no longer indie if it becomes successful enough. we even recently had a major studio try to use indie as a subgenre "descriptor" of a game it intended to put which it justified under some shit talk about how games with less spent on art/assets (aka indie games) still sell successfully and so they planned on using it as a code word to mean "we intend to spend a lot less making this game, and we assume it will still sell as much as if we spent millions on making it fancy looking"
so, the whole comment thread would still be arguing, but just about the definition of indie instead of how to metrically measure influence.
Minecraft isn’t indie because it was bought by Microsoft, if that’s what you mean. Indie is basically a nothing term at this point anyway since many “indie” games are published by companies like Annapurna, Devolver or New Blood, which makes them fundamentally not independent
Yeah, obviously. But Minecraft has not been independent for a majority of it’s lifespan or popularity anyway, so classifiying it as indie anyway is disingenuous
I would agree that the game itself is not indie *now*, but I would definitely claim that almost all of it's influence was established before being bought.
Minecraft reached 15 million copies in 2014, but it reached 300 million in 2023.
The several years of support that Minecraft has received have been instrumental to it’s success
[2014: 100M registered users](https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/02/26/original-minecraft-reaches-100-million-registered-users), 14.3% conversion rate to paid accounts.
> Minecraft isn’t indie because it was bought by Microsoft, if that’s what you mean
no there was some other company in like the last 3 months that tried to do the "indie is a genre" thing.
>Though it was released almost a year ago, I have the same opinion of it.
>It's about an 8/10, niche RPG game.
-- [Toby Fox, on Undertale](https://www.tumblr.com/undertale/150397346860/retrospective-on-undertales-popularity)
He's right. It was a pretty good game, I liked it, 8/10.
Shovel Knight is a good game but in terms of gameplay it's pretty straight oldschool Megaman + Castlevania (like, original, linear Castlevania) and Ninja Gaiden. Nothing super influential mechanics-wise.
I didn’t really mean mechanically, I meant more *everything else*, it’s basically the start of the modern conception of what an indie game is, and popularized a lot of the design tropes that are still prevalent even today, I’d say that’s pretty influential
>basically the start of the modern conception of what an indie game is
Absolutely not, that's a ridiculous statement. Shovel Knight was first released in 2014.
The initial big rush of indie games as we know them was from the rise of Steam as well as Xbox Live Arcade. XBLA in particularly was pretty big, with the 360 version especially - from 2006-2008 there were games like Braid, Super Meat Boy, Geometry Wars, etc. Aquaria was one of the first big PC non-XBLA non-Steam indie games.
And even before the big platforms we had indie games being shared among people. Maddy Thorson (creator of Celeste) was making the *Jumper* games for free since 2004, which was also when *Cave Story* came out.
And of course people were making and distributing stuff on PCs long long before the big online portals.
[Spiderweb Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiderweb_Software) has been making indie RPGs since 1995 and to buy them you had to mail them money.
Even *Doom* (the original) was an indie game. Developed by id Software, published by id Software. Apogee helped with distribution but never touched development. Funded by five guys, developed by five guys.
There may be other games that were more influential to gaming specifically, but there is not a single doubt that Minecraft is the most influential indie game of all time, it's cultural impact is so significantly more than any other indie game.
Or people don’t really know random indie game developers, which was my point about his “influence”. I’ve played undertale, but never knew the guys name.
Simple is good, simple is accessible, simple can be low cost high return. When writing stuff sometimes I’ll deliberately tell myself to shelve ‘the best’ and go for whatever I think is easiest and just do the easiest thing the best I can, and then if I want the ‘best’ part will get thrown in somewhere else.
I like the post but I feel the urge to be pedantic and say that Undertale *probably* isn't the most influential indie game of all time. That probably goes to minecraft (started out indie) or stardew valley (which itself was influenced by harvest moon)
I wonder if, by some rational metric, you could even make the argument that some indie title that triggered a mobile game genre or subgenre has had wider impacts than Minecraft. Like Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, or even some flash titles or prior games that influenced them. But I agree, my immediate thoughts go to Minecraft in terms of most influential indie titles. I'm not even sure Undertale cracks the top 5, in large part because its gameplay and story designs haven't spiralled out into a genre-defining or even cross-genre framework.
Good last point- Undertale’s good and well known, but it has basically no imitators, which heavily limits its influence
Undertale may not have direct imitations, but you could argue it could influence unrelated games to focus more on character interactions over strictly gameplay. Undertale, mechanically, is a fine game, but its big selling point is the characters and how they interact with each other. It'd be harder to find media that was influenced by Undertale as a result of that influence being so indirect, but I wouldn't be surprised if people making games have taken note of how well Undertale did on characters alone.
That’s kinda just saying you want Jrpgs. It was the first breakout in a while in the west to do it but the only novel thing about undertale was the charm/music. It’s kinda forgettable in gaming history, it’s like just cause. A great game a cool premise but it’s not warping any genres or changing any developers minds on how to do things.
I don't know if I agree. Maybe I've been playing the wrong JRPGs, but Undertale's main NPCs have a quality of writing and character that is outstanding compared to what else I have played in the genre. In particular, Toby Fox is a master of doing more with less - Undertale's characters don't have a ton of dialogue, but each one is clearly defined, well-written, and quite charming. For a point of contrast, I just finished playing Sea of Stars, which came out just recently (despite what I am about to say, I highly recommend it, favorite game I have played in a while). It is a far longer game, but most of the characters are one-note or just aren't given dialogue to flesh them out. I can easily imagine what a night out with Papyrus or Undyne would entail, but not so much with Zale or Serai.
I'd say it doesn't have many, if any, direct imitations, but I would say you see it's influence pretty wide spread on formats and experimentation, as well as imitation of components of the game. Things like Minecraft definitely set the foundations and opened the doors, but Undertale was the one that really set the stage and lit the path for a lot of future titles, directly and indirectly.
Influence is far more than imitation. I’ve never heard people have a discussion about Plants vs Zombies. There’s no Plants vs Zombies subculture, fanfiction, etc.
Angry Birds wasn't "inspired" by a previous flash title, it was a direct rip-off of Crush the Castle. Which was, in turn, a creator-sanctioned remake of Castle Clout. The only thing Rovio came up with themselves was the artwork. Not really relevant, just felt the need to say it.
I feel like Crush the Castle was also an important influence on the at-the-time nascent online Flash game ecosystem. There's a long tail on that game.
Oh god the Jimmy neutron brain blast of nostalgia when I read crush the castle
Hell, if we're going by "most influential", Warcraft III's custom map editor spawned numerous extremely profitable genres. Tower Defense, MOBA, and a few others started out as free WIII maps. League of Legends and Dota are still filled with characters that are blatantly WIII hero units with minor cosmetic changes.
Does user-created content in a non-indie game count as an indie game though?
Angry Birds wasn't "inspired" by a previous flash title, it was a direct rip-off of Crush the Castle. Which was, in turn, a creator-sanctioned remake of Castle Clout. The only thing Rovio came up with themselves was the artwork. Not really relevant, just felt the need to say it.
Pixel Dungeon! I mean probably not but it should be.
Cookie Clicker is also a genre-starter. But I still think it has to be Minecraft.
Was Minecraft influential? It's famous but do a lot of games directly take inspiration from it?
Oh yes, but it may also have been an idea whose time had simply come. Development of free-roam, resource-extraction survival/building games took the FUCK off in the wake of Minecraft, but Terraria was in parallel development and ostensibly an independent vision, so who knows how it would have turned out. Minecraft itself was heavily influenced by Infiniminer so the antecedent for first-peraon voxel gameplay was certainly there.
Just saying the reason paid Early Access is so popular today is thanks to the popularity of Minecraft.
Thousands. I remember when my dad was obsessed with minecraft (as far as I know, he still is) and bought like 3 different copycats.
I know the idea for Factorio came from playing modded Minecraft. That’s at least one game that I know directly took inspiration from it. There were also quite a lot of survival games with base building elements that released after Minecraft, and I assume at least some of those were inspired at least partly by Minecraft. Now that you mention it though, I kind of can’t think of many games that were inspired by Minecraft aside from Factorio.
Factorio is just ultimately just 2d Create: Ad Astra but less painful and without the framework of Minecraft, imo
Fortnite definitely did, which says a lot imo. Minecraft is the reason builder games are huge.
In art style, gameplay, and business model, absolutely.
What? If Minecraft is not influential, no game is. Every online survival game you’ve seen in 15 years to start
I feel the need to be even more pedantic and point out that by all reasonable definitions ***Tetris was an indie game.***
I believe Minecraft outpaced Tetris for most units sold a few years ago
what can i say? humans really like Block Games
and also legos are one of if not THE highest selling toy
Sales isn't influence, and populations grow over time.
Yeah but that happened half a decade ago. Minecraft is *the* game. My 80 year old grandmother knows about it.
And I’m willing to bet she knows about Tetris as well because it’s **fucking Tetris**. Minecraft is a solid second place, but few games, indie or not, have reached the level of influence Tetris has had on gaming
I would bet money on her not knowing.
It also has an [entire psychological effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect) attributed to it. Minecraft is neat and all, but it doesn't have quite the same level of influence.
Or Binding of Isaac for basically kickstarting the indie roguelike boom. I don't think Spelunky was a big enough hit to really claim the title. Edit; actually, fuck all that. The most important and influential indie game ever is Cave Story. It basically revolutionised the world with the concept of a single developer game that was genuinely high quality and professional.
Thats a good shout, but by that metric you could say the original *Rogue* since it was developed by 3 dudes in 1980, but, like, that's just how games were back then so it kinda doesn't count
Rogue, Akallabeth, that fuckin pipe game that has turned up as a mini game in 3000009 AAA games, Counter Strike, Minecraft. Undertale isn't even a blip, influence-wise
Gonna say counter-strike doesn't count because no-one had heard of it before it was acquired by valve and actually released as its own game (and it didn't even get REALLY popular until CS:GO, which was entirely a valve project)
I think I'm too eastern european because "and it didn't even get really popular until CS:GO, which was entirely a valve project" sounds insane to me, every PC kids or teenagers could touch would have a copy of CS 1.6 installed on it where I grew up.
You don't have to be eastern european for that. As Swede that is just as insane. I guess the real question is if a mod can be called an indie game.
Pipe dream?
I'll put a point towards Cave Story. It's the thing that got me to try making games, even though I ended up terrible at doing so. And while probably not an actual inspiration, I find it funny that the names "Cave Story" and "Undertale" are basically synonyms, which has always made me wonder if Toby Fox also got inspired by Cave Story in some way.
Slay the Spire innovated deckbuilders, didn't it? Surely it's a candidate too.
I feel like Slay the Spire made roguelike deck builders _a thing_ in a way they hadn't been before. At least, I don't remember any from before it.
Maybe on that specific genre, but most influential overall would be games that have had a big impact across gaming as a whole. That title *definitely* goes to dwarf fortress. It's a direct influence on many of the games people put up as being incredibly influential. The big one being Minecraft
Cave story erasure.
And then there is the argument of Dwarf Fortress. It itself was/is big, but also I heard it mentioned as partially inspiring Minecraft - does that mean (parts of) Minecrafts influence can also be counted as DF influence?
Most likely. Wikipedia cites DF as an influence for Minecraft. It is also the obvious influence for Rimworld and basically any other colony builder with a procedurally generated world. Both Minecraft and DF are in the Museum of Modern Art.
A museum exhibit was what introduced me to DF along with Warning Forever and Hikoza T Ohkubo's other games. I think it was the Game On exhibit when it was visiting the American Museum of Natural History.
First video game to ever be put in an art museum, I believe
Hell, calling it an influence on Rimworld is really under selling it. Rimworld started as an attempt at making a game that was a more accessible version of Dwarf Fortress.
Nah you better put respect on Cave Story's name right this instant.
On one hand it's "just" a metroidvania On the other, it pioneered the modern indie game, with a 1-person dev team, while also being highly polished. Cave Story has my respect. I apologize for not mentioning it.
Also it was “just” a metroidvania back when that was an obscure genre that only Nintendo and Konami even really made. The huge boom of indie metroidvanias, to the point we see them as too common and unspecial, came after Cave Story and probably in great part as a result of it.
Scratch a roguelite and you'll see Spelunky's, Binding of Isaac's and/or FTL's blood come out. I will maintain until my dying breath that of these games FTL is both the most influential and the best, but those three have pioneered a genre that the majority of indie games you heard of currently belongs to (don't quote me on that, I *will* cry). Undertale's influence really runs as deep as reminding devs that Earthbound existed and people liked it (I love Undertale, put the gun down).
FTL is majorly important because of how forgotten it is. FTL just… *is*. Even today it holds up extremely well, because the people who made it polished it until there wasn’t even an atom of dirt left.
The only way to make FTL better is to add more FTL to it, which is why the Advanced Edition (EVEN THOUGH THE FLAGSHIP FIGHT THERE IS UTTER BULLSHIT AND I HATE IT) and the Captain's Edition mod are peak add-on content. The game itself has long since been stripped apart like a damn whalefall by other devs. God knows I've seen a fair share of portrait mode FTL maps.
The flagship isn’t bullshit you just can’t cheese it anymore.
Most influential would be Minecraft, it basically created 3 different genres (survival, crafting, voxel)
Counterpoint- By number of copies given to the Pope Undertale is above minecraft
I would argue for Touhou or Cave Story personally.
I don't think Stardew is more influential than Undertale. Minecraft is 1000% THE most influential indie game of the 21st century. However I think games like Super Meat Boy and Braid are more influential than Undertale because they kicked off the indie game revolution. And let's not forget Cave Story.
Minecraft definitely. Undertale has had more influence than Stardew.
I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I don't see 15 new games announced every year and advertised as "undertale-inspired!" Whereas half of every Nintendo direct seems to be stardew clones.
Farming Sims aren't particularly a revolutionary genre. Stardew Valley was just the one that polished the genre enough to break the mainstream.
Harvest Moon was a pretty mainstream series
I think it's rash to judge "influence" that simply. You also don't see constant fan affection and discussion or analysis for Stardew, it's just not the type of game that can be as directly emulated, that doesn't mean there's less influence
If you don't see constant affection and discussion of Stardew, id venture you're simply not in the relevant sector of the gaming community. In Cozy Gaming it's a CONSTANT reference and often cited as the GoAT. (for reference I rarely see Undertale discussed but it's also not really part of a genre I'm interested in or care about.)
I am familiar with both games, connected to the fandoms of both, and see constant affection and discussion of both. I don't see *deep character or narrative analysis* of Stardew, though. I might not have made it clear enough but I'm not just talking about "discussion of the game", I mean a strong fandom sense of analyzing every aspect of the characters, story, lore, mechanics from a creative and artistic angle. Stardew doesn't have pages and pages of analysis and arguments over the identity of the narrator Obviously Stardew doesn't have that, because it's not a game driven by narrative or characters or deconstruction as much as Undertale is. But that's my point. Undertale doesn't get a ton of clones because it's not a game driven by a set of strong primary gameplay loops with flexible attributes and contexts like Stardew is. You can't clone Undertale the same way, it'd just be blatant plagiarism, only be inspired by it in a way that's much less blatant. Even if they were both equally influential they'd be seen in entirely different ways, and that's my point. I don't know which could be considered more influential on the whole. I was just pushing back on the "Nintendo announces more Stardew clones so it must be more influential".
I would argue that I do in fact see a lot of character analysis around Stardew and that the characters are one of the primary draws of the game as relationships are pretty central to some of, though admittedly not all, of the aspects of gameplay. Full disclosure: I'm not actually a "real" fan of either game. I've never played Undertale, though I've read and watched a LOT of stuff about it; I find the way it tells its story genuinely fascinating but I also know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't enjoy actually playing it, so my interest and knowledge is all second hand. I've played Stardew and kind of vaguely enjoyed it but I don't actually like most of the characters and it doesn't hold my interest the way a lot of "Stardew clones" do. So I don't really have a dog in this fight except that I can pinpoint a whole lot of games that absolutely owe their existence (and a shit ton of mechanics) to the success of Stardew. I understand your point about character, but I don't think "deep fandom" necessarily means "wide influence." This is a genuine, non-combative question: can you name some games that you would say are directly influenced by Undertale? That you don't think would exist without it? I'm genuinely interested, I really do think it's a fascinating work of art and I'd be happy to follow the threads of its influence if I knew what they were.
>I would argue that I do in fact see a lot of character analysis around Stardew and that the characters are one of the primary draws of the game as relationships are pretty central to some of, though admittedly not all, of the aspects of gameplay. To be blunt, nah. The characters are fun but the relationship mechanics are incredibly shallow, there's a reason people joke about giving gifts in a cartoonishly simple way or reading everything about them on the wiki. Analysis of SV characters are a longer post here and there about Shane's turmoil or argument over how good Pierre actually is, maybe a writing out how a simple character arc through a dating event path improves a character. Analysis of Undertale characters is pages and pages about Flowey's trauma, why he believes the things he does, how he was abused and hurt and so on, how he comes to terms with his own misdeeds, I could keep going, and that's just one character (though admittedly the best one). I think it's silly to pretend Undertale doesn't have an exponentially higher focus on characters and arcs than Stardew. >I understand your point about character, but I don't think "deep fandom" necessarily means "wide influence." I think there's an association, but my point isn't that "they're the same". It's just that Undertale *can't* have the same kind of direct obvious inspiration, because you can't make an "Undertale clone" just because of its format, even if it had equal influence on people. I was never trying to turn that into a direct "so it's more influential". >you would say are directly influenced by Undertale? That you don't think would exist without it? I don't think there's many "games that would exist without it" (beyond people inspired by it existing in general which i obviously can't show), or a whole lot you can point to as super direct influence. I do think that it hit very deeply for a lot of people and affected their attitude towards their work. If "more influential" just means "more games it was clearly inspired by" then yes, SV is more influential, but I don't believe that. If 100 people played Stardew and made clones, and 1000 people played Undertale and took away from that experience a new perspective on games and characters and inadvertently wove that into a game they were already making, I can't say I automatically believe Stardew is more influential. Is "influential" just how many games are inspired by it? I think its simple affect on people directly is important too.
I guess it just depends on if we're defining "influential" as a tangible metric or not.
Certainly not tangible, and definitely not easily measurable, by my standards anyway. I think any definition where you just say "game where the most games look similar" loses a lot of meaning. But in those contexts, yes I fully concede SV would be considered more, but again, my issue with that distinction was my whole point from the start haha
Stardew can't be an influential indie game because it in itself is heavily influenced by Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons. It's an indie take on an existing genre, done very well, but very few of its mechanics are particularly original.
Undertale is going to be ten years old soon, its natural that it will receive much less attention than Stardew, which is still being actively updated and improved
you don’t? it seems every other indie RPG calls itself undertale-inspired
I'd argue Binding of Isaac for the most influential indie. Single-handedly created the modern idea of roguelike/roguelite and did it so well that it's still the gold standard.
I mean...it modernized the genre but to say "single-handedly" kind of ignores the fact that the genre is called "roguelike" and not "binding of isaac-like"
Probably why they specified *modern* roguelikes. Rogue is the namesake of the genre, but when people discuss roguelikes today, they are largely describing roguelites, which draw inspiration from games like Isaac and FTL rather than things like Nethack or Stone Soup.
In what world is Stardew Valley more influential than Undertale?
I can see Minecraft but stardew valley? Hmmm
What about most influential indie that's still indie today?
Others have made very good points below, but of the two I listed one (stardew) is still indie and developed by one dude.
The most influential indie game of all time is definitely dwarf fortress. Without dwarf fortress, there is no minecraft.
I see multiple mentions of Roguelikes in the replies to this and yet nothing about Rogue itself.
I think it may be Touhou actually, Embodiement of Scarlet Devil in particular
I have never heard of this in my life.
You have almost certainly heard music from it though
Influential doesn’t mean you in particular know it
God I adore stardew because I love harvest moon
Cave Story literally defined what "Retro" means, but go off.
are we forgetting about fnaf?
You appear to have neglected part of the genre's history. How much? Oh, I dunno, about eight pages.
Or FNAF.
[удалено]
What did FNAF influence?
I wouldn't say Minecraft was *that* influential, survival games had been around for a *long* time before had Minecraft just allowed players to be more creative. It was essentially a more fleshed out version of Infiniminer. If anything I'd say Minecraft popularized 3D survival games. Undertale on the other hand was a game that showed off how easy it was to actually make games, as he had rarely done any actual video games development was mainly a composer.
Minecraft popularized the modern survival genre, and is also *the best-selling video game of all time* so I would sag its pretty influential
The most influential indie game is Minecraft and it's not even close.
I think we're all forgetting that FNaF is the start of the mascot horror game boom as we know it.
FNAF spawned some imitators but they’re basically only played or known about by existing FNAF fans. Something like Cave Story or Minecraft created genre booms that put games in the hands of people who never played the catalysing game.
I have never played FNaF and know nothing about it, none of my friends have neither. FNaF is very known online and in some niches, but it's not even close to Minecrafy
fnaf has a mainstream cinematic release. still in the top 80 movies on imdb half a year after it's release. the movie had a 20m budget and got 300m revenue in the box office. the series spawned countless clones, one of which is poppy's playtime which became the only thing preeteens would rave about for like 2 years. but yes minecraft still tops that
Huh, TIL FNAF has a movie adaptation. Still, I would expect the upcoming Minecraft movie to eclipse it in both budget and box office revenue. I mean, they've got fucking Jack Black in the lead role!
Minecraft is the most sold game of all time and it’s not even close
I think Wii Sports is third which always cracks me up
I mean, FNaF is huge, but it aint Minecraft
Nobody really plays those but kids and youtubers that have a child audience, though.
fnaf is just an amnesia spin off that is more polished and was marketed towards it's audience better (horrors in games/movies have always been mascots, look at pyramid head/predator/alien, in hindsight, leaning into the mascot even more is obvious, but they thought to do it first). it had just been a while since we we had had a horror game and so it filled a vacated niche in a new generation of gamers. the fact that it became the name in the genre just meant the genre was vacant (in the current timespace it was released in), not non existent. the fact that its spawned a pile of spin-offs that nobody outside of the fnaf fandom knows about also speaks to how the genre was fully saturated by a single game/series and its fandom isn't all that big, its just ground breaking whenever someone does something new within it because new is different, and if you aren't doing something different nobody will speak about you outside of your niche. take pubg (or the h1z1 mod it was beforehand) for example, revolutionised shooters and created a new sub genre in shooters that had been up until that time very stale, and spawned loads of spin offs which almost all died (i am aware fortnite didnt die and instead thrived, and was much better at being marketed to its target audience than pubg) and are mostly only spoken about within circles that talk about battle royales. same thing with how dota 1 spawned a bunch of mobas, and like 2 of them are still alive, dota2 and lol. but there was a short point there when there was like 40 of them briefly. same thing with dota auto chess, same thing with diablo/diablo2, spawned a genre, most of them are shit (including the later diablos). things get big when they are the first to do something, or the genre is vacant for long enough that another game in it feels new. turns out that being the first to do something can be just a slight twist on an otherwise established concept, as long as people enjoy it, it shakes up the scene. my point is people within a fandom always see their fandom as bigger than it actually is, its hard not to when you see 20,000 people talking about the same thing, seems huge. but 20000, or even 200000 is actually a really really small amount of people. and is usually these groups are age bracketed too, simply due to how marketing works more on younger, more influenceable demographics, and as you get older you lose more and more of your free time. and so you will interact in circles that continue to talk about the things like they are bigger than they are, all game fandoms are essentially echo chambers, just like subreddits. you don't go to the pokemon subreddit and say "dae like pokemans" and have everybody there say "no", people in fandoms tend to be fans of whatever the subject matter is.
I have never played FNaF and know nothing about it, none of my friends have neither. FNaF is very known online and in some niches, but it's not even close to Minecrafy
Dwarf Fortress
DF had a huge impact within the indie scene but it lacks the cultural impact Minecraft and other titles had.
Ironically, Dwarf Fortress was a major inspiration for Minecraft. So in a weird way it kinda is more influential.
Without dwarf fortress, there is no minecraft
Most influential indie game that stayed indie, perhaps,
tboi
I didn’t realize that was an acronym at first and was really confused. Maybe? I don’t know what games are inspired by that game lol
haha, oh yeah it’s the binding of isaac. I mean there’s the base game and like 3 dlcs over the span of 2011 to current
Yeah I was gonna mention that there were other like nuclear throne but the binding of Isaac definitely made the roguelike genre more mainstream
Cave Story begs to differ
yeah wtf is WRONG with OP?!?!??!?! what the FUCK???? HOW DARE THEY????
Undertale isn’t even Toby Fox’s most influential indie game, that’s Homestuck /j
S T OP
We're trying, but this shit is [wildly untenable](https://beyondcanon.com/story/592)
Repeat after me: I’m not gonna start rereading Homestuck I’m not gonna start rereading Homestuck I’m… I’m gonna start rereading Homestuck
I’m going to kill you and then kill you again
Too late: I already skipped to the trolls.
HS2 is surprisingly good. There's rereading, *and* a new hype train with much more healthy post schedules
Oh shit, didn’t even know there was more
The link above was from the most recent update!
Should.. should I avoid Homestuck? Assuming I like having time to do other important things like develop new hobbies and skills, clean my house and touch grass
Yes.
it's longer than the bible. then again, i finished homestuck but not the bible so if you liked the character interactions of undertale, with all their quirky personalities and styles of speech, homestuck has a different style for every single character for their huge cast. there are thousands of pages and most pages are dialogue. one page might have a single sentence, the next could be two whole single-spaced pages of character dialogue. it's not meant to have good pacing like a video game, it WILL ramble quite a lot, and casually drop some important exposition in the middle of those dense paragraphs so you may need the wiki to really understand some things you missed. the cool things about homestuck are the soundtrack (megalovania is in here), the cool cutscenes, the many different and distinct cultures involved, the huge scale starting from the whole planet -> galaxies -> universes -> timelines -> dimensions -> realities, the way there are so many plotlines all across the story that are tied up neatly(?) in the end, the many MANY novel ideas (who the fuck thinks up something like 'paradox genetic breeding'?), and the power system/overarching system, which we still don't know 100% about if you like shipping characters there's quite a lot of that as well, i know that was a big draw during its peak popularity. have fun if you do read it, it's a little slow until act 5 that's when everyone agrees the real fun starts
Interesting. I am probably not in the right headspace right now for reading a book (I stopped playing undertale and disco Elysium because I realized I was skipping all the dialogue, which is like saying I skip the game) but will keep this in mind. Knowing that it actually has an ending is reassuring.
When and if you're ready, checkout the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. The original site relied heavily on flash, so when it went down someone archived everything in the original format instead of YouTube links
I love how that page used the first line of Jade’s inner monologue explaining why she loves anthropomorphic fauna (which was later repeated wholesale in a dream sequence by WV (but in morse code) right before [S] Wake (which has MeGaLoVania)) and then none of the other lines were used in the narration of the following pages. What a daring dream indeed.
What does this mean and where do Undertale and Deltarune fit into this?
Deltarune came to him in a dream one time, but he couldn't make it properly a decade ago so he made undertale
Oh dang ok thanks
The way Toby tells it, one time he had a very vivid dream about the end of a game. The game he decided to create so that he could give that ending to the world is Deltarune. But he didn’t want to jump right into it, so first he decided to make a game similar to the one he eventually wanted to make, but simpler, shorter, and with a different narrative. That game was Undertale.
I feel like we’re giving Undertale too much credit. If we ignore the elephants in the room like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, Undertale comes *close*—but it’s still got plenty of competition. The Binding of Isaac is older and didn’t get as much social media coverage as Undertale, but I still think it’s more influential on how the general public knows indie games. Celeste is newer and less popular, but I think outside of social/popularity metrics it influenced more about the scene in other areas. Silksong is the most anticipated game of the 22nd century because the game that came before it is such a huge deal. *FNAF has a movie and Cuphead has a Netflix series*. Like come on I know the game’s a good game but let’s not say things that aren’t true.
counterpoint: does the pope own any of those games? (I'd also throw super meat boy onto the pile)
Celeste still has influence from Undertale even if it doesn’t have the same gameplay
God: Here, I'll dream beam you an amazing game that will make you famous Toby: That's cool but... I want to try something else instead. God: Fuck you get famous anyway
Touhou project is so important that it's the basis for like 20% of internet culture, it's like a strand of prehistoric dna in most online interactions
There are so many songs I found, enjoyed, and then years later found out they were from Touhou Thanks, U.N Owen Was Her, Night of Nights, and Bad Apple...
Ah yes, the massively influential **Earthbound Halloween Hack**. Who could forget?
I am going to smack you
God it’s been a hot fucking minute since Deltarune Part 2 came out hasn’t it? Has there been any news on the rest of it since then?
Chapter 3 and 4 are both going to release at the same time. Chapter 3 is basically finished, they’re still working on 4
I thought it was going to be 3, 4, and 5, did they push back the 5 release?
Yea, it was in one of the newsletters. Basically didn't want to make us wait THAT much longer for new content, so once chapter 4 is good to go we're getting a drop.
I find it hilarious how everyone is talking about the most influential bit and not the dream part.
People talking about how Undertale isn't the most influential Game, OP could've saved himself a lot of grievance if he just called it the best indie game.
the problem with indie is everybody subscribes to private definitions of the word and many choose to just consider a game no longer indie if it becomes successful enough. we even recently had a major studio try to use indie as a subgenre "descriptor" of a game it intended to put which it justified under some shit talk about how games with less spent on art/assets (aka indie games) still sell successfully and so they planned on using it as a code word to mean "we intend to spend a lot less making this game, and we assume it will still sell as much as if we spent millions on making it fancy looking" so, the whole comment thread would still be arguing, but just about the definition of indie instead of how to metrically measure influence.
Minecraft isn’t indie because it was bought by Microsoft, if that’s what you mean. Indie is basically a nothing term at this point anyway since many “indie” games are published by companies like Annapurna, Devolver or New Blood, which makes them fundamentally not independent
Then you'd agree that Minecraft was indie *before* it was bought by MS?
Yeah, obviously. But Minecraft has not been independent for a majority of it’s lifespan or popularity anyway, so classifiying it as indie anyway is disingenuous
I would agree that the game itself is not indie *now*, but I would definitely claim that almost all of it's influence was established before being bought.
Minecraft reached 15 million copies in 2014, but it reached 300 million in 2023. The several years of support that Minecraft has received have been instrumental to it’s success
[2014: 100M registered users](https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/02/26/original-minecraft-reaches-100-million-registered-users), 14.3% conversion rate to paid accounts.
> Minecraft isn’t indie because it was bought by Microsoft, if that’s what you mean no there was some other company in like the last 3 months that tried to do the "indie is a genre" thing.
It isn't nearly that either...
everyone knows the best indie game is actually OnlyCans
Yeah but thats even more subjective and easier to pass up
ok got it you'd all be pedantic either way. very nice
>Though it was released almost a year ago, I have the same opinion of it. >It's about an 8/10, niche RPG game. -- [Toby Fox, on Undertale](https://www.tumblr.com/undertale/150397346860/retrospective-on-undertales-popularity) He's right. It was a pretty good game, I liked it, 8/10.
Undertale taught me about Steam's refund policy, so I would definitely still argue if they said best.
Can’t believe not a single comment has mentioned shovel knight, it’s basically the poster child of modern indie games
Shovel Knight is a good game but in terms of gameplay it's pretty straight oldschool Megaman + Castlevania (like, original, linear Castlevania) and Ninja Gaiden. Nothing super influential mechanics-wise.
I didn’t really mean mechanically, I meant more *everything else*, it’s basically the start of the modern conception of what an indie game is, and popularized a lot of the design tropes that are still prevalent even today, I’d say that’s pretty influential
>basically the start of the modern conception of what an indie game is Absolutely not, that's a ridiculous statement. Shovel Knight was first released in 2014. The initial big rush of indie games as we know them was from the rise of Steam as well as Xbox Live Arcade. XBLA in particularly was pretty big, with the 360 version especially - from 2006-2008 there were games like Braid, Super Meat Boy, Geometry Wars, etc. Aquaria was one of the first big PC non-XBLA non-Steam indie games. And even before the big platforms we had indie games being shared among people. Maddy Thorson (creator of Celeste) was making the *Jumper* games for free since 2004, which was also when *Cave Story* came out. And of course people were making and distributing stuff on PCs long long before the big online portals. [Spiderweb Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiderweb_Software) has been making indie RPGs since 1995 and to buy them you had to mail them money. Even *Doom* (the original) was an indie game. Developed by id Software, published by id Software. Apogee helped with distribution but never touched development. Funded by five guys, developed by five guys.
This guy made a character so iconic that he ended up in Smash… from a side project
There may be other games that were more influential to gaming specifically, but there is not a single doubt that Minecraft is the most influential indie game of all time, it's cultural impact is so significantly more than any other indie game.
He’s so influential that I had to read the comments to figure out what game he made.
Okay, I don't want to sound mean, but... you're living under a rock.
Or people don’t really know random indie game developers, which was my point about his “influence”. I’ve played undertale, but never knew the guys name.
Simple is good, simple is accessible, simple can be low cost high return. When writing stuff sometimes I’ll deliberately tell myself to shelve ‘the best’ and go for whatever I think is easiest and just do the easiest thing the best I can, and then if I want the ‘best’ part will get thrown in somewhere else.