--- title: The DIY Wave of Indie Gaming | TIME description: New technologies like smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the business of small-scale, low budget video games. Want to play? canonical: https://time.com/video/ZGW2amYn/ og:title: The DIY Wave of Indie Gaming og:description: New technologies like smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the business of small-scale, low budget video games. Want to play? og:url: https://time.com/video/ZGW2amYn/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZGW2amYn/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The DIY Wave of Indie Gaming twitter:description: New technologies like smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the business of small-scale, low budget video games. Want to play? twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZGW2amYn/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The DIY Wave of Indie Gaming > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The DIY Wave of Indie Gaming [Watch (HLS stream): The DIY Wave of Indie Gaming](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZGW2amYn.m3u8) (4:50)  _Published 2011-03-08. New technologies like smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the business of small-scale, low budget video games. Want to play?_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:10 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Growing Small Businesses in an Old Factory](/video/36ivheNx/) ### Growing Small Businesses in an Old Factory [The Sundance of Indie Games: Welcome to IndieCade](/video/cnSvKmro/) ### The Sundance of Indie Games: Welcome to IndieCade [How to File Taxes from Your Smartphone or Tablet](/video/W8hKcJiI/) ### How to File Taxes from Your Smartphone or Tablet --- ## Transcript >> At a bustling art- opening in Manhattan tonight, screams of joy and agony mixed with mellow music and cheap beer as New York City has introduced with its first installation devoted to video games. >> Vibrant [ unk ] and the memories. Something happens bringing you back to [ unk ]. >> Now, these aren't the games you'll find on store shelves. Actually, they looked like something you may have played a few decades ago. >> But if you jump this way in a reverse gravity it's like-- >> And there's a reason for that. These games were created in the same way as the first video games and small teams with low budgets and complete creative control. The results were games like Pong and Computer Space and the beginnings of a multi- billion dollar industry. That pioneering spirit has returned in the form of a vibrant indie video game community. >> There's two kinds of commercial games. One that hasn't happened yet and there's the commercial industry that we're used to that actually don't have anything to do with and not trying to engage as a scene. >> Kunal Gupta and Syed Salahuddin created this event tonight to promote indie game favorites like Bit. Trip Runner, Deceptive Platformer and Midhog, all produced by few developers on laptops and in makeshift home studios. Thanks to a flood of new gadgets like tablets and smartphones. Games like these are going beyond the four walls of this gallery and into the hands of anyone with an iTunes panel. >> It really is the golden age of indie gaming right now because of things like Xbox Live arcade and the iPhone and the iPad. These are channels that give independent developers an opportunity to get their work out there and make enough money to support themselves and build an audience, so it's a great time to be making these smaller scale or more experimental games. >> Frank Lantz is the director of the NYU Game Center and the founder of Area / Code, a small game development company in New York. The company's original game Drop7 has been called Tetris for the smartphone generation. >> I feel like one of the coolest things about working a video game is that it still feels like we're at the very beginning of the explosion of creative possibilities for what video games can do and what they can be. >> Wow. >> That's-- >> That's actually really nice. >> Frank is currently working on a new project with fellow designer Andy Nealen, whose last game, Osmos, received a number of accolades and awards. Those nominations are crucial for visibility. Then people see the list of nominees and everyone tries the game and our server got hammered. That's when we knew that it was-- at least going somewhere. >> Osmos follows a simple concept. The player controls a sphere floating in space and moves it around gaining size by absorbing smaller circles and trying to avoid the bigger ones. The simplicity of the game was the key, Andy says, when he and his partner Eddy Boxerman decided to expand it from computer screens to the iPhone and eventually the iPad. >> Eddy started developing on this game in 2006. There was no such thing as the iPhone. It's a serendipity's event that we just got the device came out. The first time Aaron actually serve a running prototype or running version of the game on the iPhone, I looked Aaron and just like, " This is awesome. This is incredible. This is gonna blow everyone away ." >> Osmos debut as the best- selling iPad app in its first week in the market. Andy and his team saw first- hand the potential of iTunes distribution for the indie games industry. >> When you make the game, you build the binary of your games and then you submit it to the app store, and normally speaking, if you have no objectionable content, you can be up on the app store within a week. The main bliss of these platforms is that now suddenly there's a marketplace for people and they no longer necessarily require a publisher, and that's pretty much all of the-- >> When Andy is not making games, he's teaching a new generation of game designers at Rod Pierce in NYU. He says new technology is not only making it easier to distribute games but create them as well. >> So even though this is still a little bit of a barrier to entry, it's nowhere close to the barrier that it used to be. >> Andy recommends everyone in today's class by a $ 20 program called Game Maker that will allow them to start making games immediately with a little computer science background. >> It's kind of a cool thing to be able to get together with a couple of friends and just create a game with the software that's available to use. >> After him talking about Game Maker, I'm definitely getting them and buy and see what I can come up with, it should be interesting. >> For TIME video, this is Jacob Templin in New York. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The DIY Wave of Indie Gaming","description":"New technologies like smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the business of small-scale, low budget video games. 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