Indie Game: The Movie: The Magazine
Physical game magazines may be getting smaller, but that doesn’t mean they’re dying. In fact, becoming more niche has only made fans of the medium more passionate. I know this from experience, thanks to three years of work on the fan-published successor to Nintendo Power, and one ill-fated but wonderful issue of the Destructoid/GameFan magazine. It’s okay that future game magazines may never be distributed in the millions. A few thousand loyal fans are all most publications need in order to stay in print.
I’m hoping the Indie G Zine manages will be able to harness that passion for physical games media and do something great with it. Curating a series of highly polished pieces of fan art paying tribute to legendary independent releases like Cave Story, Skullgirls, and Hotline Miami, and compiling them all into a fully-fledged indie game encyclopedia is one heck of a concept. Now we’ll just have to wait to see how well the book’s publishers can follow through on that potential.
Which games would you like to see added to the zine’s already sizable roster of subjects? Personally, I want to see1001 Spikes, Bit.Trip, and Thomas Was Alone get a few pages apiece. They’re all games with rich, compelling back stories that a lot of players may not be fully aware of.