What They Were Willing to Lose
I will kill myself if this doesn’t work out,
Phil Fish says it plainly—not as a cry for help but as a statement of proportionality, as if only total failure could match the scale of what he’d poured into FEZ. I watched that moment on my laptop at 3am, surrounded by empty cans of grapefruit beer, trying not to go insane while debugging an internationalization branch that kept breaking in new and creative ways.
Indie Game: The Movie had been out for a month or two by then—ancient in internet time—but I’d kept putting it off. One night I needed something to run alongside the terminal windows, so I finally put it on. I wasn’t expecting much. A documentary about independent game programmers sounds, on paper, like the world’s most refined form of niche content.
What it actually is: a film about what passion costs. Not in the TED Talk sense. In the sense of Tommy Refenes, one of the two people behind Super Meat Boy, watching himself cycle in and out of self-imposed depression as the release date closed in. In the sense of Jonathan Blow, who made Braid and then had to watch people play it without grasping what he’d been trying to say—a specific, recognizable form of madness. And in the sense of Fish, for whom FEZ and his own survival had quietly become the same question.
The years in a small room. The money that evaporates. The friendships that don’t survive being deprioritized. The relationships that can’t compete with an obsession that has no off switch. I watched all three of them and felt, more than anything else, recognition. This is what it looks like from the outside. This is probably what I look like from the outside.
Motivational speakers do nothing for me. Neither do inspirational posters, conference talks about creative courage, or interviews where successful people explain how they believed in themselves at the right moment. But watching someone spend four years in their apartment working on a thing that might fail, that might make them nothing, that a handful of people will understand and many will dismiss—that moves something. That feels true in a way the keynotes don’t.
What I genuinely can’t understand is the alternative. Nine hours of brain-off, the commute, the meetings, home, television, sleep, repeat, forty years. I get that the world needs people to do this. I get that the lights have to stay on and someone has to keep them on. I’m not deluded about what it costs to opt out. But I can’t fathom being content with it—with spending the one life you get as a component in somebody else’s project, exchanging time for money without ever building the thing you can’t stop thinking about.
Indie Game: The Movie is on Steam. Watch it—not for the games, though Super Meat Boy and Braid and FEZ are all worth your time—but for the people, and for the particular expression on someone’s face when they’re betting everything on a thing only they fully believe in.