Swaying softly in the late-morning breeze, a SNES controller, suspended from a thick telephone wire, hangs in the air above the street. It’s a visual metaphor that could mean a number of different things in a documentary about indie games. Resembling a shot from a public information film about the danger of overhead power lines, it could represent the perils facing a small team of creators.
It might refer, perhaps, to the many projects discarded partway through development, abandoned by their makers when the going got too tough. You could even say this old-school controller is indicative of the dominant genre featured in the film: Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez are all, after a fashion, sidescrolling platformers. And the phone wire? Well, that obviously speaks to the online distribution boom that first sparked the indie gold rush in the mid-to-late 2000s – when Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and WiiWare provided opportunities to a new wave of bedroom coders.
Whichever meaning you settle upon, this distinctive image feels like a very deliberate construction. Yet, as if to prove the notion that truth is often stranger than fiction, it was a moment of pure serendipity. Directors Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky had just emerged from breakfast at a Winnipeg café, having recently returned from GDC, flushed with excitement about a project they had begun to pursue recently: a documentary about indie games. They were, as Pajot says, “young and energetic”, but also “a little bit on the fence” about the idea, Swirsky adds. The two had been discussing the possibility of following Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen, and the expense of the trip to make it happen.
Could they really afford two weeks in Santa Cruz at $300 per night? “Literally, we walked out of the place, and there it was, just like hanging in the sky in front of us,” Pajot says, matter-offactly. “That was like a sign that we should do it,” Swirsky adds. He grabbed his camera and filmed it, and before any other footage had been shot, Indie Game: The Movie already had its title screen. “So thank you to whoever threw it up there!” Pajot laughs.
The story, however, really began before then. Swirsky and Pajot were video producers, doing commercial work and lifestyle TV pieces for CBC. They had always wanted to move into documentary work, Swirsky says, but weren’t sure what their first project should be. “Then we were hired by this organisation called New Media Manitoba to do a series of profiles on interesting stories in tech happening in Winnipeg. It was just going to be eight fluffy pieces about Winnipeg success stories.”
One of those stories was Alec Holowka and Derek Yu’s Aquaria.
“It did end up being a cute little puff piece,” Swirsky admits. “But as we talked to [them], we learned that the story behind the game was so much more intriguing. This whole idea of games as personal expression seemed really new to
