REEL LIFE

A decade on, the makers and subjects of Indie Game: The Movie reflect on the creation - and legacy of gaming's most influential documentary

- CHRIS SCHILLING

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.