I grew up buying computer games that came in plastic ziploc baggies. The manuals had exotic cover art, depicting scenes that could never be reproduced on the limited hardware of that age. But I was a believer. For me, the experience promised by the cover of Temple of Apshai was delivered tenfold. The games I loved were often created by one or two designers working out of their garage, translating their passion for entertaining stories into something that fit on a 5.25″ floppy. Sure, they wanted to make some money off their efforts, but they did so as entrepreneurs, not at the behest of some gargantuan entertainment conglomerate. In those days, there was no real industry to speak of. These games were not products, they were art.

The video game revolution happened. Atari, Nintendo, Coleco and others fired their salvos for a few years and then went silent. But then the motherships from rival galaxies descended and their ground forces dug in, establishing the billion dollar revenue vortex we know today. Now it is armies of designers, artists and programmers laboring over the next blockbuster mega hit.

The indie game designers retreated to the PC, coding in Java or Flash or whatever got the job done. The work now done in this realm is the very definition of niche. Beautiful, innovative and commercially unviable games. Have you ever played, let alone heard of Facade, Knytt, The Blob, The Endless Forest, or Narbacular Drop? Well, most of you have seen Narbacular Drop. These days it goes by “Portal.”

To me, that was an important event. Portal was the poster child representing a group of games crossing over from the indie world to the mainstream world. I include Team Fortress 2 and Katamari Damacy among them.

Still, the developers of these games were uplifted by the investment of higher powers and remained beholden to them. The idea of an independent developer ever seeing their game running on a next gen platform was still an impossible dream.

Until last week. At the Game Design Conference, Microsoft’s Community Games section went live. These are homebrewed indie games created by anyone who can learn to use the free XNA devkit and pay the generously cheap developer member fee ($99/year). Games are reviewed by peers to make sure they meet certain standards and then show up on XBox Live where everyone can download them.

A handful of sample games were immediately available. Microsoft could have played it safe by selecting only side scrolling shooters or crowd-pleasing Sudoku clones. Instead they included games like Culture and Jelly Car. Culture is about growing flower beds and killing weeds. A video game about flower arrangement. Let it sink in. It is utterly engrossing, by the way. All I can say is, bold play, Microsoft. Well done.

Nintendo and Sony are launching similar initiatives, but, as far as I can tell, the ‘Soft has the tastiest offering in town at this point.

Welcome to the video game Renaissance. Go make something astonishing.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/gdc2008/xna/default.htm