According to industry veteran, Marble Madness designer and PS4 lead engineer Mark Cerny, the new indie scene today is better than what it used to be. Speaking to GameInformer, as transcribed by GamesIndustry, Cerny said the indie scene today is “absolutely not” like his early experiences of the games industry.
“Atari was one-person teams, or two-person teams. But because it was coin-operated games, there was dedicated hardware, and those cabinets cost $3,000,” he said.
So the games were inexpensive to produce but the cost of the hardware meant Atari was very controlling; Cerny said multiple levels of management had control over projects developed by teams as small as solo developers. It was quite similar at Sega in the 16-bit era, he added.
“If you look at what we were doing at Sega, that was, in some sense, I hate to say it, shovelware. It was one programmer, one designer, three months, and you just shipped it,” he said.
“And the quality was low and they didn’t care. That is so far from what we call indie today, which is a labor of love and you never know when it will be done. It’ll be done when it’ll be done, when it achieves the creator’s vision.”
