Only the developer’s own funding goes into creating the game, the game is completed over the course of two months. Here, we have a game produced without the funding of anyone, not even a Kickstarter campaign. Think about how crazy that would have sounded only three years ago. Motivated by the reception, the developers decided to push the game further by spending another two months in development. Someone posted it on Reddit, and the game went viral. Kotaku took notice and shared it with their gleeful audience. Surgeon Simulator 2013 got off as a game jam project developed in a span of 48 hours. Journey and The Unfinished Swan owed their success to an aggressive experimental gameplay push by Sony, FEZ got its start with a grant by the Canadian government, and FTL jumped into the hearts of gamers with a successful Kickstarter campaign. Surgeon Simulator is an interactive joke. Maybe the success of Surgeon Simulator is going to push the indie games movement even further. 2012, a banner year for indie games with the dominance of games like Journey, FEZ, and FTL signified that with the right attention and funding, oddball experimental games can achieve riotous success, even going so far as to sweep the GDC and BAFTA award shows. Maybe this is a sign of what’s happening with mainstream tastes in games. I’m against Metacritic, but color me legitimately surprised and impressed. By previous measures of rationality, the game should have everything working against it, I can’t think of any Global Game Jam project that received substantial coverage on Kotaku.Īnd critics are reviewing the game higher than Crysis 3 and Gears of War: Judgement. Mainstream ones too, not the alt-indie leaning sites like Polygon and Destructoid, sites like IGN and Gamespot are doling out these surprising scores. The game is short, cheap, and deliberately makes counterintuitive game design decisions. The game defies any notion of what we’d think would merit commercial success and critical acclaim: Surgeon Simulator 2013 is an interactive joke, much like QWOP, it utilizes frustrating controls and silly physics to create hilarity. Most games that get created at these events get played only by the friends and family of participants (at least in my brief time partaking in these events). This was a game made at a Global Game Jam, a series of relatively underground 48-hour game making competitions. Let’s take a look at what I just said there.
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