Why I am not a modern gamer.

[jfrost]

There's the episode of an independent British company called Rare, that asked for a dev kit for the NES and was denied. They reverse engineered the NES and showed results to Nintendo and were met with the answer: "Now do something with it, we still won't give you a license."

Yeah, those were the times.

[isiolia]

Think about this, did you ever hear anyone use the term "indie" to refer to a console game before the current generation? Why do we now need this terminology?

Sure we did, we called them "PC developers", and their products "Shareware". Consoles were always mired in officially licensed this and supported that.

The current generation has brought us things like the XNA development tools that really do let basically anyone make something for an actual production console (okay, you need to pay $99/year to actually put it on the 360). You didn't have that in previous generations, short of trying to let a company let you pay tens of thousands for a development kit. The PSX had a homebrew variant, and that was a "big deal" then.

[noiseredux]

^and expensive. If I recall, the PS1 Net Yaroze cost $4,000. And the finished games could not be played on a regular PS1.

[BoringSupreez]

Think about this, did you ever hear anyone use the term "indie" to refer to a console game before the current generation? Why do we now need this terminology?

Sure we did, we called them "PC developers", and their products "Shareware". Consoles were always mired in officially licensed this and supported that.

And thus, early-90s PC games are among my most favorites. That was truly a good time for the platform.

[scarper]

I still play some current games, but they typically take the form of classic style titles. An example being how much I'd rather play New Super Mario Bros than MW3.

On a slightly related note, I just got Shantae Risky's Revenge, and it is wonderful.

[o.pwuaioc]

^Wish it came out on a DS cart.

[Hobie-wan]

we didn't use the term "indie developers" back then because gamers were far less aware of developers. The publishers got all the credit and glory. Case in point: most Nintendo game end credits don't even feature the real names of the designers.

And of course Atari wouldn't give developers credit back in the 2600 days, so a bunch left and formed Activision. Then Activision grew into a big evil too. The lack of credit on 2600 games was the whole reason for the easter egg in Adventure.

[Radical Lanzar]

It appears that "Ten Ten" (Takashi Tezuka of Mario and Zelda fame) was always his admitted nickname, so I'm not sure how much that disguised him. We'd have to ask those folks if they were bitter about using nicknames in the credits, so we shouldn't jump to conclusions that it was "unfair". For all we know, they may have used nicknames on their own accord.

There was an episode of retronauts where they had researched this and said that many companies forced nicknames on their designers. Which to me is very unfair, as it meant that they weren't REALLY getting the credit they deserved. I'm not sure which episode it was, but I'm fairly certain BUNBUN was specifically mentioned.

Retronauts also touched upon this in a later episode talking about a female composer -- but now my memory is cloudy, and I can't think of who it was or what games she worked on.

Big Example is Capcom in their Megaman X series for the SNES. The first game features mostly nicknames. The Second and Third games are not only devoid of actual designer names, they credit the robot masters and their underlings.