You're listening to Imaginary Worlds.

I show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Molinsky.

Back in 2012, I reported a story for public radio about independent video games which

are really coming into their own.

Now, if you're not a gamer and you have no idea what an independent video game means,

think about how games started.

Pac-Man, for example, the very simple design.

But in the early 1980s, you had to drive to an arcade to play it on a cabinet machine

or buy an Atari system.

Now games are so much more sophisticated, halo and bioshock of hyper-realistic graphics,

you can move your character around 360 degrees, and the stories last 20 hours or more.

But that also means that today, a single programmer can create a game with a sophistication of

Super Mario Bros. that you can play on your browser with a keyboard and a mouse.

And since these games are not distributed by major corporations, game designers can make

them about whatever they want, some of them are very quirky, very personal, and even very

political.

Now recently, one of my listeners wrote me and said I should really check out this new

indie game called Undertale, which has gotten a huge critical acclaim.

Now I actually hadn't played indie games for a while, so I went online to download the

game, and I was stunned by how much the world of indie video games has grown since I reported

that story.

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