Melbourne’s Underground Game Revival is Taking the World by Storm
Paulina Samy had been playing the roleplaying board game Dungeons & Dragons — fighting monsters and saving the world — for ten years when it started to get stale.
“I wanted to try something that wasn’t the hero’s journey,” Samy said. So she crafted a campaign that was co-operative, rather than competitive: running a magical inn. Her friends love it.
In 2018, Samy started thinking about turning her unconventional D&D campaign into a video game. That thought became Innchanted, a co-op adventure gameset to be released next year by the crew at her new company, DragonBear Studios.
Leaving behind a tired Tolkien-esque setting, Samy built her virtual Inn in a fantasy Victoria inspired by Australian Indigeous culture. The characters, clothing and even houses pay homage to these traditional Indigenous stories — albeit a little more adorable. To get the look just right, Samy consulted First Nations friends, who loved the idea of an Indigenous-soaked fantasy setting.
“The effect of colonisation meant they weren’t being represented in the culture,” Samy said. She hopes this game means they can share a piece of their culture, their heritage and history, with their kids.
After a decade of obscurity, games like Innchanted — with their unique gameplay and inclusive design — represent an underground revival for Melbourne’s game development community. With small teams made up of new graduates and experienced professionals, Victoria has emerged as the crown jewel of Australia’s gaming scene, with somewhere between a third and half of all game studios in Australia.
These studios craft games with a quirky and off-beat sensibility, eschewing the tired tropes of endless shooting galleries for more personal and creative experiences. is an interactive story that’s entirely wordless; Necrobarista is a visual novel game about necromancers set in a Melbourne alley cafe; Push Me Pull You is… beyond description.
Importantly, Melbourne’s burgeoning success offers game-makers around the world a pathway to emulate.
Hard Reset
Throughout the 2000s, Australia developed a sizable game industry, as the cheap Australian dollar encouraged many American companies to set-up shop. These local studios, while hiring hundreds of employees, lacked creative control over their projects as publishers used them to pump out quick and cheap movie and tv tie-in games. The conditions at these studios were severe, with reports of long hours (also known as ‘crunch’) and employee harassment.
When the global financial crisis hit in 2006, US publishers closed their Australian studios in an attempt to quickly cut costs. In the next four years, Australia’s video game industry shrunk from $136.9 million with 1431 employees, to $89.4 million and 581 employees.
But from those ashes emerged a small yet vibrant game scene with an independent spirit waiting to be unleashed. In the same time frame, the number of studios increased, almost doubling from 45 in 2006, to 84 studios in 2012.
Known in the industry as ‘indies’ or indie devs, these miniscule studios don’t have financial or technical support from a big publisher, — most are made up of only a handful of people, often fresh-faced graduates and students — but are free to focus on passion projects, avant garde trips, or just something strange.
Most recently, the 2-dimensional title character of House House’s Untitled Goose Game became a cultural sensation, winning the public’s adoration with its mischievous antics.
“We had thought of [the game] as an in-joke, basically,” says House House co-founder, Jake Strasser, “We thought it was just a weird, funny idea but we didn’t really expect other people to get around it.”
House House, founded in 2014 by Strasser and three friends, had seen several years earlier how games were reaching uncharted territory.
“Indie had just started kicking off in a way that was really exciting and kind of vital,” Strasser said, referencing games like which showed what was possible with a minuscule team.
“I was starting film school and feeling a bit like film, in general, felt just a bit tired. In games, it felt like there was still stuff that was happening that had never ever been done before.”
During Strasser’s final year of film school, the group’s weekly gaming sessions turned into coding sessions, leading to their first game, Push Me Pull You released in 2016.
“Victoria has started to think in a big way [about video games] by funding smaller projects, and so the scene in many ways has fractured and grown.” Strasser said. “There’ve been multiple occasions where I’ve been interested in a game and you find out someone in Melbourne’s making it.”
The State of Play
While Sydney and Brisbane have also built up admirable industries, Melbourne’s game scene stands on a podium of its own.
“There’s definitely something pretty particular about the culture of game development in Melbourne, which I think largely aligns with just the broader kind of creative culture in Melbourne,” said Dr Brendan Keogh, a video game researcher at the Queensland University of Technology.
“Indie devs in Brisbane and Adelaide and Sydney, they’re primarily focused on ‘I need to make my game company financially sustainable’,” he explained. “Whereas in Melbourne, it’s much more about what’s the idea I want to express.”
According to Dr. Keogh, Melbourne studios tap into the existing creative scene in the city: developers may have other creative passions like skateboarding and street art; local musicians may get involved with a game’s soundtrack; local artists may help out with a game’s concept art.
“Victoria gets a lot of things right,” said Ron Curry, CEO of the video game lobbying firm IGEA.
In particular, he highlighted the support the state government provides to the industry, including a dedicated Ministry for Creative Industry, a body which oversees the state’s creative efforts. It’s one of the only ministries of its kind in the country, acting as a key ally for game development in the state.
“When a [game] publisher shows interest in setting up in Australia, Victoria moves,” Curry said.
Different state departments, including Creative Victoria and the Department of Infrastructure, work together to lobby for those video game projects to set up shop in Melbourne. Much of that coordination, and success, however, comes from one group: Film Victoria.
Started 25 years ago, Film Victoria — while also a film and tv fund — is one of the oldest public game funds in the world. In that time, the agency has become the bedrock of the state’s burgeoning game scene, helping fund almost every major game released by Melbourne studios. In 2019, the organisation funded 34 games at the cost of AUD$1.6 million.
Film Victoria also represents local creators at Gamescon, the largest video game conference in the world, It’s here that- among 370,000 people — developers show their games for the first time to players and -potentially — deep-pocketed game publishers.
Each year, countless young developers leave empty-handed, their passion project lost among the flashy sequels and mega-releases. That’s where Film Victoria comes in, using their muscle and clout to organise meetings with publishers on behalf of burgeoning studios.
“[Film Victoria] even organises meeting rooms”, Mr Curry explained. “[The studios] are too busy making games to really worry about all the business side.”
But when trying to work out the ingredients for the city’s success, one explanation gets repeated more often than any other: the community.
Many blockbuster — or “triple-A” — games made today are deeply secretive. Dr Keogh describes a paranoid industry, where everyone is worried a competitor might steal their ideas or technology.
The pre-GFC industry in Australia was the same, as developers attacked each other to win valuable contracts. But when indies burst onto the scene at the tail end of the 2000s, it changed. Because they use the same programs to make their games — and focus on new gameplay rather than graphics — indie devs work on common problems together.
“You see that at indies all over the world a little bit… but Australian indies are definitely much more open and collaborative and sharing in terms of what they’re working on, what problems they have, what their financial situation is like, what help they need,” Dr Keogh said.
Most of Australia’s talented designers, artists and programmers work in a nondescript office building next to a major highway in Southbank, a digital greenhouse where the future of Australia’s interactive entertainment is nurtured.
Established in 2013, The Arcade is Australia’s first not-for-profit workspace dedicated to game developers. Studios like League of Geeks, Mountains Studio and Samurai Punk and a dozen others work in the same building.
Curry praises shared-spaces like Arcade in Melbourne as hot-beds for sharing more than just space, but also ideas, and even workers. “People will go onto Discord and post “Hey, I need some with this. Does anyone have any tips? Or someone will say “Hey I don’t have much to do today, does anyone need any help for the day?””
“It’s really lovely.” Samy said, “In normal times we’d have weekly lunches in Brunswick.”
“The collaborative nature of game development in Australia is incredible and something all countries should be aspiring to”, Dr Keogh said. “We have this opportunity to reimagine from the ground up what a game industry could look like, what we want a game industry to look like, that isn’t controlled by just a few corporate overlords.”
While most people think of game development companies as technology firms, Dr Keogh argues that indie studios are more like bands.
“It’s a group of four people, they need a new drummer to come on board, they’re just not just going to hire someone with the best CV. They’re going to hire someone with similar taste, who has probably already been moving around their social circles.”
“Getting into the game industry becomes like trying to get into the club: the bouncer needs to know who you are, you need to be wearing the right clothes,” he said.
This ‘club culture’, as Keogh describes in his research, is great for people who can “gel” with the developer scene, but it hurts others — like women and older people.
Then there is the financial precarity of the independent studios themselves. They aren’t part of a larger company that can support their efforts when games take longer to make than expected making many indie studios feel like ‘empires of sand’, where success isn’t permanent, and a flop can wash everything away.
“I would ask people where they see themselves in five years, and very few people in Australia could answer that,” Dr Keogh said. “They’d never even thought about it. No one could see beyond their current project, and then they have to roll the dice as to whether or not the project is successful.”
If it succeeds, they move onto the next project. If it fails? They may leave the industry entirely.
This turns even the most laid-back studios into pressure cookers. The indie scene in Melbourne is rife with self-exploitation, as people push themselves to create and get noticed, without a salary.
“There’s a lot of gambling as ‘I’ll just spend three years and my own resources into the game, and hopefully it’ll work out,’ Dr Keogh said. “In a lot of ways, indie game developers are effectively the same as Uber drivers.”
Without financial security few studios are hiring full-time employees at any one time.
“The vast majority of indies in Australia don’t want to hire 10 people. They don’t want to hire 100 people,” Dr. Keogh said. “Like the band analogy: you have a successful album. You don’t hire 10 more drummers, you don’t need 10 more drummers.”
There’s growing concern for a ‘brain drain’ as many Australian gamers leave the industry, either to pursue other careers or to migrate to the US or Canada. Despite this, roughly 5,000 students enrolled at game courses each year at uni/TAFE courses around the country, all competing over the 1,000 full-time jobs.
And without federal support, initiatives like Film Victoria can only help grow the industry so big. Currently, there are no federal games funding programs. Most dishearteningly, the recently unveiled $400 million funding boost to Australia’s entertainment industry didn’t include the video game industry.
“It’s been very difficult,” Curry said about convincing the current government. “I get angry when I think about it… It’s ridiculous that New Zealand has a similar sized game industry.”
Yet despite the setbacks, last year saw Australia’s video game studios income increase to $143.5 million, the highest it’s been since the hey-day of 2006. Melbourne studios look set to continue releasing critically acclaimed gems with The Artful Escape and Chorus, a musical-theatre-inspired game, set to be released in the near future.
Foreign publishers are beginning to return to Melbourne’s shores. Sledgehammer Studios, one of the studios behind the über successful Call of Duty franchise, announced in September 2019 that it was building out their studio here, with dozens of hires. It’s the first triple-A studio to expand into Melbourne’s indie and mobile dominated scene.
What’s most inspiring about the Melbourne scene is the potential to craft their own path, to build a game industry wholly different — and better — than what’s come before. A game sector that lets go of secrecy and embraces openness; that puts innovative indies at the front and centre; that views other studios as avenues for collaboration instead of competition.
“The collaborative nature of game development in Australia is incredible and something all countries should be aspiring to”, Dr Keogh said. “We have this opportunity to reimagine from the ground up what a game industry could look like, what we want a game industry to look like, that isn’t controlled by just a few corporate overlords.”
Paulina Samy is leaving the future open, wanting to focus on Innchanted before deciding what to do next. “I’m going to take a long break once it comes out,” she says laughing. Whatever happens next, we can only hope Melbourne keeps releasing games about violent Roomba vacuums and Indigenous-inspired restaurant simulators.
Originally published at https://www.lanewaydispatch.com on September 16, 2020.
