When video games first started being made, the only way you could get a game published was by working for or being a large enough company to convince an existing store to sell your game and its consoles. If you were anyone else, you were out of luck. You would have to pitch your game to an aforementioned publisher and hope that they would allow you to make and publish your game under the company’s name. But in the modern era, your ability to make a game has increased dramatically. Online storefronts such as Steam (made by Valve), Newgrounds (founded by Tom Fulp), and even Adobe Flash Player have allowed anyone to become their own publisher and still get their game known by the general population. By not having to adhere to anyone else’s standards, some people have managed to create games good enough to challenge the corporate behemoths, and those games make up the rest of this article.

★Minecraft (2009)

While not what most would think of, Minecraft started its life as a game exclusively made by one person, a Swedish man named Markus Persson (also called Notch). The first playable builds of Minecraft were released in 2009, with the full release coming in 2011. The game was initially based on Infiniminer, a 3D sandbox mining game that shares little resemblance to Minecraft beyond the concept of blocks and breaking them. The only goal of early Minecraft was to simply survive for as long as possible, while regular updates were provided to add more depth to the game. During this stage, infinite generation and crafting were added despite being staples of the modern game; the level-up system had a completely different execution from modern builds, the player models were even intended to be completely overhauled (the latter two were both removed soon after), and multiplayer servers were manually hosted whenever Notch got home from his 9–5 job. Now, Minecraft’s ease of access and depth have made it the highest-selling game of all time, according to the BBC and Guinness World Records, and it’s currently under Mojang, a subsidiary of Microsoft.

★Balatro (2024)

Balatro, made by Canadian developer LocalThunk, is a game that was barely intended to be made. It was released with very little marketing, and almost nobody knew about it until it was released. Despite this, when it did eventually come out, it instantly became one of the most well received games of 2024. Balatro re-introduced the gaming world to the rougelike, just as Hades and The Binding of Isaac had in 2020 and 2011, respectively. Just like many indie games, Balatro took this concept and added a very unique concept to the genre: You have to score a certain amount of points every round, and you score points by playing hands in accordance with poker. As you go through each play session, you pick up special “joker” cards, which change the scoring rules of the game to allow players to get possibly obscene amounts of points. This gameplay loop gets addicting, and many people can’t tear themselves away from the game.

★Undertale/Deltarune (2015/2018)

Undertale was made by Toby Fox and Temmie Chang in 2015 and was founded on the concept of subverting the classic conventions of an RPG. In most RPGs, the goal is to kill monsters to get experience and improve your character. On the other hand, in Undertale, you have a choice between killing and sparing any monster you fight, which also changes the ending of the game in possibly drastic ways. The three main routes and endings of Undertale result in killing all monsters, sparing all monsters, or any other mix of those two extremes. Combining this with an incredibly crafted cast of characters makes the player truly feel the effects of their actions, with each route having a specific final boss that ties the entire story together, rewarding the player for accomplishing a True Pacifist route, and psychologically crushing them for a Genocide route. Undertale would later get a spiritual successor called Deltarune in 2018, which has similarly taken the gaming scene by storm by adapting the previous game’s mechanics into a new world with some of the same characters, although in an entirely new story. More about Deltarune can be read in The Echo’s Issue 16 article “Deltarune: A Game Review,” which is available at theechohsmse.com.

★Hollow Knight/Silksong (2017/2025)

Hollow Knight, released in 2017 by Australian game studio Team Cherry, is quite different from many other games in this article. Most popular indie games either take a concept already established and flip it on its head or create an entirely new creative direction unlike any other game, whereas Hollow Knight instead took to an idea from the 1980s and refined it to perfection. Hollow Knight is a metroidvania game, where a player traverses a huge world of interconnected rooms, finding new abilities to become stronger and access more areas. Metroidvanias originated from the games Metroid and Castlevania, made by Nintendo in 1986. The world of Hollow Knight took this game design and gave it an excellently crafted story with a gloomy aesthetic and extraordinary combat that is consistently difficult but fair. After this huge success, a new game called Hollow Knight: Silksong would be announced and become possibly the most anticipated game ever made. It was in development for about seven years, and fans kept getting more excited until its eventual release in 2025, when it was just as, if not more, well-received than the original.

★Lethal Company (2023)

Not many games can claim that they created a genre, but Lethal Company, made in 2023 by ZeekeersRBLX (or just Zeekers), effectively did. Lethal Company has players explore abandoned, industrialised moons in search of scrap to sell to a predatory intergalactic company called The Company, with the help of up to three friends. However, these moons also have monsters that you have little to no defense against. This results in what can be a very strategic game with a high skill ceiling to optimize and improve at scrap collection, but what most people play because it can be really funny. Almost anyone who’s played Lethal Company will tell you that watching your friends explode, get devoured, or step on a whoopee cushion and get eaten by an eyeless dog is much more entertaining than trying your best to meet quota. This social element, combined with a repeatable structure and enormous internet popularity, made a game that created “friendslop” as a game concept and showed that the fun of the game doesn’t have to come from the game itself, but how you play it.

And finally, here are some games whose full explanations couldn’t fit into this article, but are still interesting enough to mention.

Terraria: Similar to Minecraft, but it takes a more RPG look to the genre, rather than survival.

Don’t Starve: Also similar to Minecraft, but it focuses on being as uncompromising as possible.

The Binding of Isaac: Inspired by old-school The Legend of Zelda dungeons, while also inspired by the religion that deeply affected the creator’s childhood.

Hades: The big roguelike before Balatro, where the player attempts to escape the Greek underworld as an immortal demi-god.

Five Nights at Freddy’s: Created its own horror genre, referred to as mascot horror, and it presented the idea of “What if you couldn’t run from the monsters?”

Super Meat Boy: The grandfather of precision platformers in the indie game space, made by the eventual creator of The Binding of Isaac, who also recently released a new game called Mewgenics.

Celeste: The modern precision platformer about climbing a mountain, primarily known for having a transgender protagonist.