Paste Magazine’s Maddy Myers released a list of the top 20 indie games in 2014. It included five IF entries:
#17 - With Those We Love Alive, by Porpentine
#14 - Cis Gaze, by Caelyn Sandel
#8 - Dee’s Big Night, by Merritt Kopas
#3 - It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings, by Dominique Pamplemousse
#1 - The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, by Michael Lutz and Kimberly Parker
None of them are parser (darn), but I’m glad to see IF receiving mainstream attention.
It feels like IF suddenly got included by the larger indie game community over night. Like, we didn’t even exist, and now IF authors are suddenly also indie game designers.
Recently I’ve been running into tacit acknowledgement of text adventures in the other corners of the Internet where I lurk. My favorite podcast is Gamechurch, and they’ve recently interviewed both Jonas Kyratzes and Pippin Barr. I didn’t remember that Barr was the author of Kicker from the 2012 Comp at the time, and I don’t mentally classify Kyratzes as an IF author. (Not that I mean to exclude him; he just doesn’t seem to me to be in the same categories as Short and Plotkin and the hardcore IF theorists and implementors.) However, I still get a strange sense of deja vu whenever I run across IF being mentioned or discussed in strange domains.