Q+A: JONATHAN BLOW
You say that “part of [making indie games] is about not trying to be professional”, and that a lot of people try too hard to be like a big company and “make highly polished games”, but you could easily describe Braid and The Witness as highly polished. Even today, I carry over this aesthetic of working really hard to polish certain aspects of a game. But those aspects are about making sure that the player has the kind of experience that you’re trying to give them. It’s not about the commercial kind of polish, which is about controlling that kind of experience in a certain way – that it should make the maximum number of people happy, and it shouldn’t make anybody upset, and it shouldn’t be super-personal.
And there’s one other thing at play, which is the differentiation between indie game and art game. Think about Edmund’s games – they’re all very much like his personal kind of thing. If he were an employee of, say, EA, he wouldn’t get to do his characters and all that stuff. So that was the reason to be independent back then. There wasn’t all this money in it. I mean, there started to be right around the time Indie Game: The Movie [came out] but that wasn’t why you got into it back then.
Did you find you were recognised more often after it was released?
I definitely got noticed in public more. But not long after that was the PlayStation 4 launch show, which also
has a very large audience. And I was in that. So those two things together in short succession sort of meant that a lot more people knew who I was. It’s hard to pick apart, but I do think the movie was the bigger factor of those two. I’m not like Hollywood-famous now, but I understand a little bit of what that’s like now where people want to talk to you or have a little interaction. And there’s sort of two categories of those. And one of those is totally cool, where they’re interested in games and it inspired them in some way. And one of them is kind of weird, and a little bit gross, where it’s like ‘I’m going to schmooze them because they’re a little bit famous’. But on the whole it’s been positive. I’m very happy that I participated in the movie.