The "Indie Gamer Rant" session of this year's Game Developers Conference was a rapid-fire burst of ideas and ideals regarding the shape of the videogame industry — where it was headed, where it's veered off-course, and what we can do to change it. But no rant was more pointedly persuasive, perhaps, than one: that of designer and illustrator Craig Adams, better known by his collective-of-one moniker Superbrothers.
Over the past few weeks, Adams has been on the receiving end of a growing amount of attention for his debut adventure game Sword & Sworcery EP — a Mobile Indie Games Festival-winning collaboration with Critter Crunch devs Capy and musician Jim Guthrie — due out on the iPhone in a few short months, and his indie rant encapsulated much of the thinking that's gone into the game.
It's a treatise on and exploration of the language of videogames themselves, and a call to developers to adopt that language as it was meant to be, not to rely on the written words of more traditional media. And it's a message that, even prior to the rant, long-time followers here might innately understand: a quick perusal of our Games To Get page highlights a number of games like Eliss, Glum Buster and Spider that speak that unique language fluently.
And so, in an effort to spread the message more widely, we present as a Boing Boing Special Feature: Less Talk, More Rock, Superbrothers' manifesto in its full unedited form, gorgeously illustrated in his inimitable "rustic pixel" style, and including a list of more games that speak that language of Rock for your further exploration.
