Defining indie games of the 21st century

Many of your favorites live in their shadows.

DayZ (2013)

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, eh? Obviously Brendan Greene's phenomenally successful Early Access multiplayer shooter owes a lot to the movie adaptation of Battle Royale, as well as his own work with H1Z1 and as a modder, but the original unlikely success story in this brutal survival genre was Bohemia Interactive's ArmA 2.

ArmA 2 was an incredibly exacting military simulation - the sort of game in which flying a helicopter really does involve reading a flight manual - when New Zealander Dean Hall decided to adapt its huge post-Soviet environment of Chernarus into a zombie survival space. The result was a rickety modification that took great patience to set up and then find a working server. Despite this, it was an overnight sensation, propelling ArmA 2 to sales beyond Bohemia's wildest dreams, and making a celebrity out of Hall.

DayZ had that lightning that all these games try to bottle: "emergent" situations, where the mechanics of the world, which allow for interaction and don't encourage or discourage particular behaviors, led to fascinating outcomes. You might make friends with another player, who would fix you up and help you repel a zombie horde, only to then slaughter you and steal your things just when he or she earned your trust. Or you might find yourself staring down the barrels of a roving party of other players, who planned to murder you and take your things, only for them to become overwhelmed by zombies, allowing you to slip away. DayZ soon span off from ArmA 2 itself, and inspired a raft of pretenders, many of which were hugely successful themselves. Rust, for example, clearly owes some of its DNA to DayZ. PUBG is just the latest beneficiary, and it will be interesting to see what other exciting new games continue to echo DayZ's great work in years to come.

Editor-at-Large

Tom is probably best known for the 15 years - FIFTEEN YEARS! - he spent at Eurogamer, one of Europe's biggest independent gaming sites. Now he roams the earth, but will always have a home here at AllGamers. You can try and raise him from his deep, abyssal slumber through tom.bramwell@allgamers.com or he's also on Twitter.

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