![]() "It was a golden time for indie game development, where overnight success on Steam or the consoles was still a possibility YouTube was in the ascendancy, catapulting little-known games into the spotlight.” “Thomas Was Alone came out at a time when the idea of what a game could be, and what it could have to say, was changing rapidly," MacDonald explains. She awarded a score of 8/10, calling it “unique and entertaining”. Keza Macdonald, now video games editor for The Guardian, reviewed Thomas Was Alone for IGN back in 2012. Patience is apparently a virtue, however, and interest in the game picked up sharply around the six-month mark. “We were hoping for Disneyland.” But things moved slowly. He’s Zooming me from Portland, where his partner lives. “We made the game, hoping it would pay for a holiday,” Bithell says. The success of the game was unprecedented, though not immediate. After two years, a lot of work, and one (sort-of) successful crowdfunding campaign to secure comedian Danny Wallace as the game's narrator, Thomas Was Alone released in July 2012. It proved popular, and Bithell decided to build upon the game both to expand on the experience and to teach himself Unity. This early prototype was released for free online. In his spare time, though, he had been developing a basic game about a red rectangle making its way through stair-based stages. Back then, Bithell was in his early twenties, and working full time as a developer. In 2010, the video games industry was undergoing what creator Mike Bithell describes as the ‘second wave’ of indie games.
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