Gish is a sidescrolling platformer, released in 2004, about a sticky blob-type thing who sets off to rescue his girlfriend after she's kidnapped by a mysterious creature of darkness. It sounds weird but it's actually really good—good enough to warrant inclusion in the first-ever Humble Bundle, all the way back in 2010. And more than 15 years after release, it's also getting a new update.

News of the quality-of-life update came amidst a series of tweets from Gish co-creator Edmund McMillan, who has big plans for 2020. McMillan's most recent game, The Legend of Bum-Bo, will also be getting some "fun updates" next year, including "saving/loading, quality of life polish, bonus content and more fixes," and he hopes to start revealing more about The Binding of Isaac's final expansion, Repentance, ahead of its planned release in mid-2020. "@FixItVinh and the team are doing a mind blowing job on it and it will be well worth the wait, trust me," he wrote.

McMillan also said that the on-again, off-again Mew-genics will be back in development next month. This is interesting because I didn't realize that development had been paused (again): It's been put on hold multiple times over the past several years but the last we heard from it was in June, when McMillen announced that it was "officially back in development." 

Maybe this new tweet is a recommitment rather than a resumption? Whatever the case, it's good news if you've been looking forward to someday actually seeing what Mew-genics is all about.

He also teased a "small secret game about worms" that he expects will be out in February or March, and a possibly-final expansion to The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls, a tabletop card game, that will arrive around the end of 2020. He had some bad news for fans hoping that Four Souls will be brought to the digital realm, saying in a tweet today that a videogame version is "probably not" going to happen.

Wibbly-wobbly physics puzzler World of Goo is free on the Epic Games Store now, and in a couple of weeks it will be followed by spooky narrative experiment Stories Untold. 

World of Goo has been around for so long now and has been part of so many sales and bundles that I can't imagine anyone not owning it for multiple devices, but maybe there are still a few of you. You can get it for free between now and May 16. It's good! I mean I don't think I have the energy to play it yet again, but if you've missed it, it's a cracking physics puzzler with loads of character.

Stories Untold is a bit more exciting, though. No Code's eerie compilation is a clever, unique romp that you're absolutely better off experiencing blind. You'll get to fiddle around with archaic machines and in text adventures across four stories, always interacting with chunky bits of tech, from CRT monitors to old radios. Check out Andy's Stories Untold review for more. You'll be able to grab it in a fortnight.

No Code's also working on the intriguing Observation, where you'll play a space station AI that spends it days watching the station's inhabitants. It's due out in May on the Epic Games Store.  

The next free game on the Epic Games Store, as of May 2, will be World of Goo, the bizarre, sticky, and exceptionally good structure-building puzzle game from 2008. Even better, after years of languishing in a not-quite-right state, it's been given a significant update to ensure that it runs properly on modern PCs. 

"The last time we built the PC version of World of Goo was ten years ago, way back in 2009. The game ran at a 4:3 aspect ratio and at a resolution of 800x600. Most computers now can't even enter that old 800x600 mode without the screen flashing or glitching. The game would also crash your computer if you had more than one monitor hooked up," World of Goo designer, artist, and composer Kyle Gabler explained. 

"So over the last few months, we've rebuilt the game for Win / Mac / Linux and it should now work nicely again on everyone's modern computers. It'll run by default at a modern widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, and at whatever size you want. We also made a lot of improvements over the years for other platforms, like Nintendo Switch, so we brought over those improvements as well." 

Those improvements include doubling the resolution of all graphics—800x600 does not look super-great on big, modern displays—with "high quality upscaling tools to start," and then tweaking by hand. For die-hard old-school types, an option to use the original graphics will also be available.   

One thing that won't be available, unfortunately, are leaderboards. Gabler said they never worked very well anyway—"Our poor server constantly got stressed out and shut itself down"—and so they were taken offline for good a few years back. "In all recent versions of the game, including the version launching on the Epic store, we've redesigned bits of the game to accommodate this change," he said. He also pointed out that leaderboard support is offered by GooFans.com, saying that it's "a much nicer leaderboard system than we ever had." 

The updated version of World of Goo will eventually be released everywhere, but the Epic Games Store will be first. If you want to know why you should play it, read this. 

This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK 327 back in January. Consider subscribing to get our long-running magazine sent to your door. 

I had not considered that in this, the sixth Year of Luigi, finding music to play in Audiosurf would be a problem. Turns out I stream everything. The only CD I actually own is Bette Midler’s It’s The Girls album and even then I’d need to stream the tracks from that via Spotify because I don’t have a disc drive on my PC anymore.    

After exhausting the sole track included with the game (Audiosurf Overture by Pedro Macedo Camacho) I decide to stream Audiosurf Online Radio, which is basically just a Soundcloud playlist. The only song on the playlist is Audiosurf Overture by Pedro Macedo Camacho. 

I only discover this later when Phil looks it up, as trying to connect to Audiosurf Online Radio by clicking a very 2008-looking button marked ‘www’ causes the entire game to crash. Even Windows’ task manager can’t help me fix it, so I have to reboot my whole PC. 

Rather than risk the World Wide Web again, I’ll need to feed Audiosurf some MP3s directly. This is how I end up on the Free Music Archive downloading songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ by Eric Rogers (a celebration of the birthdays of people called Eric and Shelly) and ‘i love you’ by Catherine Pancake (a woman who says the words ‘olive juice’ over and over until they gradually turn into ‘I love you’). 

Making a point

Audiosurf takes these files and turns them into futuristic racecourses, each spackled with coloured blocks. Collecting groups of matching coloured blocks in each lane of the track is how you earn points. Warmer colours are worth more points, so red is the most desirable pickup and blue is chump change. If you clog up a lane with non-matching colours you can’t pick anything up for a while. 

'Happy Birthday' is too short to be an enjoyable course, and 'i love you' is slightly too weird. The Freak Fandango Orchestra’s Requiem for a Fish works surprisingly well. The latter has a jaunty folk rock thing going on which means there are plenty of blocks on the screen to maintain your attention, but after that I was struggling for mp3 options. Ambient electronica makes for absolutely tedious racing, while punk started giving me a headache, because I’m a million years old and deeply uncool. 

This is when I took my problem to the rest of the PC Gamer team.  

“No can do on the Reinstall, Phil,” I say. “No one actually owns any music nowadays.” 

This is how I come to learn that Phil paid money for an album called Monster Halloween Hits (full track listings here). He is very keen to distance himself from his purchase of Monster Halloween Hits, insisting that it was ‘necessary’ for a party his stepfather’s pub was hosting back in 2010. I don’t remember anything I bought in 2010 so it seems unlikely that Phil would recall this album so easily if he wasn’t still listening to it regularly. 

Regular haunts

The track listing of Monster Halloween Hits reads like an exercise in Halloween keyword searches. Sure, there are classic tunes like Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Monster Mash, but the rest are just songs with vaguely spooky words in the title. And where the hell is the sublime Things That Go Bump In The Night by allSTARS* (a band which no one seems to remember except me, and whose members included a woman who played an Australian housemate in the eighth season of UK version of Big Brother and the guy who plays Darren Osborne in Hollyoaks)? 

While I listen to Things That Go Bump In The Night via a terribly low-quality YouTube video, I decide the biggest stumbling block with Monster Halloween Hits is that tonally it’s all over the place. 

Picture the scene: you go to the pub (the one which Phil may or may not have made up) expecting cheesy over-the-top cobwebstravaganza realness, and as you walk through the door the CD spits out Radiohead’s Creep. You go to the loo to try to get over your sudden waves of angst and alienation and by the time you get back it’s barrelled on towards Iron Maiden (The Number of the Beast, since you asked). 

You try to order a snakebite and black because memories of some metal club night at university are stirring and while you shout your order Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead pops up. You don’t know how to deal with this change in mood so you slide a quid onto the side of the pool table. You know pool. You like pool. Pool is pretty low-stress for you. Then O Fortuna from Carmina Burana starts up. Your pool game is now the most dramatic event of your life. You throw the pool cue onto the floor and run to the taxi rank. It’s all too much. You never attend another Halloween party as long as you live. 

I mean, Ghost Town by The Specials in on there. I assume it’s because it namechecks ghosts. Ghost Town is a song about unemployment and the decay of once-thriving areas. There’s a creeping horror there, sure, but not in the kind of campy over-the-top Halloween way. More in the way of political unrest and a loss of faith in governance. There’s also Black Night by Deep Purple, maybe because dark, gothy colour palettes and night are spooky? 

Shakira’s She Wolf is more interesting. It is ostensibly about werewolves, but, look, the werewolf is a metaphor for sexual agency and freedom. It’s a lot like Dracula, but instead of trying to put an end to all the sucking and seducing, Shakira’s like, “Mate, I’ve got a radar to track down eligible dudes and the emergency services on speed dial in case it gets so hot it catches fire.” She Wolf is also a total CHOON. 

Further complaints

I suspect that embracing a playful riff on folklore was less important to the selection process for Monster Halloween Hits than the fact it has the word ‘Wolf’ in the title. It is on the same CD as Creep and the only reason I can see for choosing Creep as a Monster Halloween Hit is that creep is part of the word ‘creepy’. This logic also would help explain Poison by Alice Cooper. Actually, it wouldn’t. 

My beef with Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead is a little more nuanced. Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead is about a witch, and witches are a Halloween staple. So far, so logical. But Ding Dong! is from The Wizard of Oz. It’s about a very specific witch being killed in extremely specific circumstances, i.e. being crushed to death under a gallivanting house. The commercial and party-focused strands of Halloween are not so much about eradicating witches as plastering them over everything. 

The only thing I can think of here is that in the movie, the singing of the song is overseen by Glinda the Good Witch so maybe there’s an ambient non-squashed witch in the song’s general orbit. I will, however, point out that Glinda dresses more like a tooth fairy or the kind of doll with a massive skirt your grandparents might use in the bathroom to hide spare rolls of toilet paper, and is not anything remotely Halloweeny. 

What it all comes down to is that there doesn’t seem to be any form of curation here. A compilation done right feels coherent. It feels like it’s either worth listening to the songs in order, or that it offers a comprehensible tone which can withstand being put on shuffle. Monster Halloween Hits avoids both. If one were to, for example, crack it out for use at some definitely non-fictional Halloween party at one’s stepdad’s pub, you’d be signing up to spend the entire evening with a finger hovering over the skip button. 

This is why no one owns music nowadays. We saw Monster Halloween Hits and decided that life was too short for these shenanigans. Well, everyone except Phil. Phil decided that this was exactly the lifestyle he was going to embrace. A life with Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead and no Things That Go Bump In The Night. 

I guess what I am trying to say here is that this Reinstall of Monster Halloween Hits was a complete disaster. 

Audiosurf is fine. 

We're digging into the PC Gamer magazine archives to publish pieces from years gone by. This article was originally published in 2005, in PC Gamer UK issue 153. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. 

Darwinia is more than just a game about a virtual world where you have to zap arcade-style baddies. It’s a theme park, and the theme is the Darwinians themselves. Their AI is cultivated by evolution, but they don’t actually reproduce. Instead they are reincarnated, their digital DNA (or ‘soul’) fed back into the system and reborn. The clever bit is that their soul contained information about what kind of Darwinian they were, and how it worked out for them.

Before the soul is reprocessed, this information is read in and the master template adjusted accordingly. If the little guy led a long and fruitful life by staying inland, that tendency will be strengthened in future Darwinians. If he learnt something the hard way about the Virus that is currently threatening Dr Sepulveda’ artificial world, future generations won’t make the same mistake. And with thousands of Darwinians roaming the place, they’re learning fast.

The best of it is that you see the whole process, starting with the main menu. The huge, pulsating, nebulous sun of Darwinia hangs at the centre of the inverted planetoid: the Soul Repository. It’s connected to every location in the game by thin streams of orange light, and it’s not immediately obvious what these are. Then you notice that one of them is flowing downwards, and the penny drops: they’re souls.

Virii and Darwinians are dying in every location, and their digital DNA is surging up into the sky along these curved paths. The downstream feeds it to the Receiver for reprocessing. It’s one of the most beautiful locations in the game. Large, glowing orange souls rain slowly down like floating embers from a bonfire, lost on the dormant arrays because the virus has killed the Darwinians manning them.

Almost as spectacular is the Pattern Buffer itself, which plays host to your epic battle for the soul of all Darwinians. This master template, a giant Darwinian atop a snowy blue mountain, turns green limb-by-limb as you wrest back the datastreams feeding into it. The final piece of the ecological puzzle is the Biosphere, at which point—for about the fifth time—Darwinia turns into a different game. Suddenly the souls of the fallen that have been your only resource thus far are rendered irrelevant—they’re being pumped into the Biosphere for rebirth constantly. All that matters now is taking control of the Spawn Points—claw-like buildings clutching balls of digital fire, spewing out evil red troops at an alarming rate.

The story changes at the Biosphere, too. The central spawn point is surrounded by monolithic polygonal human heads, which Darwinia’s fictional creator Dr Sepulveda sheepishly explains are the Darwinian’s idea of his effigy. When trying to change the sky texture of the world one day, the feed from his webcam was accidentally pasted all over the sky, and for one glorious moment the Darwinians saw their creator. This is the first you hear of their religion, but you’re about to discover a whole lot more: the final level is the Darwinian’s Temple, a shrine they’ve built in an attempt to commune with God. They’ve altered one of their portals to point straight at heaven: the great Soul Repository in the sky.

“For years they’ve been trying to communicate with me,” Sepulveda explains, as the blinding datastream casts long shadows over the Darwinian congregation. “It never occurred to me they might actually succeed.” Their talk with God did not go well, though. What they actually talked to was his PC, and what came down the datastream were the design documents for the Darwinians themselves. It’s one thing to talk to your creator, quite another to download your own source code.

They weren’t ready for the information, but they were even less prepared for what they found next: Sepulveda’s inbox, complete with virus-ridden spam emails. Suddenly the whole sorry story of this little green race comes into focus. Their plague wasn’t an invading force, they brought it upon themselves in their search for God.

Darwinia is for people who love games—not least because it’s like playing five of them simultaneously at times. You’ll be using your Cannon Fodder-controlled squad as a strike force to cripple enemy forces, while directing your main army like Lemmings to swarm in and mop up the remainder. You’ll also be levelling up specific bits of tech as you possess more of the map. And through it all, you’re fluidly controlling streams of your two-dimensional troops by creating new Officers and issuing them conflicting orders to split off Darwinians in their aura of jurisdiction. This is you. You’re like us—you love games, you love discovering new worlds, and you long for something genuinely original, brilliant fun and with enough strategic depth to set your brain buzzing.

But the sales figures we have here say most of you didn’t buy Darwinia. In fact, they say many bought mediocre, sci-fi, FPS Area 51 instead. We know you better than that: you don’t want the rubbish to win. Perhaps the demo put you off—it lacked depth and was a little obscure. A new demo will be out by the time you read this, a Half-Life: Uplink type one-off story, especially made to show off the game. Did the gesture system annoy you? You now have the option to click icons instead.

Unless something changes, Introversion will be gone within the year. Unless you actually buy Darwinia, we’ll lose the most exciting independent developer around. They spent three years crafting a refreshing, exciting, even spiritual experience, and the gaming world ignored it. Let’s not send that message to the people who control what we get to play: that anything deviating from the mind-numbing norm won’t sell. Shops are telling Introversion they won’t stock the game because you won’t buy it—you’re only interested in the next formulaic FPS or WWII strategy. Screw them. Buy Darwinia, pay £20 straight to the people who deserve it, and save one of the great hopes of gaming.

A note from 2019: Introversion did struggle, but the studio moved on from Darwinia and launch Prison Architect, which was brilliant, and enormously successful for the team. Prison Architect now belongs to Paradox, and Introversion is looking at new projects like space base sim Order of Magnitude. Today you can grab Darwinia on Steam for a couple of bucks.

Having long since forgotten the plot of world of goo but not its glorious, weird jelly Meccano physics, I think I was expecting this reinstall to be a mainly sensory experience. Something like Peggle—great music, appealing cartoonish aesthetic—but with a slippery puzzle element instead of pinball, and a streak of black humour involving some goo balls going through a mincer. 

I had forgotten the observations about how companies use data and cookies (World of Goo operates in a GDPR-less world), about idiotic, wasteful product launches, about the value of physical beauty and so on. These observations are relatively broad-brush—corporations that put financial gain over consumer welfare, the ugly being trampled by the beautiful—but it’s a tang of playful cynicism I haven’t seen much in games recently. 

That’s not to say we’re less cynical now, but there’s a specific flavour of breezy side-eye which feels very much rooted in the late-’00s and is interesting to encounter now. These were the heady days when we were only questioning some, not all, of our metastructures. The result is that its shots still hit their targets (we’ve only really doubled down on what the game calls out) but the mood it adopts is peppy and perky rather than exhausted. Certainly a curio to me right now, at any rate. 

The jiggly, chirruping construction side is as excellent as I remember. Have you played World of Goo? If you haven’t, the idea is that you have these sentient blobs which like to attach to one another by sending out tendrils to other blobs. You’ll use this to create structures—2D lattices of varying levels of messiness. Loose goo blobs swarm over the structure, their weight and movement contributing to the instability of the whole thing, sometimes sending it tumbling to one side. 

The point of these structures is that you use them to bring the loose goo swarm to an exit pipe which will suck them up. But the pipe only activates when the goo structure is close enough, hence you can’t just fire goo balls into the air and hope they get slurped up.

Build up

At a bare minimum, the challenge is to build a structure and reach the pipe with enough loose goo balls to meet the level’s target. Later on in the game it’s about factoring in the different properties of the different types of goo, about navigating obstacles, and even moving larger non-goo objects around. 

The levels start off relatively simply. You have one type of goo and plenty of it, meaning it’s easy to meet the level targets. The starter goo is wonderfully uncomplicated. It puts out two tendrils and you can’t detach it once it’s in place. It naturally lends itself, then, to building robust triangular shapes and thus is relatively stable. 

These early levels remind me of the weird team-building exercises we had to do as part of a few corporate away days I’ve been on, or as part of school physics projects—build a bridge out of newspaper that’s capable of bearing some kind of heavy weight, or a teammate or whatever. You’d always have someone who spent a whole day explaining the value of the triangle in construction. 

“It’s really hard to deform a triangle, you know?” Yes Dave. We know. “Consider the pyramids.” I’ve considered the bloody pyramids, Dave. “It’s because of trigonometry.” Shut up and roll newspaper, Dave. “It’s why you see so many triangles in bridges too.” DAVE THAT IS WHY WE ARE USING TRIANGLES TO BUILD THIS BRIDGE. “Did I show you this picture of a bridge I took while I was away last month?” Yes, Dave. Please just roll some newspaper so we can bear the weight of that encyclopedia and get out of here. “Look! There’s a picture of a bridge in this newspaper! I’m going to cut it out so we can stick it on the bridge as a mascot. It even has triangles.” I swear to god, Dave. “You know what? My favourite triangle is the equilateral triangle.” 

Unlike Dave, I have a soft spot for a scalene triangle. They’re awkward and difficult and spiky, like me in a team-building session. Anyway, where was I?

Gooreat

Ah yes. Goo. So there are different types of goo. There’s that first kind I mentioned, but you’ll soon encounter others—green goo, beauty goo, matchstick goo, balloon goo… My favourite is the green goo. It can put out up to three tendrils which is nice, but the best bit is that it can be detached and reused or just left loose. The reason I love it is because I spend a lot of time trying to rescue as much goo as possible from each level. If a level uses plain black goo, every blob you use to build is one you can’t collect. If you’re on the green stuff there’s a chance you can detach it and collect it once you’ve activated the pipe. 

Having blasted through the story chapters in a few hours I went back to the beginning to try OCD mode. I winced at the name—another reminder that the world has changed a little, I guess—although it technically stands for Obsessive Completion Distinction. This is the hard mode where you need to meet far more challenging targets. Every ball and every placement becomes incredibly important. 

This is where I started to feel real annoyance with the interface. It boils down to the fact the game doesn’t have a quick restart button or a replay option if you reach the end and find out you didn’t meet the target. Having to sit through the end section of a level and start again from the level select screen is just a bunch of extra clicking which gets between me and the challenge. The alternative is to try and work out whether you’ve succeeded or failed before you activate the pipe, so you can use the in-level retry button, which isn’t always possible.

Heavyweight

My other gripe is that goo becomes heavier when you attach it to a structure. I’m assuming this is because it is now considered to have the weight of the blob and the weight of the legs attaching it to other goo balls, but where did that extra weight come from? In a physics puzzler, this manifestation of substance from nothing, rather than the blob being spread thinner, feels like a tiny betrayal. “But what of the laws of physics?” Exactly, Dave. I’m with you on this one.

Trying to see if there was a way to quick restart using a mod or some other tinkering is how I ended up on www.goofans.com. This is where you can download GooTool; a utility for installing new levels and goo ball mods. It’s a bit old at this point and requires a touch of Java tinkering, but I’ve found a number of level packs which offer some curious new challenges. You can’t create new chapters for the game, so these levels just hover in the sky in the chapter 1 level select screen—a bit messy-looking, but useful for extending the life of the game that bit further. 

I was also considering some of the goo ball colour mods, but the game does a good job of clearly communicating function via its colour coding, so adding a random colour variable felt like it wasn’t likely to help me play (much as I would love to build a riotously bright tower that rivals my Christmas tree for coloured balls). 

But all of this is just me distracting myself. I’m clearly going to end up tearing my hair out over how you get one last infernal ball into that infernal pipe on vanilla mode. It’s 2008 all over again. 

Earlier this week, we asked you to tell us the last physical copy of a PC game you bought, while sharing our own choices. Today, as a kind of sequel to that question, we ask, what was the first downloadable game you bought on PC? 

In the PC Gamer Q&A, we ask the global PC Gamer team for their thoughts on a particular subject, then invite you to add your thoughts in the comments below. We'll also feature a few answers from the PC Gamer Club Discord, accessible to anyone who's a part of our membership program.

You'll find our answers below, and we'd love to hear what your first paid downloadable game was too. 

Jarred Walton: Half-Life 2

I'll take the easy route on this one, because it's also true: Half-Life 2 was the first downloadable game I bought. I also played Counter-Strike 1.6 on the platform (including using the Steam beta), but that was a mod for Half-Life so I didn't pay for it. Anyway, HL2 required Steam, so what else was I going to do? I'm old enough that having a credit card and high-speed internet back in 2004 wasn't a problem, and I was luckier than some, in that Steam worked basically without a hitch for me. Sure, there were a few outages, but I don't recall them ever really affecting me. 

I played (and benchmarked) Half-Life 2 all the way to the end in the first week or so after its release, and I thought the convenience of downloading a game was pretty awesome. Others hated the idea, but I don't think any of us could have guessed how huge Steam would become over the next decade. It went from a place where you bought Valve games and maybe a few others, to eventually becoming the virtual storefront for 95 percent of all the games I own. No wonder EA, Ubisoft, and Activision want a piece of that pie.

Jody Macgregor: Uplink

I kept buying boxed copies of games for ages because slow Australian internet made downloading them a hassle, until I got into small indie games that wouldn't bust my data limit. The first was Uplink, which let me live out the fantasy of being an elite computer hacker and also the fantasy of having really fast internet.

It's designed to make you feel like you're in the movie Sneakers, and for a while it did. Like every other hacking game I've tried—games like Hack 'n' Slash, and else.Heart.Break()—it eventually started to feel like work instead of fun. Now when I want to pretend I'm a hacker I just go to hackertyper.net. What it did get me into was playing more small, personal projects and I found plenty of those to love. The next two were Atom Zombie Smasher and Audiosurf, both of which became favorites.

Samuel Roberts: Audiosurf

Right when rhythm action games were blowing up on console, but tended to focus on guitar music that I didn't really like and plastic controllers that took up way too much space in a single person's bedroom, a friend explained how there was a rhythm action game where you could play your own songs. The novelty of this was huge to me. I was 20 at the time, working on a PlayStation magazine, and I didn't really have the cash for a good PC, having wasted hundreds of pounds on a PS3 I needed for work—which broke a year later. Sigh. At least I got to play Uncharted, I suppose. Eventually, my parents bought me an okayish laptop, and one of the first things I did was download Audiosurf on Steam. 

It was pretty amazing, to upload my favourite tracks into the game and to have so many cool and challenging ways to play them, along with leaderboards. This was one of the first PC games of the modern era that really showed me why playing on PC was better—both in terms of the variety of games available, and the experiences that only PC could give you. If I wanted to play the theme tune from Max Payne 2 in a rhythm action game, I could do it, damn it! 

Now I own close to 1000 games across Steam, GOG, uPlay, Battle.net and Origin, and I don't know why I've done that to myself. 

James Davenport: SiN Episodes

Remember the short-lived SiN Episodes reboot? I can't remember why I chose to make that my first digital purchase rather than, say, Half-Life 2, but it was. It was this whole ordeal. I didn't have a credit card and Steam bucks weren't really a thing back then, so I went to a friend's house (hey, Anton, I'll find that copy of Kingdom Hearts and return it as soon as I can) just to ask their older sister to let me use hers. Digital game marketplaces were a new concept back then, and she didn't play many games anyway, so it 100-percent came off as a con. 

Your little brother's good friend rolls in with wearing the edgiest Linkin Park t-shirt he could find at Goodwill, then asks, under his breath, to borrow your credit card to purchase something from "Steam" called "Sin". My ma had just started preaching at the local Presbyterian church and everyone knew it, so the look Anton's sister threw my way had me worried her eyes might pop out. Not sure why she agreed in the end, but thanks, Roxie. Only had dial-up internet at the time, so my parents paid for it next with a phone line that wouldn't put a call through for a day or two. And when I finally played Episode 1, the only episode ever released, I remember feeling like all the trouble was worth it. The novelty of a game floating somewhere in the ether that I could call mine and play from any computer was incredibly empowering. Bit of a shit game, but SiN Episode 1 got me hooked on Steam, and set me right in the path of innumerable indie games I would have missed otherwise. 

Phil Savage: Prey, the original one

I spent most of my 2000s dealing with a laptop that became too hot to handle after just 20 minutes of Command & Conquer: Generals. As such, the advent of Steam passed me by—if it wasn't a sedate isometric strategy game or RPG, I wasn't prepared to suffer the third-degree burns required to play it. In 2008, though, I got a real job and saved enough money to buy a desktop PC. I downloaded Steam, fully intending to finally play Half-Life 2. Instead, I ran face first into a Steam sale. Prey was on offer for about £3. I didn't know what it was, or if it was any good, but at that price how could I not immediately buy it?

It was good. Prey is far from amazing, but if you don't know any better—for instance if you hadn't played an FPS since Quake because your last decade had been spent ordering many sprites to gib many orcs in the various Infinity Engine RPGs—it looked spectacular. I also bought Audiosurf on the same day, because everyone bought Audiosurf in 2008.

Chris Livingston: Half-Life 2, probably

My Steam purchase history only goes back to 2007 for some reason, but I have to assume it was Half-Life 2. I remember staying up late to unlock it. It launched fine, and I remember seeing those Combine metrocops walking around on the menu screen. Instead of playing, though, I decided to change a couple graphics options, and then had to restart. And that's when Steam completely tanked. I couldn't get back in. I missed my window to play a game I'd been waiting years for, and after about three hours of not being able to connect, I just had to give up and go to sleep because I had work in the morning. I'm sure glad that 15 years later games no longer have launch day issues, huh? Huh?

The PC Gamer Club

We got a few answers from the Club Discord, so thanks all who responded. "I'm pretty sure my first digital game was Mass Effect 1 &2 in 2010 because I'm old and until that point I always got games from a store," says user IronGnomee. "A podcast I listened to at the time was always saying how amazing Commander Shepard was so I finally tried it out." 

"As far as I can remember, it would be The Orange Box," says user Buttface Jones in Discord. "I had played PC games before TOB, like Quake, Command and Conquer, and WoW but always from a disc. I bought TOB on Xbox and fell in love with TF2, despite how bad and limited the Xbox version was. I eventually got fed up and downloaded Steam specifically to play 'the real TF2'."

User Buttz says Garry's Mod on Steam. Imbaer adds, "Orange box in 2008 for me." Fellow user erdelf adds "Stargate Resistance honestly, before that I bought games in the store or played f2p online games." 

Let us know the first downloadable game you bought below!

Braid is one of those games that rolls lazily off the tongue in conversations about the most influential indie games of all time. Depending which of the many breathless pieces you've read about it over the years, Braid was either an "enormous leap towards realising the potential" of videogames that "ripped away…years of gaming blinkers", the "Sex, Lies and Videotape of indie gaming", or possibly even gaming's "Easy Rider" moment. It has a reputation as more than just a clever puzzler with a mind-bending rewind mechanic—it was seen as a changing of the guard, a signal that independent games could finally compete with their big-budget counterparts.

Even today, it's still on people's minds. Developers I've spoken to over the past few months have managed to slip it into conversations about seemingly unrelated topics, mentioning its brilliance or commercial success. But how influential was it actually? Did Braid directly inspire a generation of indie developers? Or was it just one indie project among many that managed to find an audience at a time when distribution platforms like Steam and Xbox Live Arcade were making games more accessible?

"In terms of graphics, aesthetics and emotion it was not particularly influential [on] me," says Dino Patti, co-founder of Playdead, who now works at a new studio called Jumpship. Playdead developed Limbo, a game that's often mentioned in the same sentence as Braid. Patti says that though he "really enjoyed the puzzles" and the way the time manipulation mechanic forced players to think "out-of-the-box", it didn't stick in his mind any more than other games at the time. 

He was, however, keeping close tabs on its commercial success. Braid sold well when it came out in August 2008, shipping 55,000 copies in its first week on Xbox Live Arcade, and its numbers only ramped up when it came to Steam in April 2009. Jonathan Blow spent $200,000 making it, and by 2015 he'd raked in nearly $6 million. "I personally spent a lot of time analyzing [Braid's] numbers," says Patti, who was eager to convince investors that independent games could make money. Patti even spoke to Blow in 2009 about the ins and outs of releasing without a publisher. "We were looking very closely at how well it was doing," he says.

But that success wasn't unique. Patti says the team were watching "anything that did reasonably well back then", including Castle Crashers, which came out in the same month as Braid and sold better, racking up 103,000 players in its first three days. It would go on to be the best-selling Xbox Live Arcade game ever. 

Hearing Patti talk about Braid as just one game in a crowd surprises me, because out of all the indie games that found an audience in the years following Braid, Limbo is arguably the most directly comparable: it's a puzzle-platformer that relies on atmosphere to tell a subtle story that's open to interpretation. But I get the same message from Jakub Dvorský, chief executive and founder of Amanita Design, which released Machinarium a year after Braid first came out.

Dvorský calls Braid a "very smart" puzzler and notes that it was "one of the first really successful indie games" but again, he sees it as part of a "wave of games"—which also includes the likes of World of Goo and Windosill—that started grabbing the attention of players and other developers.

"We were not influenced directly by its game design, but we were closely watching how games like Braid or World of Goo managed the business and marketing," he says. "Both World of Goo and Braid had an impact on us mostly in how they broke into the games market, how their developers handled communication with players and media, and what business decisions they made."

And even when Braid's success did influence Dvorský, it was largely confirming "what we already felt, that it's possible to avoid publishers and use only storefronts who agreed on 70/30 or better revenue share". Before those games came out, Amanita had "already decided" its direction of travel, having released point-and-click adventure Samorost 2 in 2005, which was successful enough for it to develop Machinarium independently. 

It's hard to disconnect the success of Braid and its contemporaries from the rise of platforms like Xbox Live Arcade and Steam, which made it easier than ever for indie developers to get their games in front of players. "The development became easier, and maybe even more importantly it also became possible to distribute and monetize games directly to players without having a publisher," Patti says. "All of a sudden making smaller, low-budget games started to make sense."

It's a thought echoed by Greg Kasavin, writer and designer at Supergiant Games, developers of Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre. "Independent games were being created long before the success of something like Braid," he says. "Kongregate launched in 2006, and [there was] stuff like Newgrounds, which Super Meat Boy came out of. There was always this scene of independent game creators making weird platformers and adventure games… but something like XBLA helped to make it a viable commercial business, and then it caught on with Steam."

But Braid had more of an impact on Kasavin than it did on Dvorský or Patti. It was on a "shortlist of games" that made the Supergiant team realize that "small groups of people can make impactful games that could feel very meaningful and personal, as well as being high quality." That list games included Plants vs. Zombies, World of Goo and, Castle Crashers, but Braid was "emblematic of both that era and the style of game."

Without the success of Braid and other games of the time, Kasavin says Supergiant wouldn't exist. The fact that Braid and other games like it found a large audience gave the team confidence that there was a possibility for indie development to be financially viable. "Supergiant was self-funded, it was people drawing into their savings or asking their family for help, things like that, and we couldn't have done that for fun. Even though we knew the chances were terrible, there had to be some sense that it was possible," he says.

"There was no part of us that thought we could be the next Braid or the next World of Goo, but the fact that these games did exist, that some people were able to succeed while making games they really believed in, that was inspiring both creatively and from the standpoint of trying to create a small studio."

When I ask Kasavin how Braid inspired him personally, it's clear that it's a game close to his heart, and one that he feels shouldn't simply be lumped in with others that came out at the same time. "I wouldn't call it a narrative game, but there's absolutely the sense that it's about something. It's not just a platformer for its own sake. Its mechanics and aesthetics are in service of a greater experience," he says. 

"Every ounce of that game felt like it was richly layered with subtext, that it was a deeply personal work, and a poetic work. I'd been playing games with impactful narratives since I was a kid, but the way in which Braid was able to take every aspect of its presentation and use it in service of a meaningful experience where every detail was intentional, that to me was inspiring."

It's easy to overstate the influence that Braid had on indie gaming. To some in the industry, it's just one game (albeit it a memorable one) among many that happened to flourish in the indie boom of the late 2000s, which is itself tied closely to improvements in distribution through platforms like Steam.

But that doesn't mean you should completely dismiss it. Without Braid, there would be no Bastion. There would be no Transistor, and no Pyre. And while Supergiant is just one studio, I have no doubt that others owe Braid a similar debt. 2008 and 2009 were years in which many talented developers were floating in the wind, having lost jobs at companies that were struggling with both the global financial crisis and the rising cost of making games. "You're left with all these skilled developers wondering what they're going to do, and they start seeing games like Braid, and they're getting inspired," Kasavin says. 

Braid's release may not be the singular defining moment for the indie gaming explosion, but who knows how many games wouldn't exist without it?

This article is part of the Class of 2008, a series of retrospectives about indie games that were released 10 years ago. 

A telling difference between today's indie games scene and that of 10 years ago is how excited Dylan Fitterer was to hear his game was going to be on Steam. 

Audiosurf had just been nominated for three IGF awards in the categories of Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize. As Dylan tells it, "Then I got a call from Jason Holtman at Valve who said, 'Hey, you want to sell this on Steam?' That blew me away. That was crazy to get an offer like that."

Audiosurf went on to win the audio category as well as the audience vote, but the bigger prize was that it became February 2008's top seller on Steam, both by number of copies sold and revenue, despite being an indie rhythm game that cost 10 bucks. It eventually sold over a million copies. Of course since this was 2008, it was one of only five games released on Steam that month.

Best Game Ever Dot Com 

Getting to that point was a road as bumpy as any of the rollercoaster levels Audiosurf makes out of the music you feed it. Like a lot of designers, Dylan's first game ideas were way beyond his capabilities. "I was trying to build the biggest videogame possible, that incorporated everything," he says. "My first game I was working on was like Magic: The Gathering meets first-person shooter meets something else. Had everything in it, the one game that was all games. That was what I figured I'd just build, by myself."

After a couple of years hitting his head against that wall he changed tack and went as far in the other direction as possible. From then on he only worked on games that could be finished in a week. "What I did is I launched this website called bestgameever.com and put up this promise that I'm gonna release a new game every Friday just to see if I could actually finish some things. And one of the things that I finished on there was called Tune Racer."

Tune Racer auto-detected whichever CD was in your drive at the time—this was 14 years ago, so of course you had CDs near at hand—and then matched the tempo of that music to a simple game about a car racing along a tube, overtaking other cars. Two sequels followed, tweaking the idea so that cars had to be dodged around instead of just overtaken (an idea that would return as Audiosurf 2's Dusk skin). 

There was clearly something to the idea, something that kept drawing Dylan back. When he eventually decided it was time to invest more than a week in one of his concepts, to monetize one of those bestgameever.com prototypes, it was Tune Racer he turned to. He figured he could turn around a deluxe version in "like a month." 

Spoiler: it took longer than a month.

"You should probably usability test your game" 

Dylan wasn't alone. His wife Elizabeth, who had a day job at Microsoft, helped him over the course of what turned out to be several years of work. The two encountered plenty of dead ends along the way. They even tried to give Audiosurf a plot for a while, though he doesn't recall the details. "My wife and I worked on a story, and I don't remember if the motivation was like as an extended tutorial, or if it was just this lack of confidence that a game with no story would be compelling for people," he recalls. "I'm not sure. It didn't come together. It wasn't a good idea."

What was a good idea was letting people use their own mp3s. Rhythm games with original scores have a hurdle to get over because players need to get used to the music before they can tap along with it, and even something like Rock Band can fall flat with players who don't listen to the bands it favors. Audiosurf's algorithm matches the curves of the track, the speed of your craft, and the placement of blocks to elements of the songs you choose, songs you already love. It transforms your mp3 collection into an explorable space.

"My absolute favorite thing was to play this track from OCRemix in the game's Mono mode. The simplicity of Mono mode and the intensity of the track made for a great flow experience."—Ben Prunty, composer of FTL and Into the Breach

The big beat

But for most of Audiosurf's development, the placement of blocks wasn't in sync with the beat. "Those were basically random," Dylan admits. "I had convinced myself that didn't really matter. The track was shaped to the music and you just had these random patterns and you could maybe see the music in the patterns if you look hard enough or something. It made sense to me but Elizabeth, my wife, finally convinced me that was not a good idea." 

The extra effort was worth it, although even then it wasn't a game that clicked with everybody. Some people sat down to play and don't feel the connection between the game and the song, no matter what music they choose. There just seems to be something in the way people are wired that determines whether it works for them or not. "We noticed that early on at trade shows. I think most people would see how it worked right away once they played, but some people get in and play and say, 'I don't see how it's synchronized to the music.' We'd be in there clapping and stamping our feet."

Another worthwhile idea was thorough playtesting, and not just at conventions. The value of seeing how new players react to a game repeatedly over the course of its development is impossible to overstate. "My wife did a lot on it before anyone else," Dylan says. "Toward the tail end she was working at Microsoft as a usability engineer in the Xbox group and so one night she comes home and says, 'You should probably usability-test your game.' 'Oh, yeah. That's a good idea.' We just hired friends and different people to play it and watch them play, and [we would] not talk. See where they get hung up. That is so hard. Watching people play your game that you think is almost there and you discover that you're not even close."

"I'll always connect Audiosurf to the voluptuous hillsides produced by Wuthering Heights, specifically the swell into the orgasmic walls of red. A decade on, I still shiver."—Kieron Gillen, former PC Gamer editor and Audiosurf leaderboard champ

Going ninja 

One of the ways Audiosurf began to differ from Tune Racer was that it wasn't just about avoiding obstacles. It stopped being a game about weaving between blocks and became a game about collecting them, matching three of a kind into the grid at the bottom of the screen. "Through that usability testing that my wife and I did, we discovered that that was really hard to teach," Dylan says. "It was hard enough explaining to people that you use your own music, that was foreign, then this other thing where you're playing a match-3 game on this racetrack to music, it was too much to teach."

The optional mono mode was the solution. It simplified things by reducing the blocks to two varieties, one to collect and one to dodge. "I thought that would just be a stepping stone or maybe just a tutorial mode and then that ended up being super popular." Players wanted it to be more than just an introductory way of playing, so Dylan created 'ninja mono' as the hardcore variant, and it became the way most players experienced Audiosurf.

The Fitterers were helped across the finish line by several contractors, including artist Goran Delic who drew characters like the ninja for the select screen, and Paladin Studios, who built various 3D assets. "They did the vehicles and the geometry that's alongside the track and the squid that's at the end," Dylan says. "That was a week or two weeks of work, right before launch. That was a lot of fun. Our timezones were so different that we'd have a call at midnight and tell them what we thought about the last batch of stuff and what we wanted the next day and we'd get up in the morning and check it out and put new stuff in the game." 

And finally, there was Valve. Their involvement went beyond just putting Audiosurf on Steam—it was the first third-party game given access to Steamworks, the full suite of tools Valve's games use for everything from leaderboards to achievements. It also shipped with the soundtracks to The Orange Box games packaged in, and selecting certain songs from Portal triggered a "secret level" where you have a portal gun and some of the blocks are companion cubes.

On Audiosurf's release those songs immediately became the most popular on its leaderboards, but competition broke out wherever players found songs that made particularly fun levels. So did arguments about which genres suited it best. "I don't think there is an objective best or anything," Dylan says, although he notes that his preference is for bands like Tool and Nine Inch Nails. "One of the things I like about industrial, Nine Inch Nails kind of stuff is it tends to have very big changes very rapidly, so a slow part, a very intense part, and that creates very cool moments."

Those moments of drama and intensity when everything lights up and the track swoops around at speed are key to the appeal of Audiosurf, and when you find out a song you love hits one of those it's even better. But as well as connecting you with music you're already into, Audiosurf has helped players discover new music. Dylan himself learned a lot about what was popular in 2008. "I was a little behind the times I think. Like Dragonforce, that was huge. 'What is this song everybody's playing?' Podcasts were funny, there were people playing podcasts. I hadn't thought to try that."

The Fitterers followed Audiosurf with a sequel and a VR spin-off called Audioshield. But some day, Dylan says he'd like to go back to bestgameever.com and see what other forgotten treasures it holds. "I still have the domain, I just have this lame little placeholder on there right now. I have that site backed up I keep meaning to get it back online. That'd be fun."

This article is part of the Class of 2008, a series of retrospectives about indie games that were released 10 years ago.

7 Billion Humans is a people-powered programming puzzle game set in a world ruled by machines. It was announced by developer Tomorrow Corporation today as a direct follow-up to 2015's Human Resource Machine. 

The announcement trailer is bleak, but the premise is interesting. Essentially, you order office workers to complete tasks by treating them as variables in a unique programming language. Tomorrow Corporation says 7 Billion Humans improves on the language used in Human Resource Machine with the addition of multi-worker execution—again, bleak. 

"You'll be taught everything you need to know," the game's Steam page says, presumably trying to comfort the people who look at programming like a gazelle looks at a lioness (hello). It seems there are also more puzzles this time—over 60 in all. 

Tomorrow Corporation is a small studio consisting of World of Goo designer Kyle Gabler, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure designer Kyle Gray, and former EA developer Allan Blomquist. They released their first game, Little Inferno, in 2012. 

7 Billion Humans does not yet have a release date, though Tomorrow Corporation says it's "initiating soon."