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Jun 25, 2013
Submissions for Fantastic Arcade 2013 are now open | Fantastic Fest

June 25, 2013 | Wiley Wiggins

Submissions for Fantastic Arcade 2013 are now open

The wait is over, as the Fantastic Fest machine starts its engines, with the new Lakeline Alamo Drafthouse in its sights, Fantastic Arcade is now accepting game submissions.
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Submissions have begun for Fantastic Arcade 2013 and will continue until July 31st. Fantastic Arcade is a specially selected power-pack of videogames presented during the first week of Fantastic Fest (Sept 19th - 22nd) with accompanying tournaments, opportunities to meet the minds that created them, and custom old-school arcade cabinets built for the ‘arcadiest’ of the bunch. All the games selected will be accessible to both festival attendees and the general public for free, in a casual (if rarely ‘relaxed’) atmosphere of comraderie and love for games.

Click here to submit your videogame creation to be a part of the event, and game creators and fans alike- mark your calendars for September 19th, when Arcade 2013 begins!

Correction- due to a Mayan calendar malfunction, the last day of Fantastic arcade does not fall on the 21st as previously posted. Also the world did not end in 2012.
Mar 20, 2013
Past Fantastic Arcade titles break into the big-time | Fantastic Fest

March 20, 2013 | Wiley Wiggins

Past Fantastic Arcade titles break into the big-time

2012 Fantastic Arcade ‘Most-Fantastic’ selection Hotline Miami cleans up, alongside the iOS evolution of 2011’s spotlight game Radical Fishing- Vlambeer and Zach Gage’s Ridiculous Fishing.

Fantastic Arcade’s mission is to champion the creators of original and unique games in the face of an industry that promotes sameness and mediocrity (supercharged by limitless money and promotion).

We’re happy to point out that the tides are visibly turning.

In 2011, Fantastic Arcade spotlighted Vlambeer’s Radical Fishing, alongside their newer efforts, because in the process of working on the iOS version of ‘Fishing , their game had been “cloned” by another company (game mechanics copied from the free version of their game and beat to market while they worked on the iOS version). It seemed like a dark reminder that ingenuity would always be trampled by copycats with more capital and promotional resources, and that openness and the hard work of creation were ultimately a liability.

Instead of becoming secretive or more conservative in their designs, Vlambeer decided to double-down. They put an extra year’s worth of work into the new version, Ridiculous Fishing._After a week on sale, _Ridiculous Fishing is currently the fifth top selling app in the paid section of the US app store, playing tag with mega-titles like Minecraft. Right now they have a meta-critic score of 92. As of writing this article they are the highest scoring game of 2013. Beating out mega-franchises like Tomb Raider.

Last year’s ‘Most-Fantastic’ winner Hotline Miami has had a similar rags-to-riches upset. The game was created by Fantastic Arcade alum Jonatan Söderström and his partner Dennis Wedin. They didn’t simply make the trek from Sweden to Austin last year with their game, they actually designed a custom level for it that included the floorplan of the Highball to hose down with pixelated blood.

Hotline Miami has gone on to defy all expectations. The first commercial release for Cactus, who was famously longsuffering in the indie game scene for his groundbreaking free-to-play flash games, Hotline Miami sold 130,000 copies in the first seven weeks after its release, and it’s gone on to multiplatform mega-success, with a Sony Vita version on the horizon.

Again, financial success isn’t what validates a game- but when it happens to individuals who deserve it, rather than cycling back into the industry meatgrinder that alienates and preys off them, it’s a big win for them… and for us.
Sep 26, 2012
Vibrating Logic, Astronauts bearing Crossbows, and a final day of Fantastic Arcade | Fantastic Fest

September 26, 2012 | Wiley Wiggins

Vibrating Logic, Astronauts bearing Crossbows, and a final day of Fantastic Arcade

The Final Day of Fantastic Arcade was incomparable, unforgettable, and well… fantastic.

September 24th, The final day of Fantastic Arcade, started auspiciously with a talk from last year’s crowd favorites, Young Horses (previously team Octodad) and the follow up to their previous year’s hit. Octodad: Dadliest Catch is a vastly improved and polished retake on the original, with a idiosyncratic sense of humor and visual style. The game is doubtless to be a break-out hit, and already has a great deal of buzz on Steam Greenlight.

The next of the developer commentaries was one of the most inense, with a trip through Time and Space (by way of their bastard lovechild Sound) at David Kanaga’s Proteus panel. Like Austin Wintory, David took a trip through the history of music, but took us into the realms of music as play, conversation, and space. After an incredibly wild headtrip that included a guarded peek at his and Fernando Ramallo’s next project. David treated us to some radical rescorings of mainstream games.

After David’s talk we were taken to the world of Pietro Righi Riva’s Mirrormoon :

MIRRORMOON Mini Trailer from Santa Ragione on Vimeo.

Pietro’s talk took some interesting turns, including questions about the general push towards long form games due to the expectations set by AAA titles, and the idea of short games remaining commercially viable by way of collections, like a book of short stories. Following Pietro was a talk from developer Jasper Byrne about his excellent Lone Survivor . A project that originated as a combination of an unfinished project and a “de-make” of Silent Hill 2, Lone Survivor is a uniquely inventive and personal game, while staying perceptively true to the sources it pays tribute to.

Two surprise tournaments ended up being some of the most intense of the festival- Samurai Gunn (an unreleased, 4-player action game by Beau Blythe) was a huge hit, and generated a lot of excitement for players and viewers alike, and a last second Luftrausers tournament ended in a Super Crate Box OST box and a complete Devolver Digital game collection being awarded to the victor.

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The annual Starcade tournament saw challengers once again competing at classic games and slightly dodgy triva questions, after walking away with the grand prize, the winner revealed that as a child he had tried out for (and been rejected by) the original Starcade television showthat the Fantastic Arcade version borrows its name from. So the victor, Tom (hailing from “parts unknown”) got to experience a sort of catharsis that might only have been otherwise afforded by years of therapy.

Finally, closing out the event was the final Fantastic Arcade Awards ceremony. Each game in the spotlight selection received a beautiful trophy created by Lauren Hemphill of Ink It Labs, based on this year’s artwork by Cory Schmitz.

This year’s Spotlight Awards were:

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Most Fantastic Game to be Later Cited By the Mainstream Media As the Reason For a Mass Shooting - Hotline MiamiBy Dennaton

Most Fantastic Reason To Go Cross-eyed : Super Hexagon by Terry Cavanagh

Most Fantastic Temporal Distortion : Super Time Force by Capy

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Most Fantastic Indeterminate Nationality Definitely Not Nazis : Luftrausers by Vlambeer

Most Fantastic Way to Learn That If You’re Ever Put In Charge of Anything Important, Everyone Will Die : FTL by Matthew Davis & Justin Ma

Most Fantastic Grim Reminder of the Reality of the Military-Industrial Complex and The Effect Upon The Common Man : Unmanned by Molleindustria & Jim Munroe

Most Fantastic Nutcracker : McPixel by SOS

After the general spotlight awards, we took a moment to honor three teams that participated in our Adventure Time Gamemaking Frenzy

Third Place: Adventure Time Mega Mini-Boss Mission Gauntlet by Retora (who will receive a peice of micro-voxel-artwork by Bob Sabiston )

Second Place: Must Party Forever by One and a Half Beards (who received two Mondo Adventure Time Posters)

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When it came time to announce the first place Adventure Time game, we were treated to a surprise appearance by a special guest:

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Ultima- series creator and Portalarium founder Richard “Lord British” Garriott lept on stage, brandishing a functioning crossbow made by David Watson, aka “Iolo the Bard”.

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And the (very dangerous) first place Gamemaking Frenzy award went to JW Nijman and Kitty Calis’ Adventure Minute.

The final prizes of the night were for the prestigious Audience Choice and Most Fantastic Awards. The Audience Choice award carried a prize of a professional software suite from Adobe, and the Most Fantastic Award was accompanied by a high-end graphics card from AMD.

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The Audience Choice award went to the indie runaway hit Super Hexagon, by Terry Cavanagh.

Finally the “Most Fantastic” Award went to Hotline Miami, by Dennis Wedin and Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström of Dennaton.

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Upon receiving their prize, host Wiley Wiggins asked if he could have a shirt from the game, at which time Dennis Wedin pulled the shirt off his back, and gave it to Wiggins, who then traded him his ceremonial salmon-pink corduroy Starcade blazer.

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A night that ended in real live weapon powerups delivered by a man who has traveled into space, partial nudity, a lot of alcohol, and an avalanche of amazing games made despite all the odds. Not a bad way to end Fantastic Arcade 2012.

We’d like to thank all of the developers who contributed and attended, and all of our sponsors, for making this the best Fantastic Arcade ever.

Here’s a list (in progress) of this year’s games that are available for purchase, or that can use your support on Steam Greenlight:
- Octodad: Dadliest Catch needs your Greenlight votes
- Hotline Miami, available in October from Devolver Digital
- POP Methodolog y: Experiment one, needs your Greenlight votes
- Windosill , available on Steamand the iOS App Store
- Realistic Summer Sports Simulator , available for PC and on the App store
- Tokyo Jungle , out today on PSN
- God of Blades , out tomorrow on the App Store
- Super Hexagon , available on the App Store
- Lone Survivor , available on Steam
- Russian Subway Dogs is a free download, also check out They Bleed Pixels on Steam, Miguel’s Arcade entry from last year.
- Gunpoint doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can sign up to be a beta tester.
- Mirrormoon is available as a free download
- Last year’s Waking Mars needs your Greenlight votes
- You can purchase Proteus direct from the developer
- Barabariball is not yet available, check here for more info
Sep 24, 2012
Fantastic Arcade

AUSTIN, TX – August 24, 2012 – More than 20 independent video games will be on display at this year’s Fantastic Arcade, the third annual showcase of independent games from the organizers of Fantastic Fest, the world’s largest genre film festival.

The three founding members of Austin independent game community Juegos Rancheros – Adam Saltsman, Wiley Wiggins & Brandon Boyer - curated this year’s lineup. Panel discussions, developer talks and game tournaments will be held each day of the festival. All games and game related events in Fantastic Arcade will be free and open to the general public at The Highball Lounge on South Lamar Blvd in Austin, Texas. This year’s Fantastic Arcade will also see new surprise events, to be revealed within the coming weeks.

“Fantastic Arcade is, to the burgeoning world of indie gaming, what Fantastic Fest is to genre film,” said Wiley Wiggins, arcade creative director. “It’s not like any other festival or trade show. It’s a party where the best and brightest outsider talents come to enjoy the company of their audience; both die-hard fans and newcomers.”

The following seven games will be showcased during Fantastic Arcade as part of the Arcade’s main competition: FTL (Subset Games) FTL is a spaceship simulation roguelike-like attempting is to recreate the atmosphere of running a spaceship exploring the galaxy. FTL allows you to take your ship and crew on an adventure through a randomly generated galaxy filled with glory and bitter defeat.

Hotline Miami (Devolver Digital) Take a surreal trip back to the seedy back alleys of Miami’s criminal underworld in the late 80s. You’ll soon find yourself in a deadly maze of mystifying phone calls, ultraviolent encounters with the local crime syndicate and strange dreams of interrogative people wearing animal masks. What is going on and what are you willing to do to find out?

Super Hexagon (Distractionware) Super Hexagon is a minimal arcade game that focuses on twitch reflexes and the interaction between music and gameplay.

Unmanned (Molleindustria) In Unmanned you get to play the newest kind of soldier: one who remotely drops bombs on foreign soil during the day, and at night goes home to his family in the suburbs. In Unmanned, the conflict is internal – the only blood you’ll shed is from shaving cuts. But is there collateral damage in this new way of waging war?

Luftrausers (Vlambeer) Luftrausers is a stylish, tight & beautiful WWII meets Thunderbirds dogfighting game in which you control the experimental LUFTRAUSER airplane.

Super T.I.M.E. Force (Capybara Games) Super TIME Force is a rip-roarin’, run ‘n gun action game with a time-traveling twist that creates opportunities for both strategy and mayhem, or, “strayhem”. With an ingenious “time-rewinding” mechanic, STF takes the action to intense new peaks by allowing players to team up with their own past replays of a level in an utterly unique single-player co-op experience that sees all of your past-lives fighting together at once. It’s fun to play with yourself!

McPixel (SOS) McPixel is a save-the-day guy that you guide through short challenges in an oldschool point’n’click fashion. The goal in each challenge is to prevent stuff from blowing up using available tools! You have only 20 seconds to save the day! Think quick!

In addition to the aforementioned games, Fantastic Arcade will also feature the following games throughout the four days of the festival:

Mirrormoon (David Mershon) MirrorMoon is a first-person puzzle-adventure game set on a uninhabited planet that is experiencing a full solar eclipse.

Proteus (Ed Key and David Kanaga) A game of audio-visual exploration and discovery.

Where is My Heart (Die Gute Fabrik) In Where is my Heart? you play the story of a family of three monsters. The family lives comfortably in a tree in the woods until one day they lose their home and thus embark on a great adventure.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch (Young Horses) Octodad: Dadliest Catch is the sequel to the splash hit, Octodad! This time, our cephaloprotagonist has gotten himself in a bind between his wife’s mounting mistrust, and a disastrous trip to the local aquarium!

The Banner Saga (Stoic) The Banner Saga is a role-playing meets turn-based strategy, wrapped into an adventure mini-series about vikings.

Realistic Summer Sports Simulator (Justin Smith) A ridiculous multiplayer summer olympics game where the athletes are controlled by giant springs.

Scale (Joy Polloi) Scale is an experimental first person game that explores freely changing the scale of objects as a game mechanic.

Russian Subway Dogs (Spooky Squid Games) Experience the life of a stray Russian subway dog scavenging for food in this realistic simulator. Features doggies, Ruskies, and a proprietary vodka physics system!

Windosill (Vectorpark) Windosill is a toy-like puzzle game. There are no instructions or rules; instead, you are encouraged to discover the logic of each scene through exploration and play.

Gunpoint (Tom Francis) Gunpoint is a creative stealth puzzle game that lets you rewire its levels to trick people.

Lone Survivor (Superflat Games) In this psychological survival adventure, the masked protagonist must escape from a city ravaged by disease, by any means necessary. Starving and exhausted, he has begun to question how much of what he sees is even real. A new kind of adventure where the choice of how to survive is up to you.

BariBariBall (Noah Sasso) BaraBariBall is a competitive sports game for two or four players.

God of Blades (White Whale Games) love-song to pulp fantasy tales of yore, 70s synth-prog-landscape oddities, and forgotten places, God of Blades is a gorgeous, visceral sidescrolling physics-based sword-fighting adventure.

PID (Might and Delight) PID is a platform game that will turn everything you know about 2D gameplay upside down.

About Fantastic Arcade Fantastic Arcade introduces the worlds of independent games and fantastic film to one another over cocktails. At Fantastic Arcade, we showcase a curated selection of brand new independent games as well as a larger sampling of important groundbreaking independent games from the last couple of years. With international guest developers in attendance to show off their work, talk about the state of independent gaming via panels, and interact with attendees during play sessions and nightly parties and happy hours. We feel that video games rightfully belong side by side with shorts and feature films at Fantastic Fest. The artistic merit of these games will be honored with both audience awards and a juried competition. Admission to Fantastic Arcade is free and open to the public.

About Fantastic Fest Fantastic Fest is the largest genre film festival in the U.S., specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi, action and just plain fantastic movies from all around the world. In years past the festival has been home to world premieres of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, APOCALYPTO, ZOMBIELAND and RED while the guest roster has included such talent as Mel Gibson, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Ryan Reynolds, Karl Urban, Josh Hartnett, The RZA, Dolph Lundgren, Jemaine Clement, Paul Rudd, Bill Pullman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kevin Smith, Jon Favreau, George Romero, Darren Aronofsky and Mike Judge. Fantastic Fest also features world, national and regional premieres of new, up-and-coming genre films. The festival has launched and propelled the buzz for international genre hits like THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, MONSTERS, TIMECRIMES and TROLLHUNTER. Fantastic Fest is held each year at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema on South Lamar in Austin, Texas. The Alamo Drafthouse was named the best cinema in America by Entertainment Weekly and features food and drink served to your seat without any disruption of the movie experience.

During his Keynote Address at the International film Festival Summit in Las Vegas, Variety president and publisher Charlie Koones listed Fantastic Fest in a list of “10 Film Festivals We Love,” a list which included industry heavy-hitters such as Cannes, Toronto and Telluride. We’ve also been named as one of the “25 coolest film festivals” and the “25 film festivals worth the entry fee” by Moviemaker Magazine.