Throughout the history of the horror genre, there’s been many indie low budget movies that broke through to major mainstream success, like Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween.
Now history’s repeating itself again, but with an indie game called Amnesia, which has reportedly made back ten times its original cost.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent was coded by Frictional Games, and as WebProNews reports, the title has sold 1.3 million copies, and that it still moves 10,000 copies a month. (Bit-Tech.net also reminds us that this is pretty impressive for a title that’s almost two years old).
As Frictional confirms on its website, the game took three years and $360,000 to develop. “It has since earned more than ten times that… Take that investors we talked to in 2009!”
Bit-Tech also feels one reason for the game’s continued popularity could be because of its “modding community, which have made the game the most popular game at ModDB as of [this] writing, ahead of Half-Life 2 in second, Minecraft in third.” There’s also apparently quite a few clips that have been made on YouTube with Amnesia’s theme.
Thomas Grip, who is the lead programmer for Frictional, told PCGamer, “That a game can still be going this good two years after releasing is remarkable. The success is due to many factors, some of which are the uniqueness of the game (horror games without combat do not really exist on PC), the large modding community, and the steady flood of YouTube clips (which is in turn fueled by the modding community’s output).”
As far as the fans modding the game, Grip continued, “It’s quite clear allowing users to create content is a feature worth putting time into. I also think that we managed to have a pretty good balance between having simple tools and still allowing a lot of possibilities.”
There’s currently a sequel in the works, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, and it’s due early next year. Frictional also promises a “super secret project,” that will apparently be another first person shooter horror game.
