I always want to twist people’s heads a bit when they play my stuff, ‘cause that’s what I like in a game: lots of mode-switching, never let the brain get settled. My dad told me about this game that some musicians he liked were into, back in the old days.

They called it chessboxing, and it was just like it sounds: you’d play a fast game of chess, then you’d both get into the ring and do a round of boxing. Then you’d go back to the chess, back to the ring, rinse and repeat. I don’t remember how you were supposed to win, but the idea stuck with me—not just two different mechanics, but mechanics which would make playing the other mechanic way, way harder when you switched over. Imagine trying to play chess with your head ringing from a fist to the jaw! That’s how I want my games to feel.

Most games are too easy, too boring. Up in the Stratum, the big studios always play it safe, they don’t wanna make something that someone might give up on. They’re fools. People love a challenging game—you’ve just gotta make it interesting enough, make the narrative match up with the mechanics, make it matter. If we Undergrounders had their distro, we’d wipe the floor with their weak-sauce games.

But they’re too scared: scared of offending, scared of taking a risk, scared of hiring someone who might put something in front of them that they don’t understand. They’d rather prompt up something that’s basically the same as whatever sold well last time, with some minor cosmetic changes. Corporate crap.

Sure, people play it. People drink mellanmjölk, too. The Stratum is happy to make money selling bland junk with a long shelf-life to people with no taste, so they make sure that people never learn any better.

Not like us—not like the Underground. We keep it real.

#

Anyway, I was at my usual desk in the Bunker when Ell breezes in, late morning as usual. That’s Ell for you: pretty decent coder when they put their mind to it, I guess, and a good eye for assets, but I never felt like they really committed to anything. It’s all just a game to them—devving, I mean, not just the games themselves.

Still, they were better than almost anyone else in our local chapter, so we were kinda friends by default—colleagues, maybe, more than friends. Ell would piss me off sometimes, and I think it was deliberate, like they enjoyed getting a rise out of me, but I liked the challenge. Ell would try to top whatever I was doing, and I’d try to top them back, and as a result we’d both make better things.

Some of the older coders in the chapter, they say that that’s kinda how the studios used to work, before the Stratum: competing to make the crazy new thing that would take everyone else’s audience. Maybe it’s true, I dunno. Those old guys, they don’t compete much nowadays. They mostly come to the Bunker to sit around playing cozy crap, using up valuable flops on the collective datacenter, and talking about the old days. Some of them did some pretty cool stuff when they were young—couple of them even have wikipedia pages, for real. But I figure they lost their mojo when they sold out to the studios; gave up their souls, you know?

Sad, if you ask me. I’d rather be free than have a wikipedia page. Oh, you had however many hundred thousand players at peak—well, so what? What do they even remember of a game that popular, that average? My biggest game had three thousand two hundred players at peak, but I still get emails about it today, asking how I came up with it. That’s the mark of real art, you know? I’d rather change one person’s life than amuse a thousand people for a few hours.

So Ell says to me guess what, and I’m like guessing is the most babyish game of all, but they’re like you’re still gonna have to guess. So I sigh and say I guess the Stratum went bankrupt overnight and all the big-money hacks are out of work and want to come join the Bunker, and Ell’s like nah, but it is about the Stratum.

Now look, I’d be the first to admit that the Stratum is good for a few things. They spend their bloated R&D budgets throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks: new hardware, new engines, new mechanics and models. Most of these are ideas they acquire by hiring up sell-outs from the Underground, but by the time they end up in Corporation Town, whatever good ideas they have are sanded down to the most simple form possible. Some of it sells, a lot of it doesn’t. But once it goes out into distribution, our Underground cracker crews get to work picking through the rubbish, cloning and splicing, bodging bits of their implementation, seeing what’s useful. Any Underground dev worth the name has a couple of pet crackers who know what they’re looking for: the trick is explaining to them what you need to achieve in a way that lets them recognise a function that might do the job. My crackers are good—the best, maybe, at least in the Eurobloc.

No, I’m not telling you who they are. I understand the value of good opsec, see? I open-source all my stuff, like everyone else—check my codeberg if you don’t believe me—but I reserve the right to use it first. Down here in the Underground, you gotta keep your advantages close.

#

Anyway, eventually Ell tells me the news, which is that someone actually bought some VIP tickets to the regional showcase.

See, this basically never happens. The entire idea of VIP tickets was a joke that started somewhere in the Africabloc, the idea being, like: this is the Underground, anyone can get in for peanuts, but if some high-roller is stupid enough to drop big tokens on a VIP ticket, which doesn’t even get them anything that the basic ticket wouldn’t give them, well—more fool them, right? So every local jam has a VIP option, and they sometimes they get used as a way for local sponsors to kick in a bit of support money without the risk of pissing the Stratum off, but mostly it’s just an easter egg, a way to show you know what’s what.

But we just sold ten tickets at the full whack, no refunds, Ell tells me—which is about enough cash to keep the Bunker afloat for a year. What’s wild is that the names tagged to the tickets is like a list of the biggest Stratum sell-outs in the whole fragging Eurobloc.

It’s not like they’re actually gonna come to the showcase, though, I say to Ell. It’s just a flex: here, have some crumbs from the top table, little people! But Ell’s like nah; someone they know who works the fancy hotel in Gamla Staden says that one of the big studios has booked out the whole top floor over the weekend of the showcase. Plus they’re all out on the Stratum podcast circuit, saying how much they’re looking forward to seeing what the Underground’s up to, that they’ve heard good things about the region and they want to see it up close.

Want to see what ideas they can steal, I say.

Yeah right, says Ell; we should give them the real deal! Show them what real devs can do, devs who don’t have to play nice for management and the review aggregators. Make something so gnarly that they won’t dare touch it! Send them running home to their parents!

Like you could make something that hardcore, I say to Ell, and they’re like frag you Foxy, I can make a game that’s heavier and uglier and weirder than anything you can make, and I’m like yeah OK dream on. Then they say I’ll double-dead-dog-dare you, we’ll face off at the showcase and the Bunker crew can be the judge, and I say make it the whole regional scene with tiered voting rights and you’ve got yourself a deal, and Ell says OK, it’s on like teevee be gone.

#

I’m a sucker for a challenge, I admit—but it’s gotta be a real challenge, not the pitch-and-pray shitshow of the Stratum’s grant allocation process, not a popularity contest like their dopey distro markets always turn out to be. “Make a cozy platformer that will reach the maximum number of fans of the Happy Scrappy Hero Pups franchise”, blah blah, like that’s anything more than cynical optimisation. I’m not gonna help anyone take pocket money from kids. Besides, when I was that age I was already looking for harder, weirder stuff.

That’s the real art of the dev, right there. Sure, you need to code real well; you need to get your hands on the best new tools and techniques by managing your crackers; you’ve gotta make great assets, or know someone who can bring the good noise as a subcontractor without ripping you off. But those are just the tools and techniques.

It’s like music, right? Like music used to be, anyway. You need the instruments, and you need to know how to play them, but once you’ve got that in the bag you can just play what people like, get the streaming numbers, have a producer polish your stuff until it could be anyone’s. You can do that, but who cares about the musicians who did it that way? Sure, people still listen to Taylor Swift or ABBA or whatever, but no one pretends that they changed anything. There’s no art to just meeting market demand! The real artists were the ones who made the market realise that there could be demands that no one had thought to meet—the ones who went out to the edges and pushed real hard, who dared to see how far the audience might follow them.

OK, sure, lot of those musicians died young, or spent their whole lives poor. Whatever. And yeah, lot of them eventually got signed, and they almost always sold out after that. But the great ones, they got signed because they showed the system where the new edges were, and the system knew it didn’t have a map for those places. Same with the Stratum, see? They keep us Undergrounders far out on the margins because they don’t know how to operate out there, but also because when they finally decide they need us, they can dangle in front of us all the opportunity that we never get to touch, that they’re careful to keep to themselves.

I mean, I get it—I understand why people do it, why they sell out. They think it might make things just a little easier. And it does, and they like it, so when other ways to make it easier get suggested, they think OK, why not... and before you know it, they’re just another mainstream hack.

Not me, man. I’d rather be free, out in the edgelands. The true legends, the indie hardcore, they never compromised. And the sell-outs, I bet you, they’d trade all that money and fame for the freedom to do something original again, only they can’t give up the easy life—and if they did, they’d find the mojo was gone. Use it or lose it, baby.

#

Word went round the Bunker scene like viral, and soon everyone knew that Ell and Foxbridge were going head to head to make the gnarliest game at the showcase jam. There were only a few weeks to go, so we agreed it was fair to keep working with ongoing projects rather than start from scratch. The challenge was to make something that the Underground ultras would recognise as truly hardcore, the sort of game that no Stratum studio would even want to admit to having heard of—to show the sell-outs what you could do if you stayed free.

People were getting pretty excited, because news of the Stratum VIPs had spread. Sad, really, how some people will only pay attention to the Underground when the Stratum says they should. But hey—just like their money, we’ll take the attention if it’s there. Pretty soon we both had a bunch of people twitching along, watching us work in our codebergs and sandboxes.

Ell had been working on a walking simulator with some hack-and-slash bits. It had this kind of more-then-human vibe, like you had to run missions for these bearded sentient mushrooms or something like that. I told them they should amp up the gross-out elements, and sent them a bunch of links about this fungus that colonises ant brains and turns them into zombies. Ell went pretty wild for that stuff, and soon their sandbox was full of these staggering insect-people you had to chop into pieces before they infected you. They also put in a whole set of power-ups that you got from eating mushrooms, a hat-tip reference back to like classic Mario stuff—but as well as the power-ups the mushrooms would trip you out, so the whole UI went super-psychedelic, meaning you were stronger or faster or whatever, but also less able to see what was actually going on. Ell seemed to be getting super into the work for a change, too. I’d come in early to the Bunker as usual, and they’d already be there, cranking out the code. They started staying late, too—I was seeing commit notifications in their codeberg long after I’d gone home, and sometimes late into the night.

I thought about upping my own hours, but I learned as a noob that I’m no night-owl. I need to keep my hours regular to do my best stuff. So I stuck to my schedule, arranged an equity deal with one of my asset-makers who’s really fond of the super-dark ideas, and focussed on making my work-in-progress as hardcore as it would go. I was a bit gutted that I’d given Ell the fungus-ants idea, TBH—but it probably wouldn’t have fit with the bullet-hell mechanic anyway. I thought about other gross-out stuff, too, but it felt like everything had been done to death; there was a big fad for gore the year before, and I hate going over ground that’s been trodden down by others. So how could I give the Stratum sell-outs the middle finger, show them just what I thought of them and their condescending crap?

In the end, Ell gave me the idea. You want to really freak them out, they said, why not put them in the firing line— like, literally? I thought it was a pretty brilliant idea, and I was a bit pissed I’d not thought of it myself. Ell was like, it’s cool, you gifted me the fungus, this is my gift to you; we’re Undergrounders, we share things, right? I thought about it for an hour or two, but time was running short, and besides I really liked the total screw-you vibes of it— the sort of thing that Ell would probably never have the guts to do themselves, the sort of thing that the hardcore would go wild for.

So I made my decision, and got to work. I knocked up some scrapers with my assets guy, which got us every public picture of the Stratum big-wigs and studio investors that could be found in public, and we used those to build the enemies and bosses in my game. They were like twisted cartoons, satirical and ugly, and they had this whining, fuzzed-out dialogue that came across like robots reading Stratum press releases. In the bullet-hell sections, they’d be trying to blast you with DMCA notices; in the platform bits, they’d always be trying to kick you down into the sewers while telling you that you didn’t have the chops to enter their domain. You played as an Undergrounder— not as a dev, because that would be a bit too on-the-nose, even for satire, but as a rebel party trying to bring down the evil empire. You’d recruit wizards and clerics to your party—asset-makers and crackers, basically—and work your way into their fortress, slaying and humiliating a succession of the biggest sell-outs of the Stratum at the end of each level, until you finally reached the central chamber, which is where I put the punch-line. All the way through, they’d be trying to prevent you getting at this chest that’s supposed to contain the secret of their power, and your party assumes it’s some maxxed-out magical item or whatever, the maguffin that will heal the kingdom and make you king, but you defeat the final boss and open the chest, and bam—what’s inside?

Gold coins. All they’ve really got is money, see.

#

Come the day of the jam, Underground heads from all over the region turned up to see the sparks fly, plus all the Stratum suckers in their sponsored drip, dressed like they thought they were better than us, like there would be some press conference afterward. I was feeling good: my game was pretty together, and I’d compressed a lot of the features and set-pieces that I’d scoped for a full production run into this demo version, because I wanted to give everyone both barrels.

In the morning, the noob leagues were doing their thing, with the Bunker trainees putting on a good show for the home-team crowd, but everyone knew that the main event was Ell and me. So after lunch the adjudicators fired up a sandbox server each for our games, and opened up the invites. We both got about half of the Stratum schmucks each as players, plus various notable Undergrounders from around the region. But both games also had a huge audience of twitchers, both live at the showcase venue and online.

It’s a weird feeling watching people beta one of your games in real-time—weird, but also pretty sweet, specially when you’ve got an audience doing the side-channel commentary, trolling the players or egging them on, giving the thing that gladiatorial atmosphere. I love it, and I spent the first half of the run watching my players discover all the stuff I’d crammed into it. I got a real kick out of seeing the Stratum goons wrestling with the ferocious chessboxing dynamic while also being obliged to basically murder poorly-disguised versions of themselves to get ahead, and the twitchers were wild for it. I noticed a lot of the Underground legends in the comments, folks I’ve always looked up to, giving the goons all the nastiest memes, dropping tokens in my tipcup every time they saw a particularly gnarly final move or brutal parody.

The respect of your peers, man—that’s the artist’s true reward, right there.

The jam always keeps runs pretty short, because you’re only showcasing a demo, and you don’t want players running up against the edges where there should be more levels or new mechanics or whatever. After maybe ninety minutes out of the full two hours, pretty much all of my players had given up, with just a few of the Underground hardcore still hacking their way toward the final boss. I’d hoped that one of the Stratum suits would make it that far so the punchline could land, but I hadn’t made it easy for them—and besides, they probably wouldn’t have even gotten the joke. So I left the last players to it, and clicked into the twitch for Ell’s game, to see how the suits were handling their psychedelic fungus-zombie murder spree.

At first I thought I must have mis-clicked, because this wasn’t the game I’d seen Ell working on. It was much closer to their original idea, with much more exploration and much less zombie-killing. They’d left in the fungus-ants, but in this version you were questing to try to find a cure, and while you could still eat some funky mushrooms, the trips just took you to some other plane of existence where you could ask the gods for advice or new abilities, something like that. Well-written, but pretty tame.

No surprise, then, that the normies were into it. Ell’s twitch total was like ten times the numbers I’d been getting—people from all over the world, it looked like—and the Stratum suits were deep into the game’s shortened run of levels. A couple of the ones who’d bailed on my game had even bribed other players to give them their slots in Ell’s demo! Their numbers may have been bigger, but the vibe wasn’t the same: no atmosphere from the crowd, quiet concentration from the players. Might as well watch a kernel compile for the kicks. I clicked out and left them to it, got a few beers bought for me at the bar by the hardcore who’d been in my twitch.

#

Maybe an hour later, I’m still sinking beers with the hardcore when Ell comes over, trailing a couple of Stratum suits. Must be your round, I say to them, and one of them says sure, I’d be honoured, and just slaps his company card down on the bar. Show-off.

Guess you won fair and square, I say to Ell, and they say not really, you took the crown on the terms we agreed. Besides, they continue, that chessboxing thing of yours, that’s seriously heavy. I got nothing comes close to that.

A very impressive game, Mister Foxbridge, says the round-buying suit, and I say it’s just Foxbridge actually, and he just shrugs, says something about a new paradigm out of the Asiabloc that does something similar with mixed mechanics, how they’ve been wondering what it would look like adapted for a more Euro IP style, food for thought, yadda yadda yadda. The others chime in with some other corporate nonsense. I ignore them all, order another beer on his card. The hardcore crew slips off, leaving me with a ping for the after-party at Chunky Flo’s later on.

Ell appears beside me at the bar. Sorry for cheating, Fox, they say. Whatever, I say.

I do feel a bit bad, though, Ell continues. I always thought you were the better coder, so when I heard they were coming, I figured I had to take the shine off you so there was a chance they’d notice me instead.

Hope it worked out for you, I say. Seems so, they reply; they made me an offer.

Let me guess, I say—complete artistic control, all the flops and tokens you can use, 20% of all revenue. Ell laughs, says it’s nowhere near that good, but it’s good enough.

Never thought you’d sell out, Ell, I say, specially not for so light a haul. Well, don’t forget us little people on your way up; that way we might remember you kindly on your way back down.

Can’t you be even a little bit happy for me, they hiss, and I’m like if you wanted me to be happy you shouldn’t have cheated, and they’re like I thought you just said it wasn’t cheating. I think I slammed my beer down, said something like it’s not me you cheated, it’s the whole fragging Underground.

Ell looks like they want to cry, but they don’t. You could have gotten an offer yourself, they say quietly, even with your game as it is; they admired it, they’re right here, you could talk to them, it’s such an opportunity.

I say I wasn’t even interested in getting an offer; I’m no sell-out.

Then I guess you’ve got no reason to be upset, Ell says, and shrugs; see it as me doing you a favour, Foxy, taking the bullet of temptation. Now you’re free to be king of the Bunker forever.

Ell walked back to the suits, who were planning an afterparty at their hotel or something. You’d be welcome to come along, Mister Foxbridge, calls the one who was throwing his money around.

I told them all to get fragged, then went outside to look for a scooter to take me to Chunky Flo’s. The hardcore were waiting to hear how it all went down.

SOURCE SCENARIO: BENEATH THE STRATUM

In 2036, the AI wars are over. The winners—a handful of big corporations, each a master of its own geographical market bloc—now control the full stack of the games industry: the development of AI tools, the processing power of data centers, the big mainstream intellectual properties (IP), and the curation and distribution systems that serve mainstream audiences through powerful attention algorithms. The majority of players neither know nor care about any of this: they want to be entertained, and the industry fulfills their desires easily.

The number of professional, salaried game developers has decreased dramatically, but the number of hobby developers has increased, and a vibrant, diverse indie-developer underground is flourishing. Enabled by open source alternatives to the big models and powered by home-made micro data centers, they push the boundaries of what is possible. Through peer-to-peer networks, they exchange ideas, hacks, homebrew models, and DIY device builds.

The people in the Underground refer to the top corporate layer as The Stratum. As soon as The Stratum launches new features, fueled by their immense R&D budgets, the empowered underground do their best to replicate, hack and redistribute their own versions.

The Underground is home to a wide range of political views, with right-wing neo fascists facing left-wing free-culture activists fighting over which LLM is the most true tool for developing games. There’s a new global culture war being fought with games as the weapon.

The lowered cost of development has made way for more niche games and custom experiences, requiring smaller audiences to become financially viable. As mainstream discoverability is gatekept by The Stratum, indie games are discovered and distributed through underground networks and subcommunities.

There’s a tension between the Stratum and the underground, a sort of symbiotic relationship. Solo/micro developers are reaching new levels of success and stardom, as they can now create games at a scale and quality never seen before: they’re the new-rich game dev elite that many Underground developers dream of joining.

The Stratum relies on the creativity and innovation of the Underground, and lobbies for more control of what the Underground produces, while the Underground is partly fueled by R&D trickle-down from the Stratum. The Stratum is constantly trying to recruit the successful micro-devs from the Underground with the lure of mainstream recognition—but if you join them, you’re considered a sellout by your Underground peers.

Meanwhile, former developers are struggling to find new careers and new direction outside the industry. Many rely on interacting with and playing games from the Underground as their way of keeping in touch with their game-dev roots. Some play cozy, non-stressful games to escape from reality, meeting up with fellow players in the ever-more-popular gaming cafes.