BitBash Festival Highlights Chicago Indie Games

This past Saturday was a landmark event for the Chicago indie scene.

This past Saturday was a landmark event for the Chicago indie scene. BitBash took place at Threadless HQ in downtown’s West Loop, a warehouse that housed over 30 local and outer indie titles and their creators.

Among the developer-curated games were Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime , a one or two co-op experience where two players control a ship together, Crawl , a dungeon RPG where three players control monsters against a lone hero, and Killer Queen , the world’s only 10-player cabinet that pits teams of five against each other in a bee-based cooperative game. Other crowd-pleasers were also for four or more players, like Close Castles with RTS-type gameplay, sports game VIDEOBALL , and ragdoll fighting game Gang Beats , which had as many as eight participants at the same time.

“Our main focus was to push the indie game culture out, especially in Chicago,” said Rob Lach, a local game developer and one of BitBash’s organizers. ” The one thing we were worried about a lot is because we wanted to reach out to families, younger kids, to show them that not every game is Call of Duty , you’re not just shooting as a space marine everywhere.”

The free, open-public event was structured to switch out the games at 7 pm, aiming the earlier part of the day for games parents and kids would be more likely to join. This way, the space was efficiently used to feature more games, and late-night patrons took advantage of beer servings. The attendance far exceeded the organizers’ expectations, with long lines for entry and for nearly every game.

Among some other alternative form games were Johann Sebastian Joust , which took place outside. Players attempt to hold their PlayStation Move controllers steadily as others try to knock them off balance, along to changing music tempos. Relax Harder puts LED scanners around the heads of two volunteers, who face each other in a contest of relaxing, bars showing who’s doing it better. Developer Blair Kuhlman brought A Fitting , a Kinect game where a player attempts to mimic the poses of a woman on screen, to the judgement of the in-game audience — and the surrounding on-lookers.

“It’s been awesome to watch people embarrass themselves. Anthony, you’re beautiful!” said Kuhlman, cheering an attendee who performed awkward leg raises and tilts to match those on the screen. A Fitting is intended to be shown in galleries, rather than something distributed for the mainstream audience, which will keep it from people playing by themselves in the living room.

“The good part about keeping it in galleries is that you have an actual audience,” Kuhlman added. “Some people jeering or cheering adds a layer of what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Games like A Fitting show an alternative, counter-culture approach to gaming, generally unknown to the mainstream audience. Many of the indies featured, like Max Gentlemen and Samurai Gun , were housed on old-school arcade cabinets.

“The great thing about indie games is that it’s really accepting of outside influences, outside the cultures,” Lach said. “You can create your own identity in this medium — games like A Fitting. We wanted to show what else games have to offer because we have these outside voices, people that might not be into games, might resonate with that. These are voices that need to be heard, that don’t come out of the mainstream, like blockbuster budget games. This is something that came out of someone’s passion.”

Lach believes there’s a good possibility for more frequent, smaller events, or for a repeat of BitBashnext year.

“We don’t want it too big, too corporate, we don’t want to be another Game Developer’s Conference, but neither a party in a warehouse,” he added. “It’s a festival, not a conference.”