"So it's actually an indie game made by Mr. Takayuki himself. I never thought someone of his stature would personally develop an indie game."
Half a month after the Game Developers Competition ended, at a workstation inside Mikeford Company in the United States, the young man with the afro browsed the crowdfunding section of the BattleNet platform with great interest.
Lately, he had been visiting this section more and more often.
Perhaps because of Takayuki's strong traffic-pulling effect, many players had indeed begun actively checking out indie games.
Some indie titles that previously sold poorly started receiving noticeably more exposure on BattleNet.
As a result, their once-dismal sales suddenly jumped by a large margin.
Indie developers who had been struggling financially were overjoyed.
Their games finally seemed to be gradually discovered by players.
Some indie games were genuinely high quality, and their ratings began to slowly rise as well.
This was especially true for extremely niche indie games, whose reviews were now rebounding.
Previously, players who tried these niche games often didn't enjoy them, and after playing, would immediately leave negative reviews.
But as more players started paying attention to niche games, there were always some who genuinely liked that genre—and among them, some were willing to write long, thoughtful reviews.
These detailed, high-value reviews naturally carried more weight than short, perfunctory comments, allowing overall ratings to gradually recover.
Indie developers' confidence rose accordingly.
As a result, more and more indie game concepts began appearing in the crowdfunding section.
Several games that had won awards at the Game Developers Competition also chose to launch crowdfunding campaigns here.
Within just the first half month, some of them raised close to—or even over—one million dollars.
With that kind of funding, indie developers became even more excited. Game development no longer felt constrained, and progress became much smoother.
From time to time, the young man with the afro would browse this section for inspiration and incorporate ideas into the Infinite World game he was developing.
His ambitions were enormous—he wanted to create a completely vivid, living universe.
The side-scrolling infinite sky-island game he made at the competition was merely a prototype. What he was working on now was his ultimate dream.
Eventually, the young man moved his mouse to Takayuki's crowdfunding page.
The Binding of Isaac.
Even now, the name still sounded rather strange.
Strange or not, this was a game made by a godfather-level figure in the gaming world.
And it was the first time in decades that Takayuki had publicly released a game created entirely by himself.
The crowdfunding page directly featured a playable demo. The demo contained a complete gameplay loop, though the random elements were still relatively limited.
The page promised that future development would heavily expand random events and procedurally generated dungeon content, ensuring the game would live up to players' expectations.
In the demo's comment section, the young man noticed there were already over seven thousand comments.
Seven thousand comments—from unique users.
"This game has a strange kind of magic. The actual main progression only takes about two hours, but I've already logged at least a hundred hours. You can check my playtime record in the comments to see how much I love this game."
"The God of Games really is the God of Games. Even without grand visuals or flashy effects, a solo-developed game can still be incredibly fun. Though it does feel like the content is still a bit lacking."
"Isn't that obvious? The game already said it's just a demo. They promised to deliver the full version within six months. All we need to do is wait patiently."
"By the way, when I play this, I keep getting this sense of déjà vu. It feels like I've played similar indie games before—or at least games like this…"
"Now that you mention it, I feel the same."
"I remember—like that guy who always said 'Nintendo is basically the ruler of the world.' He was also a top-tier game developer. But I haven't seen him release anything new in a long time."
"Probably made enough money, or maybe ran out of ideas. After all, there's only one true game god. Others having occasional moments of brilliance is already impressive."
"True, but it's still a shame that such a talented indie developer disappeared."
Players chatted casually in the comments, treating it like a live chat room—and incredibly, more than seven thousand users were participating.
By now, The Binding of Isaac had raised an astonishing three million dollars, the highest amount among all crowdfunding projects.
The young man with the afro believed a large part of this was due to Takayuki's fame.
Even if Takayuki made a terrible game, a huge number of fans would still be willing to fund it—just to support their idol.
After all, isn't that what people do with film and entertainment stars?
Still, raising over three million dollars also proved that the game itself must have something special.
What attracted him most was the word random.
This game revolved around randomness—just like his Infinite World project.
He felt he should play it himself, to see how a top-tier developer handled randomness.
The demo was tiny—only 10 MB.
Nowadays, even a single song could easily take up 20–30 MB, and just one or two high-resolution images could exceed 10 MB.
Yet this demo of The Binding of Isaac was only 10 MB. The young man was genuinely stunned.
How could a game be this small?
Even if it really only had two hours of content, that was still incredible.
Most modern games started at several gigabytes.
He couldn't even remember the last time he'd played a game this small.
Because of its size, the download finished almost instantly—he barely had time to react before it was done.
He launched the game and prepared to try it out.
Perhaps because of the small file size, many assets were extremely minimal.
On the start screen, there was only a strange little figure curled up on the ground in pain, a beam of white light shining down from above.
The background was simple, yet it conveyed a deep sense of sorrow and suffering.
"…What a strange art style."