Apparently what was up earlier was just a 'beta' or something. I got this in the mail today:
For Immediate Release
New York, New York -- September 27th, 2006
Manifesto Games officially launched today, and can be found at
www.manifestogames.com. Gamers bored with franchise titles and the limited
variety of the conventional game market now have a single place to go to find
"the best of the rest," the games that the retail channel doesn't have the room
for or feel it's worth carrying. Manifesto Games offers reviews, previews, and
strategy articles for independent games, as well as player reviews and a forum
on which the staff participates, staff blogs, community contributed content,
and of course, games.
Formed in the fall of 2005 by veteran industry innovators Greg Costikyan and
Johnny Wilson, Manifesto Games's mission is to create for the game industry
what independent music and independent film provide for their respective forms:
a viable path to market, and an audience for independently created, offbeat, and
innovative works.
Offering computer games for direct download, Manifesto Games is based on the
principles of Long Tail distribution theory, which explains how over time, the
aggregate of the modest, the cult and the quirky can equal or exceed the
compressed sales of high-budget blockbusters. Offering a path-to-market for
independently produced and niche games that are frequently unable to find shelf
space in the bricks-and-mortar world, the company expects to reinject creativity
and innovation into a dynamic field that has become increasingly moribund.
Costikyan and Wilson feel that the independent games movement is analogous to
alternative music and independent film. "We are the Independent Film Channel
in relation to EA's HBO," explains Greg Costikyan, Manifesto's CEO.
"Those of us who love games," said Dr. Johnny L. Wilson, Manifesto's EVP of
Content and Community, "know that individual creative vision is essential to
the creation of good gameplay, and that's something hard to sustain with the
massive, bureaucratic teams that prevail today. Our raison d'etre is to connect
gamers with great games that the larger industry overlooks, to provide a
comfortable home for everyone who chafes at the sameness and lack of variety
offered by the large publishers."
The Manifesto Games site launches with more than 100 games of a wide variety of
types, from turn-based games, shoot-em-ups, graphic adventures, and RPGs to
unclassifiable innovative "indie" games and European titles that have received
little exposure in North America. In addition to the launch rooster, Manifesto
will continue to add new titles regularly, and plans to launch Manifesto
Originals, titles that will be funded and produced in-house, in the second year
of operation.
"Gamers arise!" said Manifesto's CEO, Greg Costikyan. "Ever-spiraling budgets
and ever more risk-adverse publishers have turned what was once the most
creative art form on the planet into a morass of stultifying drudgery and
sterile imitation. Only by smashing the existing distribution channel and
replacing it with a path to market that rewards innovation over imagery,
gameplay over glitz, and playfulness over polygons, can we hope to sustain the
enormous ferment of creativity that is gaming's proud heritage. Let a thousand
flowers blossom, let a thousand different games contend!"
"Basically, we're a Long Tail play," explains Costikyan, calming down a bit and
referring to Chris Anderson's best-selling book, which holds that Internet
retailers can thrive by offering a wider range of product than
bricks-and-mortar retailers can reasonably provide. "Plenty of great games
never get retail exposure, but it has been hard for consumers to find them,
since they have to visit dozens of independent developers' sites online. Our
goal is to make Manifesto the place people turn to first when looking for games
they can't find at Gamestop--and ultimately to build a thriving marketplace
independent of the conventional retail channel where developers inspired by the
desire to create can follow their bliss and still make a reasonable living."
Manifesto will be launching new games on its site on a weekly basis. It also
plans a continuing series of promotions and special offers for site
members--starting with a free copy of Digital Eel's Plasmaworm to new
registrants through September 30th.
About Manifesto Games
Manifesto Games, Inc., is an ecommerce retailer of downloadable computer games
for PCs, Macs, and Linux machines, and is headquartered in New York City. It is
a start-up, and is not traded anywhere under any symbol. Its slogans "Gameplay
over Glitz!" and "Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your
Retail Chains!" are not trademarked, never will be, and may be used with
impunity. Past results are no guarantor of future success, which is a darn good
thing, as a lot about the past is awfully depressing. Use as directed. No
animals were harmed in the making of this press release (tropical deforestation
is a possibility, though). Games are good, and we will meet anyone who claims
otherwise, on horse or afoot, with sword or pistol, at a time and place of
their choosing. More about Manifesto Games and the ideas that inspired its
formation may be found at
www.manifestogames.com/corporate.
The site's still pretty slow (although not as bad as it was a few days ago), and still needs a major usability redesign.
Also, "The Central Committee"? I didn't know this was a Bolshevik revolution...
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