The 2012 IGF Pirate Kart: Over 300 Free Games from 100 Indie Devs

Submissions are in for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, and one entry in particular already stands out: the 2012 IGF Pirate Kart. For the Pirate Kart, over 100 developers gathered some 300 games they felt weren’t “big” or “polished” enough to deserve IGF entry on their own. They’ve also released the bundle as a free download so that everyone can bear witness to this cornucopia of creative insanity.

Littered throughout the hundreds of tiny experiments you’ll find plenty of little games worth spending time with. A “Play Random Game” button even adds some suspense to your exploration of the catalogue. I had a blast running and gunning through Sos Sosowski’s Attack of the Heavenly Bats. Livestock Longstack reinvents the Wolf/Sheep/Cabbage Riddle as a brain-cramping three-tiered platformer. Beebash, a simple game about protecting a diamond from thieving bees, feels like it’d do well as a mobile game with touch controls. And I was pleasanty surprised to find that Terry Cavanagh included his excellent parody of classic RPGs, Hero’s Adventure.

They’re not all winners, of course. Many of the games seem purposefully obtuse and non-gamelike. Take Jazz, the Non-interactive Jazz Simulator, for example. All it does, as far as I can tell, is play disorganized snippets of jazz while an artists’ rendering of John Coltrane floats in front of a backdrop of giant saxophones. Weird.

In a way, this kind of weirdness is the point of the Pirate Kart. “In a form with as much untapped creative potential as the videogame, we think, a plethora of small, new ideas is more innovative than a single idea polished for months, and that the inclusion of authors from all walks of life is more valuable than the celebritizing of the few,” writes developer Anna Anthropy in the Pirate Kart’s About section.

You can download the full 1.4 GB of this bizarre bundle at the link below.

Source: 2012 IGF Pirate Kart Official Page