Super Rare Games, a company already well acquainted with bringing indie games to physical release, has unveiled its latest project: The Super Rare Mixtape: Vol. 1. A curated collection of 30 indie games and six demos from rising star developers.
Limited to 1000 copies, the mixtape is a USB drive of the 30 games, appropriately presented as a cassette tape, and comes bundled with a collector’s box that is designed to sit comfortably among the rest of your physical games collections. With its own custom launcher, you’ll be able to plug ‘n’ play in no time.
Additionally, you’ll find a full-colour manual with entire pages dedicated to each title and the rationale for their selection in the collection. Alongside these 30 full games, six playable demos will also be available, of indie games that are already gaining traction, including Grapple Dog, Billie Bust Up and SkateBIRD.
The games themselves are an assortment of genres; from retro first-person shooters and platformers, to visual novels, tower defence games, and quick experimental ideas that showcase how wonderful these indies are and why they deserve preserving.
With gaming increasingly becoming more of a downloadable commodity, it is more important than ever to put preservation first. Lest we forget the fate of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills demo, P.T., in which the game was removed entirely from the PlayStation Store and is now only available to play via fan-made recreations or if you’re lucky enough to still have his terrifying Konami swansong still installed on your PlayStation 4.
The mixtape is very much a passion project for Super Rare’s “Head of Saying Stuff”, Ryan Brown, who after once having to send a developer a copy of their own game as it could no longer be found online, realised just how lacking preservation could be in this particular indie scene and decided to do something about it. And with the conversation about preservation becoming all the more prevalent, this is without a doubt a step in the right direction.
The Super Rare Mixtape Vol. 1 will be available on Super Rare Games’ site 19th August at 6pm BST.
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