So as of today, I'm shutting down Manifesto Games.

We started in September 05 because we thought that a combination of trends made it feasible to create a market for independently developed games outside conventional retail. The spread of broadband makes digital distribution even of quite large games feasible; growing disenchantment on the part of developers with the conditions of the mainstream industry mean many are looking for any possible alternative path to market; and the casual game market had already shown that substantial businesses could be built around selling games online -- games with characteristics quite different from those offered by the traditional industry.

Manifesto Games launched as a statement of belief in the creative efforts of the independent game community. It has been a slow exploration, but things are beginning to speed up. One change is that Play This Thing! has become a separate site. Even with idealistic commerce, users expressed that critical content should be separate. Other more substantive changes will be occurring shortly.

Just to re-cap on the vision, it was/is that there's a potential for quality independent development out there that wasn't being fostered appropriately. It still isn't, and we are just beginning the project.

Stay tuned...

Manifesto Games congratulates PeaceMaker and the development team at Impact Games on their recent distribution relationship with the Peres Center for Peace.

PeaceMaker is the award-winning game that allows the player to “play the news, live the conflict” by attempting to bring peace to the Mid-East as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President. The Peres Center has distributed 75,000 copies through the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz and 10,000 copies through the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds. They will distribute an additional 15,000 copies of PeaceMaker to Palestinian and Israeli high school classrooms in the coming months.

“It has been our hope to put this game in the hands of people who live with the real conflict every day, so they can play as the other side.” Explained Asi Burak, co-founder of ImpactGames. This holiday season, his wish as come true. Those of us in the rest of the world can still download PeaceMaker here at Manifesto Games and have a try at creating a more peaceful world for the coming New Year.

Here are Manifesto Games, we’re surrounded by so many talented writers that I forgot that most people are more happy to be readers that writers, which is OK except that I didn’t get as many ghost stories as I expected. This is the last entry in out Blackwell Unbound competition, but I think you’ll agree that it’s worth the wait. Enjoy it!

Morgan, Promotions Editor at Manifesto Games

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Ghostly Children
By Christian Schlager

Three years ago I had taken a small measly job in some sleepy run-down town near the Rhine. For the first few months I lived in an even smaller village a few miles down the river.

It’s week two of our Blackwell Unbound “Tell Us Your Ghost Story” contest, with two more winners. Remember that if you didn’t win this week, you can try again next week. Blackwell Unbound is still a great game, and the contest is still going on. Just to remind you, this week’s contest will go from 12:01 AM on Thursday until 5 PM next Wednesday, and the first-prize winner will receive both Blackwell Games, the second-prize winner will get a $10 code to use at Manifesto Games. To enter, all you have is e-mail your ghost story to me, Morgan (at) ManifestoGames (dot) com

Thanks for your stories, and here are the winners:

Hi, I'm Morgan, an editor at Manfesto Games. I've seen a few ghosts (my mom's dead aunt came for a visit and tried to pat my head. It was pretty weird.) so my colleagues thought I was the best judge for this contest. It was really pretty hard -- there were so many great stories that it was hard to pick just two. If you didn't make our winner's list this time, try again this coming week; the contest begins again at midnight tonight and ends next Wednesday after five PM -- I do need a couple of hours to read and re-read them all. Thanks for your stories, and have a Happy Halloween!

Imagine that your favorite relative has died and has left you something very special. Now imagine that the something special is the family ghost and only you can see him. That’s The Blackwell Legacy; the Blackwell women can all see Joey but nobody else would believe them. Joey isn’t just any mutigenerational legacy, but he’s a crime-fighting, mystery-solving spirit, and you can solve the mystery in The Blackwell Mystery--and now in Blackwell Unbound, the prequel to the earlier game.

You can also enter our “Have You Seen a Ghost?” contest for a weekly opportunity to win both Blackwell games or a $10 gift certificate for other purchases at Manifesto Games.

We just launched a new site, which we invite you to check out. It's called Play This Thing, and it will feature one cool game each day--free games, interactive fiction, mods, and weird stuff like alternative reality and "big urban" games, as well, of course, as independent games.

Why are we doing this, and why is it separate from the Manifesto site?

For a bunch of reasons.

For one thing, when we launched the Manifesto site, we expected it to be a content-and-community site as well as an online retailer. That hasn't turned out as well as we had hoped; "The Word," our pages with reviews and articles about games, never got a lot of traffic--and in any event, reviews there sat a little uneasily on a site that was trying to sell you stuff. It was also not updated frequently enough to draw much repeat traffic--and perhaps was too much inspired by print magazine reviews. Online, where a demo download is a click away, short squibs are perhaps more useful than lengthy reviews--quick reading, and enough to give you a sense of whether it's worth your time to check the game out.

Game Tunnel recently posted their Top 100 Games of the last 3 years, and it was interesting going down the list--both because, well, I'd put some games a lot farther down, and some a lot higher up... And in general, I think there's not enough attention paid here to wargames, adventures, turn-based strategy, and 'serious' games, and perhaps too much to fairly pedestrian shooters, arcade game retreads, and rather dull casual games. But interesting nonetheless, since Game Tunnel also focuses on indie games, and it's intriguing to see their somewhat different take on the field--and encouraging to see that almost half of the games in their "top 100" we carry.

#1: Mr Robot

#5: Mexican Motor Mafia

#6: Jets 'n Guns

#8: Outpost Kaloki

#9: Global Defense Network

Wow. That was a lot harder than it should have been. Urban Legend's developer has their own unlock system. They sent us a little script to generate unlock codes for their game, and said "use this!".

Sounds simple. How hard can that be? Three days hard, apparently.

Normally what we do is generate a bunch of codes ahead of time, upload them to our server, and dole them out to purchasers one at a time. (If you're logged on, click "my codes" at the top of the page--that'll give you a list of all the unlock codes you've received for games you've purchased). In some cases, developers have their own code generation system which requires a second piece of data, like a user's name. No problem there; we generate a few hundred codes using names like "manifesto1," "manifesto2" and so on, and upload them. But Urban Legend wants a "system id" that's pulled off the user's machine--meaning we can't generate arbitrary codes ahead of time. The user has to supply the system ID, with the code generated afterward.