The maker of Hypnospace Outlaw was a Klikker

Jay Tholen, whose Hypnospace Outlaw brilliantly captured the feeling of using the internet in the 90s, wrote about making games as a kid back then, including this:

[T]o my mind, making games was a highly technical thing that only large teams of grown-ups could accomplish, so The Games Factory was a reality-bending discovery. I was never not thinking about my next game project. I didn’t want to do anything else. School notebooks were now for mocking up game concepts, enemy beastiaries [sic], and level designs. I took my backpack to restaurants and other family outings and spent any downtime scribbling notes and sketches.

The Games Factory was the successor to Klik & Play, a no-code game development program, and was itself succeeded by Multimedia Fusion, all developed by Clickteam. Jay made a list of notable games that were made with these tools:

Destruction Carnival (1997) by Charles Tomino

SIEGE!! (2001) by Fallen Angel Industries (Beau)

Eternal Daughter (2002) by Blackeye Software

Entrance Gate (2002) by Jannis Stoppe

Hell Creatures Rotten Corpse (2003) by Dreams Illusions Fantasies Software

The Spirit Engine (2003) by Mark Pay

A Game With a Kitty (2005) by Fallen Angel Industries (origamihero)

Lyle in Cube Sector (2006) by Bogosoft

I’m O.K (2006) by “Thompsonsoft” (mostly Derek Yu)

Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns (2006) by Joakim Sandberg

Knytt (2006) & Knytt Stories (2007) by Nifflas

I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game (2007) by Kayin

Bonesaw: The Game (2008) by xerus

The Spirit Engine 2 (2008) by Mark Pay

The Sea Will Claim Everything (2013) by Jonas & Verena Kyratzes

Freedom Planet (2014) by GalaxyTrail

Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014) by Scott Cawthon

Baba Is You (2019) by Hempuli

These are just games made with Klik software itself. But there’s probably a fairly ambitious story to be written about how the community—which Jay and I were both a part of, but at different times—seeded an entire generation of cool indie game developers that went onto bigger things. (UFO 50 by Derek Yu et al is a triumph.)

(via the always-excellent Virtual Moose blog)