The Humble Introversion Bundle: Just Stop What You’re Doing And Buy It Immediately

Posted on November 28, 2011

One of the more clever marketing moves in indie gaming over the last couple of years has been the rise of the Humble Bundle. Organized by indie developers themselves, Humble Bundles package together several indie games into a single purchase, increasing visibility for all involved. What’s made them such a phenomenon, though, is that each buyer sets his or her own purchase price for the bundle. Think the bundled games together are worth $20? Pay that. Think they’re only worth $5? Pay that instead. They even let you tune how much of your purchase price goes to the developer of each game, so you can reward one particular developer if you think their product is what makes the bundle worth buying. And on top of all that, they let you earmark some or all of your purchase price to go to two charities (Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation) too, if you want. It’s a smart approach that has driven more than $7 million in sales so far, which is a lot of money for developers who are working out of their bedrooms on labors of love. (Not to mention raising more than $2 million for the participating charities.)

So I was excited to see that the latest Humble Bundle focuses on the work of one of the most creative indie games studios out there — Introversion Software. The Humble Introversion Bundle pulls together all four of Introversion’s titles into a single package that you can pay anything you want for. Even better, the games all run on Windows, OS X, and Linux; for Linux gamers especially, who don’t generally have many games to choose from, Introversion’s games have been a bright spot.

The Humble Introversion Bundle contains four Introversion games. Uplink is an adventure that puts you into the shoes of a hacker who bites off a bit more than he can chew. Darwinia is a gorgeous real-time strategy game where you help the digital denizens of a computerized world fight off an attack from a deadly virus. Multiwinia is multiplayer Darwinia, moving the action from you against the computer to you against another player online. And DEFCON is a strategy game based on the bizarre logic of nuclear war, where the “winner” is the side with the last man standing.

Besides their addictive gameplay, what sets Introversion’s games apart is their creative art design. Each game is lavished with a look that calls back to classic works of fiction while simultaneously seeming new and fresh. Uplink, for instance, is inspired by William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novels, and DEFCON’s visual design is a pitch-perfect homage to the classic 1980s nuclear war film WarGames.

As an added bonus, if you pay more than the average buyer ($3.74 as of this writing), the Humble Bundle folks will throw in two extra games for free. Hard to argue with that!

So if you’ve never played an Introversion game before, here is your chance to remedy that sad fact, for whatever price you want. But this offer won’t last forever — the Humble Introversion Bundle deal will only be live for eight more days — so if you want to pick it up, now’s the time. Follow this link to get your bundle on.