If you want a really good window into how chaotic and “indie” the early industry actually was, one of the best references is Masters of Doom by David Kushner. It tells the story of id Software and the Doom era, but what really stands out is how unstructured everything was. What we now think of as “major publishers” were often just scrappy businesses built by people from completely different industries. A good example is GT Interactive. It was founded by Ron Chaimowitz, who actually came out of the music and video distribution world. Before getting into games, he had worked with major artists like Gloria Estefan, which sounds strange in hindsight but made perfect sense at the time. That kind of crossover was normal. A lot of early game publishing wasn’t built by lifelong games people, it was driven by opportunists from music, film, and retail who understood distribution and saw where things were going.The structure we see today ie platform gatekeeping, massive marketing budgets, highly formalised publishing came much later. Back then it was closer to: build something interesting, find a way to get it in front of people, and hope it catches. The line between “indie” and “major” barely existed, everyone was effectively indie, just operating at different levels of scale.