That is starting to change. The last decade has produced a string of Australian-developed titles that have not just sold well but genuinely moved the industry forward, picking up Game of the Year awards, inspiring entire subgenres and turning a handful of small studios into some of the most respected names in independent game development worldwide. And there is a longer history worth knowing too, reaching back to the 1980s when Australian studios were punching above their weight on home computers and early consoles long before anyone was paying attention.
This list covers the best of all of it. Some entries are global phenomenon with millions of copies sold. Others are smaller, stranger, more distinctly local. All of them are worth knowing, and all of them were made right here in Australia.
The Classics: Where It All Started
Long before the phrase “Australian indie scene” entered anyone’s vocabulary, a generation of developers in Melbourne, Sydney and beyond were building games that reached audiences across the world. The tools were primitive, the budgets were tiny, and the results were frequently extraordinary.
Way of the Exploding Fist (1985)
Developer: Beam Software
Studio Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Platforms: Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, MS-DOS, others
Before Street Fighter II turned one-on-one fighting games into a global obsession, a Melbourne studio called Beam Software quietly released what many consider the first truly great fighting game ever made. Way of the Exploding Fist arrived on the Commodore 64 in 1985 and was an immediate sensation, selling over 250,000 copies and winning multiple awards from European gaming magazines at a time when the Australian origin of a game was rarely noted.
The game featured fluid animation that felt genuinely revolutionary for its era, with sixteen distinct moves and two-player support that made it an instant hit in lounge rooms across Australia and the UK. Beam Software went on to make dozens more games, including the licensed Batman game for NES in 1989, but Way of the Exploding Fist remains the studio’s most historically significant work. It is a direct ancestor of every fighting game that followed it.
Cricket (Brian Lara Cricket / Codemasters series) via Beam Software / Big Ant
Studios: Beam Software, IR Gurus, Big Ant Studios
Studio Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Era: 1987 onwards
Australian cricket games have a surprisingly rich development history, much of it driven by Melbourne-based studios. Beam Software produced some of the earliest and best cricket simulations for home computers in the late 1980s, and the tradition was carried forward through Big Ant Studios, a Melbourne developer that has become the global home of quality cricket gaming. Big Ant’s Cricket series, including Ashes Cricket, Cricket 22 and Cricket 24, represents the gold standard for the sport in video game form, and the studio’s commitment to updating, expanding and genuinely improving the genre year over year has earned it a passionate fanbase across Australia, England and South Asia. Few Australian developers have so completely owned a sporting genre.
The AAA Era: Australian Studios on the World Stage
Through the 1990s and 2000s, Australia developed a significant commercial game development industry, often working on licensed titles and console ports but occasionally producing something genuinely landmark. The studios of this era employed thousands of Australians and gave the country a legitimate claim to being a serious player in the global games industry.
L.A. Noire (2011)
Developer: Team Bondi
Studio Location: Sydney, New South Wales
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One
L.A. Noire is one of the most ambitious games ever made in Australia and one of the most technically daring games of its generation. Developed by Sydney-based Team Bondi over seven years and published by Rockstar Games, it placed players in the role of detective Cole Phelps navigating a beautifully realised version of 1940s Los Angeles, investigating crimes that ranged from traffic accidents to serial killings.
The game’s defining innovation was its MotionScan technology, which captured the full facial performances of its actors in extraordinary detail, allowing players to read the emotional responses of witnesses and suspects during interrogations and decide whether they were telling the truth. The system was genuinely groundbreaking, offering a kind of interactive performance that nothing had quite managed before.
L.A. Noire was a commercial success and a critical phenomenon, selling millions of copies and winning numerous awards. The development story was troubled, with serious allegations of poor working conditions that led to Team Bondi closing its doors after the game’s release. It is a complicated legacy, but the game itself remains a landmark achievement in interactive storytelling, world-building and the application of performance capture technology to video games.
BioShock 2 / BioShock Infinite (2010, 2013)
Developer: 2K Australia (co-developer)
Studio Location: Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
Publisher: 2K Games
Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Canberra’s 2K Australia was the southern hemisphere base of one of the world’s most respected game franchises, co-developing BioShock 2 alongside the American studio 2K Marin and contributing substantially to BioShock Infinite, the acclaimed 2013 sequel that is widely regarded as one of the finest shooters ever made. The studio also led development on the original BioShock’s retrospectively beloved Protector Trials DLC and was involved with the earlier Tribes: Vengeance.
2K Australia employed some of the country’s most talented developers and represented the kind of world-class technical and creative capability that Australian studios had quietly built up over decades. When the studio was closed by its American parent company in 2015, it was a significant blow to the Australian games industry, though many of its developers went on to form and join other successful studios across the country.
The Mobile Revolution: Australia Goes Global
When the App Store launched in 2008 and smartphones transformed how and where people played games, a handful of Australian developers were perfectly positioned to capitalise on it. Two in particular built games that became some of the most recognised casual titles in the history of the medium.
Fruit Ninja (2010)
Developer: Halfbrick Studios
Studio Location: Brisbane, Queensland
Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Xbox Live Arcade, PC, others
Fruit Ninja is the kind of game that looks deceptively simple right up until you realise that over one billion people have downloaded it. Halfbrick Studios, founded in Brisbane in 2001, launched Fruit Ninja on iOS in April 2010 and watched it become one of the defining mobile gaming experiences of the smartphone era. The premise is exactly what the title suggests: fruit is thrown into the air and you slice it with a swipe of your finger. Bombs must be avoided. Combos earn extra points.
The magic of Fruit Ninja lies in how satisfying the simple mechanic feels in execution, and how effectively Halfbrick tuned it across an extraordinary variety of modes, difficulty levels and updates. The game became a cultural touchstone, appeared in television commercials, inspired a short animated series and generated licensed merchandise. Halfbrick has produced many other titles since, including the beloved platformer Jetpack Joyride, but Fruit Ninja remains the studio’s most culturally significant export and one of the most downloaded mobile games in history.
Crossy Road (2014)
Developer: Hipster Whale
Studio Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Apple TV, Android TV, PC
Built in just twelve weeks by Melbourne-based two-person team Hipster Whale, Crossy Road launched in November 2014 and immediately became one of the most downloaded apps in the world. Inspired by the classic arcade game Frogger, it takes an impossibly simple concept, hop a character across an endless series of roads and rivers without being hit, and wraps it in charming voxel art and a gacha-style character collection system that gave players hundreds of quirky animals and characters to unlock and play with.
Crossy Road generated tens of millions of downloads within its first month and has since spawned sequels, major licensed crossovers including Disney Crossy Road featuring characters from Toy Story, Frozen and dozens of other properties, and a co-op platformer spin-off called Crossy Road Castle. It demonstrated that two Australians working out of a small studio could build a global mobile hit with creativity, tight design and a premium free-to-play model that put player experience ahead of aggressive monetisation.
The Indie Revolution: Australia Finds Its Voice
The mid-2010s brought accessible development tools, digital distribution platforms and a thriving indie game conference culture built around events like PAX Australia and Freeplay. The result was an explosion of small Australian studios making deeply personal, highly original games that attracted global audiences and critical acclaim far beyond what their modest budgets would traditionally have predicted.
Hollow Knight (2017)
Developer: Team Cherry
Studio Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
There are perhaps a dozen games in the history of the medium that have genuinely redefined a genre. Hollow Knight is one of them. Developed by a three-person team in Adelaide, it is a vast, atmospheric, hand-drawn action-adventure set in Hallownest, a ruined underground kingdom populated by insects, mysteries and some of the most expertly designed boss encounters in video game history. It takes the Metroidvania template popularised by Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night and pushes it to a scope and quality level that those genre-defining titles would recognise as a peer.
Team Cherry began with a Kickstarter campaign that raised around $57,000 and then spent two and a half years building a game that most players would never guess came from a team so small or a budget so modest. The resulting game launched on PC in February 2017, arrived on Nintendo Switch in June of that year and sold over seven million copies. It holds a Metacritic score of 90 and is routinely cited as one of the greatest indie games ever made.
What makes Hollow Knight extraordinary is not any single element but the sum of them: the hand-drawn art, the deeply melancholic score by Adelaide composer Christopher Larkin, the intricate lore buried across hundreds of hours of exploration, and a combat system refined to a precision that rewards patience and skill in equal measure. A sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, was released in 2025 to rapturous critical reception and became one of the fastest-selling games on Steam at launch. Team Cherry, three people in South Australia, had made one of the decade’s most important games.
Untitled Goose Game (2019)
Developer: House House
Studio Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS (via Apple Arcade)
Few games have crossed from the gaming world into mainstream cultural conversation as cleanly as Untitled Goose Game. Developed by a four-person Melbourne studio called House House, it is a stealth-puzzle game in which you play as a horrible goose tasked with causing maximum inconvenience to the residents of a peaceful English village. You steal a groundskeeper’s keys. You trap a child’s glasses inside a phone box. You drag a shopkeeper’s inventory into the street. You honk, constantly and with great satisfaction.
The game arrived on Nintendo Switch and PC in September 2019 and within days had become a global cultural event. The goose appeared in memes, in news segments, in late-night television comedy and in the work of the most prominent games journalists in the world. It won the Game of the Year award at the D.I.C.E. Awards, was nominated across every major ceremonies and sold over a million copies before the year was out.
Untitled Goose Game works because the premise is both absurd and perfectly realised. The controls are simple enough to grasp immediately and expressive enough to make even mundane mischief feel delightful. House House’s decision to set the game in an English village rather than anything identifiably Australian is part of what allowed it to travel so well, and the studio has spoken about the choice with the kind of dry wit that characterises everything about the project. A game this funny, this tight and this joyful is rare. That it came from four people in Melbourne makes it even more remarkable.
Golf Story (2017)
Developer: Sidebar Games
Studio Location: Victoria, Australia
Platforms: Nintendo Switch
Golf Story is one of those games that smuggles genuine emotional depth inside a premise too clever to resist. Developed as a Nintendo Switch exclusive by a solo developer at Sidebar Games, it combines traditional top-down golf gameplay with a full RPG structure, complete with a story about an adult returning to the sport he abandoned as a child, learning from eccentric coaches, competing in increasingly surreal tournaments and slowly uncovering the game’s quietly affecting narrative about regret, second chances and the strange communities that form around niche sports.
The game launched to enormous enthusiasm in September 2017 and became one of the Switch’s standout indie titles in its first year, praised for its wit, its surprisingly deep golf mechanics, and its ability to commit fully to both halves of its hybrid design. A spiritual successor, Sports Story, expanded the concept to include additional sports and was released in 2023. Golf Story remains one of the most purely enjoyable Australian games ever made and a shining example of what a single passionate developer can build with a clear vision and a platform willing to support it.
Unpacking (2021)
Developer: Witch Beam
Studio Location: Brisbane, Queensland
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, iOS, Android
Witch Beam’s Unpacking begins with a child moving into their first bedroom and ends decades later, having told a complete life story without a single word of dialogue. The game asks players to unpack boxes after each of its character’s moves, placing her belongings into the spaces of her new home. What sounds like a chore becomes something unexpectedly moving, as the objects themselves reveal who she is, who she has been, and who she is becoming.
The game is a masterclass in environmental storytelling. The way a shelf of trophies communicates ambition. The way a partner’s belongings gradually encroach on a shared space and then, in one gut-punch of a level, disappear from it. The way the boxes at the end are more worn than the boxes at the beginning. Witch Beam built something that asks almost nothing of the player mechanically and offers something profound in return.
Unpacking launched in November 2021 on PC and Nintendo Switch and won the BAFTA for Best Game in 2022, an award that represents the highest recognition the British games industry gives and one that put an Australian studio in the company of the most celebrated developers in the world.
Cult of the Lamb (2022)
Developer: Massive Monster
Studio Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, iOS, Android
Cult of the Lamb launched in August 2022 and immediately became one of the most talked-about games of the year, blending two genres that have no business working as well together as they do. By day, players manage a growing cult: building facilities, performing rituals, maintaining the loyalty of followers who are equal parts endearing and deeply unsettling. By night, they venture into procedurally generated dungeons, fighting bosses and gathering resources in a tight, satisfying roguelite loop.
The aesthetic design, inspired by what one reviewer described as a cross between Animal Crossing and Midsommar, is one of the most distinctive of any game in recent memory. The lamb at the centre of the story is genuinely loveable; the mechanics of religious leadership that the game asks players to engage with are genuinely uncomfortable in exactly the way the developers intended. The result is a game that is constantly interesting and often hilarious, with a tone that sits in a category entirely its own.
Melbourne-based Massive Monster sold over five million copies and has supported the game with substantial post-launch content, including major expansion packs that added entire new systems and story chapters. Cult of the Lamb is one of the defining indie games of the early 2020s and further evidence that Melbourne’s creative community is producing some of the most inventive work in the global games industry.
Notable Honourable Mentions
Australia’s game development scene is broad enough that a definitive list inevitably leaves out games that deserve recognition. These titles are not quite in the same conversation as the entries above but are well worth knowing about.
Umurangi Generation (2020)
Developer: Origame Digital
Studio Location: Aotearoa New Zealand / Australia
A first-person photography game set in a dying city at the edge of an apocalyptic event, Umurangi Generation is one of the most politically and emotionally charged Australian-adjacent games ever made. Players work as a courier, moving through environments saturated with the visual language of protest culture, environmental collapse and human community under pressure. The game asks you to take photographs and rewards attention to composition and detail. It is strange, melancholic, angry and beautiful. It won the Australian Game Developer Award for Excellence in Visual Art and has attracted a devoted following.
The Plucky Squire (2024)
Developer: All Possible Futures
Studio Location: Brisbane, Queensland
One of the most inventive games to come out of Australia in recent years, The Plucky Squire is a storybook adventure that constantly breaks its own rules. The main character can leap from the two-dimensional pages of a children’s book into a three-dimensional real world, and the game exploits this mechanic with remarkable creative range. It was published by Devolver Digital and released to broad critical acclaim in September 2024, immediately earning comparisons to some of the most beloved family-friendly adventures of recent decades. That it came from a Brisbane studio makes it one of Queensland’s most significant contributions to the global games industry.
Armello (2015)
Developer: League of Geeks
Studio Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Armello is a digital board game wrapped around a dark fantasy world of animal kingdoms, political scheming and tactical depth. Melbourne’s League of Geeks built a richly designed world that attracted a dedicated community and helped demonstrate that Australian studios could produce beautiful, deep, original games with genuine longevity. The studio’s story ended with its closure in 2024 after thirteen years, which was mourned deeply by the Australian games community. Armello remains a landmark in Australian game design.
Hell Let Loose (2021)
Developer: Black Matter
Studio Location: Sydney, New South Wales
A brutally realistic multiplayer first-person shooter set across the major theatres of World War II, Hell Let Loose was developed by Sydney-based Black Matter and became one of the most respected hardcore multiplayer experiences of its generation. With fifty-player teams, complex communication requirements, authentic weapons and maps, and a commitment to realism that rewards cooperation and punishes lone-wolf play, it found a dedicated global audience among players who found other war games too casual. It is one of the most technically and artistically accomplished multiplayer games ever made in Australia.
Moving Out (2020)
Developer: SMG Studio (co-developer)
Studio Location: Sydney, New South Wales
A chaotic co-op game about the world’s worst moving company, Moving Out was developed by Australian studio SMG Studio alongside Swedish partner DevM Games and became one of the best couch co-op experiences of 2020, arriving just as pandemic lockdowns made local multiplayer simultaneously more valuable and more constrained. Its cheerful brutality, throwing couches through windows, dragging antiques across lawns, launching washing machines into swimming pools, made it an instant party game classic.
Where Australian Games Are Heading
Australia’s game development sector employed around 2,500 people and generated $339 million in revenue in the 2024 financial year, with 93 percent of that revenue coming from export. Those numbers tell a story of an industry that has matured dramatically, one that is no longer producing occasional breakthrough hits against the odds but building a sustainable creative ecosystem with the talent pool, the financial infrastructure and the government support to keep growing.
The Digital Games Tax Offset, which provides a 30 percent refundable tax offset for eligible game development expenditure, has made Australia increasingly attractive to both local studios and international co-productions. A new generation of developers who grew up playing the games on this list are now making games of their own, and the tools and platforms available to them make the barrier to entry lower and the potential ceiling higher than at any point in the industry’s history.
If the last decade produced Hollow Knight, Untitled Goose Game, Unpacking, Cult of the Lamb and The Plucky Squire, the next decade is going to be very interesting indeed.
TechFrontier.com.au covers technology, gaming and digital culture from an Australian perspective.
