You've heard the story before: a few students with a common passion cross paths while still in college, start jamming together and decide to form a band. That's pretty much how Introversion started, except instead of music the band's passion is game development. Chris Delay, Mark Morris and Tom Arundel met in 1997 at Imperial College in London. After studying computer science and electrical engineering for a few years, the trio decides to make their first game, entitled Uplink. Released in 2001, Uplink puts players in the role of a hacker embroiled in corporate espionage. Sales are initially slow, but word of mouth begins to spread and the game gets strong reviews. On the success of Uplink, the group officially founded Introversion in 2002. After building up a strong modding community, however, Introversion got burned when publisher Strategy First, which was contracted to distribute the U.S. version of Uplink, filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and stopped paying royalties to Introversion. Even though the group was in the midst of developing its second game, Introversion came close to closing its doors.

Despite its early troubles, Introversion released its follow-up title Darwinia in 2005. The game, which takes place in a virtual theme park that is being attacked by a computer virus, marks another critically-acclaimed title for Introversion and raises the profile of the indie developer. The big day comes in December of last year when Introversion partners with Valve Software and publishes Darwinia on the digital distribution system Steam. After three weeks on Steam, Darwinia sells more copies than in the previous six months of selling the game via the Introversion Website. Now Introversion has opened its third act: DEFCON, which is inspired by the popular 1983 movie "WarGames." The game puts players in the shoes of a military commander deep in an underground bunker who must take out enemy nations in a global thermonuclear war. Like the previous two Introversion titles, DEFCON has score stellar reviews. In fact, demand for the game was so strong that the company's Web servers couldn't handle the traffic and crashed the day of the launch. TwitchGuru caught up with Chris Delay after DEFCON's explosive launch to talk about the new game, being an indie developer and making games in today's world.

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Rob Wright: The DEFCON launch was a pretty hectic time for you and Introversion. Take us through what happened.

Chris Delay: It was a pretty crazy, I have to say. We had never seen anything quite like it at Introversion. We planned ahead and thought it was likely to be quite popular, so we've been stress-testing our servers for ages. But we had no idea that there would be this many game servers running at once. It peaked at almost 2,000 game servers at one point, which was much more than we ever expected. Our bandwidth usage was measured in terabytes for the first time. I think that's more servers at the peak moment than there are Counter-strike servers. So we were waiting for the launch to happen [on Sept. 29] and basically about an hour before the launch, everything started going wrong. Our Website started falling over and losing connections because of the huge amount of traffic. So we spent the next few hours putting fires out and making sure everyone who bought a copy of the game actually got it. They couldn't get to our site to get their access keys, so we ended up e-mailing out all of the keys to the people that had bought the game so far and directed them to available mirrors.

It was a combination of very high demand and a couple of mistakes on our part. The server that we were running our main Website on got dismantled by our ISP because of a complete miscommunication. It's the sort of thing that only happens when things are really crazy. So the live Website vanished off the face of the earth for a few hours, but it calmed down after that. If you were to build a Web server that was powerful enough to handle a launch spike every day, it would cost you a phenomenal amount of money.