Kent Quirk was about to cross the chasm when everything fell apart. It was Nov. 15, 2000, and Black Friday was a mere nine days away. Quirk's company, Cognitoy, was poised to make a major leap on the busiest shopping day of the year. A small independent game developer that Quirk launched with his wife a few years earlier, Cognitoy had released MindRover online to critical acclaim, and developed a solid niche following. Quirk dreamt of a bigger presence for the game, and therefore struck a deal with a distributor in Pittsburgh to package the game for Electronics Boutique's shelves.

But when Quirk picked up the phone on that quiet Wednesday evening, he got the worst possible news at the worst possible time. The distributor had called to tell Quirk it was going out of business, and that operations would cease tomorrow. It was a devastating blow for Cognitoy, which had spent more than $60,000 to print boxes, CDs, and manuals for MindRover; now it was all on the verge of being scrapped. "I couldn't believe it," Quirk says. "I started thinking about renting a truck and making the 10-hour drive to Pittsburgh, but I didn't think it could be done in time."

Instead, Quirk called Al Reed, a one-time Cognitoy intern who lived in the Pittsburgh area (and who would go on to start his own game developer, Demiurge Studios, in Cambridge, Mass.). In what can only be described as life imitating game, Reed essentially went into covert ops mode. He charmed his way onto the warehouse floor and rescued much of Cognitoy's inventory, before the distributor's executives discovered him and asked him to leave.

While Quirk got his batch of products back, in the end it made little difference. In a cruel twist of fate, Cognitoy's doomed retail venture actually set the company back. "The whole process killed our online sales," Quirk says. "We'd have been smarter to stay away from retail."

Such are the lessons learned by many independent game developers. While the movement appears to be growing, being independent poses formidable challenges today, even as the overall gaming industry's popularity and viability skyrockets.

So where is the independent gaming industry headed? TwitchGuru will take a look at several indy developers, like Cognitoy, to find out.