This is a reproduction of a manifesto drafted anonymously in the year 2000. It raises issues that are still valid almost eight years later and, since it was written to be reprinted, distributed and mutated, I am including it here as a peerticle. There is a one line script at the bottom of the manifesto that you can use to have it included in full in your site, should you so wish.

As we watch the price of entry to new media rise remorselessly, often within eighteen months of them being invented, the idea of scratchware remains an important clarion call.

In 2005 Greg Costikyan, one of the original creators of the Scratchware Manifesto, launched Manifesto Games with another industry veteran Johnny Wilson, to put the ideas into practice.

At the time IGN reported that:

According to Costikyan, the internet has no “shelf space” and a developer is “limited only by how well you can market yourself, your site. This is where niche product can rule.” Manifesto Games intends to model its business strategy on the music and film industries where independent offerings can be aimed at an “identifiable market” and therefore produced for at a lower budget than a “blockbuster” product and can still achieve critical and commercial success.

Two years later the Manifesto Games site continues to list new games regularly: games that are too cool, too niche, or too retro, to be likely to find their way into shopping malls. The games all adhere to the approaches outlined in the Scratchware Manifesto.

Scratchware Manifesto: an introduction