Abstract: The place of nostalgia in video game producing and consuming cultures has been explored from a variety of critical perspectives, particularly the way the industry and fan communities struggle for control over gaming’s collective past; however, little attention has been paid to nostalgia’s functions in indie game production contexts. Through an examination of the design, aesthetics, and intertextual allusions of the indie game Shovel Knight, John Vanderhoef argues that the game becomes a pastiche that celebrates the technological limitations of the past while also challenging the hegemony of the technological sublime that animates the mainstream video game industry today.