There's a place on the Internet that has become synonymous with high-quality yet absolutely ridiculous games. It has managed to attract underground indie talent like Pixeljam Games and Jonatan "Cactus" Söderström and Mark Essen. It has brought games about men who think they are cars and unicorns that are also robots to an audience of millions. And it's not some hip blog or gaming site, it's a Web portal curated by a television network. Adult Swim might just be the best indie games publisher around.

It all started in 2007. Adult Swim was looking for a way to add some more content to its website, and settled on browser games because they were inexpensive to produce and free to users. These two factors also created room to be experimental. And, surprisingly, the games weren't simply promotional tools for Adult Swim shows; they were all original properties.

"We want weird, funny, fast-paced, stupid, thought-provoking, twitchy, epic, ironic or violent — whatever you can think up" explains the site's submission guidelines. "The only pitches we don't want are kiddy and unoriginal. We also do not want show-based pitches. The more unusual the better."

Though the program started initially with AS courting indie developers, now many of the games are the result of devs coming to AS.

"It's probably 50/50," Jeff Olsen, Adult Swim's vice president of Games and Digital, told Ars. "It usually starts with an e-mail introduction and then a pitch, which can be two sentences, or a sketch, or a 50-page game-design document. The longer we work with someone the shorter the pitches tend to get."

The indie development community is also a small world, as it turns out, which means that at least one of Adult Swim's contributors arrived through word of mouth. Mark Essen, better known online as Messhof, initially learned about the network's foray into gaming through composer friend Mark Denardo, who had worked with Pixeljam Games for some of its titles. This eventually led to Essen teaming up with Pixeljam on a game called Cream Wolf, about an ice-cream vending werewolf who fattens up children before eating them.

"It was definitely a perk to be able to work with someone I knew already," Essen told Ars.

Since then Essen has gone on to create other games for the site, including the trippy surfing game Pipedreamz and the racing game/barroom brawl simulator Turbo Turbo Turbo, and he has plans to continue with other projects.

Though virtually every game on the site features an over-the-top concept, Olsen told Ars that he isn't necessarily looking for games that are insane, just games that are good. Being funny and over-the-top is a bonus. That being said, he's actually had to reject some ideas because they were too crazy. And that's "crazy meaning psychotic" not "crazy meaning absurd," according to Olson.

That's right, on a site where games with titles like Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) and Amateur Surgeon garner tens of millions of plays, people have pitched ideas that were too psychotic.

Even still, Adult Swim offers a great deal of creative freedom for developers, and because of this, it has been able to attract some solid talent. And that, in turn, has lead to a steady increase in popularity. In addition to the well-trafficked website, some of the games—most notably Robot Unicorn Attack—have expanded to other platforms like the iPhone and Facebook. Olsen also explained that we can expect some original iOS titles in the future, as well.

As for Essen, working with AS has allowed his games to reach a larger audience than he's used to, which has resulted in much more feedback from users. But does he ever worry that a concept he's come up with is too crazy?

"No, no," he said. "The stranger the better."

Listing image by Lesbian Spider Queens From Mars image courtesy Adult Swim