It has become a bit of a cliche in the game industry to talk about the last time a game made you cry. But this weekend's Sundance premiere of Indie Game: The Movie seems to be introducing a new question that may seem a bit ridiculous to those familiar with the checkered history of video game cinema: when is the last time a movie about a video game made you cry? Or, even better, made your mom cry?

"When we showed it in Salt Lake City, that was an overwhelming audience of regular people sobbing," Lisanne Pajot, half of the two-person team that created Indie Game: The Movie, told Ars in a recent phone call from the film festival. "This movie tends to kick mothers right in the heart. It's not something we anticipated."

"We get a lot of mothers come up to us and say, 'My son or my daughter plays tons and tons of video games, and I always thought it was a waste of time,'" film-making partner James Swirsky added. "'But now I don't. Now there's hope,' they say. They totally change their impression."

Those mothers are finding hope in a story that focuses primarily on the struggles of four indie game makers: Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillan, makers of tough-as-nails platformer Super Meat Boy; Jonathan Blow, who's become something of an indie gaming elder statesman after the success of inscrutable, time-bending platformer Braid; and Phil Fish, whose perfectionism has led to constant delays for multi-dimensional puzzle platformer Fez.

The two-person production—an indie itself—was funded primarily through over $23,000 in Kickstarter funds in 2010. Since then, the filmmakers have shown footage to a few dozen friends and family, but this weekend's Sundance premiere was the first time it had been shown to a wider audience, which seems to have accepted it with open arms. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive so far, lauding the creators for making "a moving documentary" with "a vibrant, beating heart."

While indie developers sitting in front of their computers and writing code for months at a time might not seem like gripping cinema, the filmmakers said they tried to focus on the human stories and struggles that animated these creators.

"It's a surprisingly emotional film," Swirsky told Ars. "A lot of people come up and say 'I had no idea it was going to be this, I thought it was going to be a fun little thing about video games.' And it is about video games, but it's not a fun little thing about video games."

One theme many Sundance critics picked out of the film was that of indie game makers worrying over releasing their tightly controlled work into the harsh glare of public criticism, something the movie's creators said they related to all too well.

"It's like we are living the movie," Pajot said. "It's amazing the parallels between our journey and the journey of the game developers in the film. It is hard to put something out there and it is hard for people who see the decisions and the values in the film—even though the film is not about us, it feels so personal."

The ups and downs of the film's creation reached another peak on Sunday, when Oscar-winning film producer Scott Rudin (Moneyball, The Social Network, True Grit, No Country for Old Men and many more) announced he has teamed up with HBO to option the film's story for a fictional, half-hour series. Though Swirsky and Pajot have been in talks with Rudin since before Sundance, they said they were a bit shocked to come out of a screening of the film to find the Internet ablaze with the news, which they thought wouldn't be announced until well after the festival was over.

The pair was also surprised to learn that large swaths of the Internet seemed to think the HBO program was going to be a sitcom, a misinterpretation of the news that raised fears among many of the movie's fans.

"It scared us too, because there's nothing in the movie that screams 'Oh this needs a laugh track and multiple cameras and it'll be fine,'" Swirsky said. "It's not going to be a comedy. Every conversation we've had with Scott Rudin and his production company showed they understood the film and they wanted to do something very sincere and honest and compelling about it."

Pajot and Swirsky will be serving as consulting producers on the series, they said, to make sure that it stays true to that vision. They'll also be able to make sure that, despite being an HBO program, the new show won't be filled with gratuitous sex scenes. "Our movie doesn't have a lot of boobs, but it does have a lot of swearing," Pajot said.

While it remains to be seen if larger audiences outside of the indie-sympathetic confines of the Sundance festival will have quite the same reaction to this humble little movie, the reaction from the public so far seems to have been basically everything the creators could have wanted.

"[It's been] really interesting having people watch the film in a theater and react to it and say what I hoped the movie would say [to them], that game creators are like any other creator, working hard," Pajot said. "They laughed and cried, and it's awesome."