What about Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, etc? Or Elite?

All pretty indy and commercially successful.

Back then Indie was called Alternative, don't you remember 90's kid?

Doom was pretty commercially successful...

"Indie" doesn't just mean independent. It is (or was) a specific scene, centered to an extent around TIGSource and its forums. The games that came from this scene are what put the genre in its current spotlight.

I would say that that's a redefinition/hijacking of a word that's been in use since long before 2008 to mean exactly "independent" in many different art forms.

EDIT: You may find it interesting to read Jordan Mechner's journals about the making of Prince of Persia as a solo dev (published by Broderbund, so not quite fitting the indie self distribution model today, but otherwise fairly similar). They used to be available online, which may not be true anymore, but it's certainly worth $8 or whatever they may be asking for.

Still, that's how the word is used today. Many, if not most, "indie" games are either made by those original TIGSource people, or were strongly influenced by contact with that community.

Doom was not indie. It had a publisher, for one thing. (GT Interactive)

"It was first released on December 10, 1993, when a shareware copy was uploaded to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin."

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm sure they published it later via a variety of publishers, but they made a ton off of the shareware version. Masters of Doom is a fantastic read, if you haven't read it.

All those remind me of Steam. Which was new at the time, yeah?

Actually, this was around 2008 or so, so Steam was already out for a few years. Most of those games hit it big on XBLA before heading to Steam a few years later.