Date: 2023-01-20 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: GAMES & ACTIVITIES / Video & Mobile
Description: The games industry moves fast, with release schedules flying by in a blur and hardware constantly changing and updating. But outside the official world of licences and publishing deals, hundreds of games every year find a new home on consoles which have since been abandoned by their manufacturers. This is the hobbyist's playground of homebrew gaming. The first book by freelance journalist and game developer Robin Wilde, Homebrew Game Development and The Extra Lives of Consoles is the first comprehensive history of the unlicensed and unofficial world of homebrew video games. It explores the met
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books

HOMEBREW GAME DEVELOPMENT AND THE EXTRA LIVES OF CONSOLES

With thanks to the developers and fans who built the homebrew industry, and with apologies to my Twitter followers who have had to hear about it.

HOMEBREW GAME DEVELOPMENT AND THE EXTRA LIVES OF CONSOLES

Robin Wilde

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

White Owl

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright © Robin Wilde, 2023

ISBN 978 1 39907264 9

Epub ISBN 978 1 39907264 9

Mobi ISBN 978 1 39907264 9

The right of Robin Wilde to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 Breaking the Seal

Chapter 2 Doing What Nintendon’t

Chapter 3 On the Move

Chapter 4 The Turn to 3D

Chapter 5 The New Millennium

Chapter 6 Homebrew on the Advance

Chapter 7 Handhelds Level Up

Chapter 8 Developments in Development

Chapter 9 Pushing the Boundaries

Chapter 10 Brewing Up Trouble

Chapter 11 Because We Can

Chapter 12 The End of Homebrew (As We Know It)

Chapter 13 The Scene

Chapter 14 So You Want to Make a Homebrew Game?

Chapter 15 The Future of Homebrew

Glossary

Endnotes and Bibliography

Foreword

Video games are in many respects unique as an entertainment medium. Until recently still viewed as a novelty, they have at last made some strides towards acceptance as a creative platform to rival the cultural esteem of other mainstream culture, such as television, film and publishing.

By comparison to those more established forms, though, gaming still lags behind in a few areas. Of particular relevance to this book is its lack of a cult of the amateur. Independent game development is now widely appreciated, of course – many such titles have found widespread popularity and critical acclaim – but it does not form the core of the talent pipeline into the industry. It is rare to find those on the creative side of the film or theatre industries whose early endeavours do not include small independent productions or participation in festivals; even rarer are authors whose first attempts at writing are where they find fame.

Conversely, those who make a living in games and have come up through the independent ranks are, if not unknown, fairly uncommon  – major game studios frequently hire from one another, employ new graduates directly out of college, or hire those with overlapping skills from outside the industry. While we have at last developed awards to reward the best of the games industry, these are still largely focused on popular mainstream games, sometimes with a token indie category stapled on. In short, to paraphrase Zero Punctuation creator Yahtzee Croshaw, we have a gaming Oscars, but we do not yet have a gaming Cannes.

Lurking beneath the already under-discussed world of the independent developers, there is the even more marginal figure of the homebrew developer. In the prestige rankings of their peers, they can at least comfort themselves that they receive more approval than fanfiction writers, but that is a bar so low as to be positively subterranean.

Without an official structure of production, distribution and promotion, it is understandable that so few of these creators make a living from their work – and fewer still do so beyond the one-off capital injection of a successfully crowdfunded project  – but that leaves their valuable contributions missing from both the popular and academic record.

This is a gap this book aims to close. Homebrew game development – which we will briefly define as the creation of console games outside of the formal publishing process, most frequently for extinct systems – is a niche pursuit, but the depth of its passion among those who practise it can teach us many valuable lessons about the nature of gaming fandom and the self-image of our industry, as well as exposing those parts of the commercial and corporate structure that, while occasionally supporting creativity through their patronage and infrastructure, also sometimes stifle and frustrate it through their stranglehold over the publishing pipeline.

I first became interested in homebrew game development when I  played the sparkling fan translation of Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance in 2009, a shining swansong for that system whose fans’ gesture of love in bringing it to Western audiences perfectly summarised the artistic good that fandom can do for the creative arts.

The Mother fandom remains one of the internet’s best established, most wide-ranging and comparatively sane, and it is not possible that this book would exist without that inspiration.

The interest was spurred further after I  interviewed a number of Sega Dreamcast developers for Wireframe magazine in 2019, and was taken in by their passion and ingenuity in overcoming the boundaries of their system. Readers should know going in that this is a bias I carry – as, given the book’s subject matter, they may have already expected.

Among the many translation challenges of Mother 3, communicating its quirky strangeness was high on the list

The homebrew phenomenon is one without an easy comparison in the history of entertainment media, built as it is on building blocks of nostalgia but, unlike fanfiction or parody music, with a technological barrier that bars access to all but the most determined or skilled. Advances in technology over the last two decades have cracked the door open a little wider, most notably the development of online enthusiast communities where the agglomeration effects of shared knowledge, ideas and technical skills could make themselves felt.

For this book, I  have interviewed several of those who work on homebrew game projects, from relative veterans with several commercial games under their belt, to enthusiastic amateurs with no expectation of ever gaining a mass audience, to several people playing supporting roles, from building tools and hardware to providing the commercial infrastructure behind the grey markets in homebrew games. I’ve asked them about what they do, how they do it, and, perhaps most importantly, why they insist on taking the road less travelled when easier and more lucrative roads to a role in the games industry exist.

This book is broken into chapters roughly charting the chronology of homebrew by discussing groups of broadly similar systems from the oldest to the newest, although of course digression and deeper dives into individual stories help illustrate specific points as well. Organising the book by console generation also helps account for the uneven spread in homebrew interest – some consoles have been receiving new games for the last two decades and it often makes sense to discuss these games comparatively, even when released far apart. As well as covering the state of the homebrew scene for each system, and interviewing figures behind them, we’ll take a look into some of the homebrew titles that define their era, and the tools available for enthusiasts who wish to get started.

Writing on the contemporary homebrew scene is, at time of writing, very sparse, and still more so outside the academic sphere. As a result, this book necessarily takes a broad remit. While I have tried to be as thorough as possible within a reasonable word count, the aim of this book is primarily to give an insight into the homebrew industry as a whole, to address the ethical, technical and legal issues affecting it, and to speculate on its achievements, challenges and future. It is not an encyclopedia – if anything it is somewhere between a narrative history and a collection of feature articles, and while I have tried to focus my attention on those games most worthy of discussion, it is entirely possible there are admirable games I have missed out, and their developers and fans should not take this as a deliberate slight.

The lack of formal texts, however, doesn’t prevent the existence of a large and surprisingly well-documented body of information contained on dozens of forums, social media profiles and Reddit boards – a swift Google search, combined with judicious use of the Wayback Machine, can throw up any number of rabbit holes, and I highly recommend it for those wishing to find out more.

I have focused primarily on the artistry of homebrew rather than the technical specifics. Primarily this is as an attempt to create a more engaging read, in the belief that those who wish to learn more can do so for themselves. It  is also the aspect of game design that I find most interesting – after all, what are we here for if not to create challenges and tell stories? It  is also a regrettable necessity for legal reasons, given the somewhat grey-area relationship homebrew scenes have with the law. While I  don’t and wouldn’t wish to endorse piracy, it is true that the homebrew scene is not one without some copyright infringement to its name.

I have been lucky enough to interview some fascinating characters in the course of my research, but it would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of those voices that are missing from the book. Several of the early pioneers of homebrew are not included because I  couldn’t get in contact with them. Many are no longer involved in the scene, or have for other reasons declined to be interviewed. The nature of online communities is that the trail of someone who was active for many years can end abruptly with years of inactivity, no longer maintained or available websites, and no way to get in touch.

It is also noteworthy how few women were available for interviews. This was not, I  should offer in my defence, for lack of trying – the games industry, despite making some strides in recent years, still suffers from a lack of the voices, ideas and experiences of a group that makes up half the population.

It is a deficiency that hurts the medium, and the unfortunate reality is that homebrew is often an inherently nostalgic and backward-looking niche within it. While this doesn’t imply intentional misogyny on the part of individuals, it is nostalgia held towards a time when it was, as a rule, an even more lonely industry in which to be a woman with any profile. In short, I  have done my best – but have still come up short.

I have found the homebrew communities I’ve spoken to and spent time in over the course of researching this book to have been in general helpful, friendly, and frighteningly knowledgeable, even as the nature of the book demanded I swan through them making the equivalent of brief small talk at a party. I  suspect it is not a scene that ever commands much attention from those outside its borders, and I’m grateful that they’ve met my interest with enthusiasm, rather than suspicion.

With all those acknowledgements made, it seems only right to start at the highest level, and to discuss where gaming – and particularly homebrew gaming – finds itself at time of writing in early 2022.

Introduction

State of play

As the games industry enters its sixth decade, it finds itself in a curious place. By the time previous entertainment technologies celebrated their first half century, most found themselves under either growing challenge or serious threat.

Think of the film industry by the early 1950s, arguably at the peak of its cultural power but shortly to plummet in popularity in the face of the cheaper, more convenient casual viewing pleasures of television.

By the turn of the 1970s, the radio (with broadcasting just past its 50th birthday) had been totally surpassed as a form of household entertainment by TV, boxed into the screenless niches of the commute, the workplace and the breakfast table. By the early 2000s, TV itself stood where movies had in their middle age  – still just about the dominant form of news and entertainment, but standing powerless as the onrushing roar of the internet built in volume and intensity.

By comparison, video games have so far gone from strength to strength. When Magnavox released the Odyssey  – the world’s first home console  – in 1972, it’s safe to say that nobody but the most optimistic visionaries would have foreseen the stratospheric rise of video games in both complexity and popularity.

Few other periods in history have seen such rapid growth in a technology primarily built for entertainment. At time of writing the games industry is by far the world’s largest entertainment industry, dwarfing film and television, and leaving radio  – still extant after a century, but hardly making new cultural waves – as a speck in the rear-view mirror. Where film, TV and radio made mostly token changes in their technology and their structure during their first decades  – the talkie, colour television and home video being the major exceptions – games have continually adapted to new platforms and player demands.

Part of this is that video games indulge a level of technological advancement no other medium was able to. Ours is an industry with a ferocious and rapid churn. Whole consoles and control methods are launched, become dominant and are replaced as obsolete in the space of half a decade. The advancement in first-person shooters from Doom to Half-Life 2 took just eleven years.

It is curious, therefore, given this obvious success, that gaming still bears an undeniable cultural cringe. As recently as 2021, when adventure game 12 Minutes was sold on its voice cast including Willem Dafoe, James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley, there was still an ingrained sense among both industry figures and players alike that games are a gimmicky outsider medium, which need to earn their dole of artistic merit by co-opting figures and production techniques from more respectable platforms.

That game serves as a perfect example because, despite a frankly insulting late-game twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan blush, it somehow found itself nominated for serious awards. The same has been true of games by Quantic Dream, who have for two decades been dining out on David Cage’s incongruous ability to keep attracting voice talent for his poorly conceived and executed melodramas.

It is almost inconceivable that a film would be sold on its casting of gaming voice actors like Troy Baker or Robin Atkin Downes, or that the presence of big names from the world of gaming would act as an easy cheat code for cultural acclaim. Indeed, such is the poor record of cultural transfer in this direction that ‘video game movie adaptation’ has become a running joke, likely to elicit a knowing smile from most experienced filmgoers.

A growing number of players and developers know that such a cringe is absurd and unjustified. Video games offer just as wide a range of cultural experiences as films  – if not wider through the added element of player interaction – and to judge a medium on its lowest common denominator would lead us to believe the defining cultural experiences of our times are Call of Duty and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Social historians would argue rightly that they are valuable and that they should be studied, as markers of the cultural landscape in which we all live. But it would be wrong to treat them as a complete picture, and worse still to treat them as the instigators of progress.

The cultural cringe is largely a lingering legacy of the slow start made by the industry in the 1980s and ‘90s. Television’s total domination of culture at that time is hard to remember for those born after it ended, but a list of the most-watched broadcasts illustrates the point.1 The top seven most viewed non-sports broadcasts ever aired in the United States occurred between 1969 (the Moon landings) and 1994 (the OJ Simpson car chase). The top twenty broadcasts in the UK all aired between 1964 and 1996. Total figures for Japan were unavailable, but a top ten list of most viewed anime broadcasts show viewership at its peak between 1979 and 1990.

One should not labour this point; TV is still extremely popular and especially so outside developed countries with access to high-speed internet and the income to buy computers and gaming hardware. But its popularity in those specific places at those specific times cannot have helped but have an impact on a games industry that was just finding its creative and commercial feet.

With TV as popular as it was – and for most viewers, free or very inexpensive to watch – going to the extra effort and expense to obtain a games console or home computer, plus games, and learn to operate it made video games a slow-growing minority interest.

Easy and lasting stereotypes of video games, first as the preserve of the poindexter computer operator with a large IQ and concomitantly low social skills, and secondly that they were a pointless pastime for delinquent children, meant games were easy to pigeonhole.

The picture was slightly different in countries such as the UK, where a burgeoning domestic computer market and accessible programming languages saw a flourishing of independent development in the early 1980s, but for most of those for whom games were a hobby at that time, it still marked one out as faintly uncool.

It took a further decade, until the rapid expansion of home computing, the rise of the internet, and mainstream consoles including the SNES and PlayStation, for games to become a more respectable form of entertainment. Those who spent the 1980s and ‘90s often being ostracised for their hobby have often – unconsciously or not – carried their bad experiences with them into the present day, when many of them, now in middle age, carry positions of influence in development, publishing, and gaming media, from which springs the lingering cringe about our industry.

This will doubtless change as TV viewing among the young continues to crater, and a new generation raised in the more supportive environment of the late 1990s and 2000s rises to prominence.

That generational scarring of our sense of worth about our creative medium has meant that we have not yet learned the art of preservation. Walk into any video store or log onto any streaming service and you’ll find thousands of films, mainstream or obscure, stretching back to the dawn of cinema. Want to buy a compendium of stories by H.P. Lovecraft or J.G. Ballard? Your local book store probably has them.

Those media, in part because they derive their social status and legitimacy from their stories history, are not just careful to preserve what they have, but to repackage, remaster, upgrade and re-release. An early well-regarded film such as, to pick an example at random, the Swedish silent drama A Man There Was, was not available to stream in HD when first released in 1917, but you’ll find it on Netflix to this day regardless.

By comparison, video games are still largely a closed system with a shallow and often incomplete archive. Digital distribution has eased the pressure somewhat – it is now possible to pay developers for work going back to the mid-2000s, and via GOG’s retro offering and the emulator DOSbox, often even older titles – but in the days of brick and mortar stores, a game had perhaps a year on the shelves before disappearing as a new product – after which the prospective player had to buy a used copy, depriving creators of residual income, or went without.

The systems on which we play games are also fragile and short-lived. Though the lives of consoles have lengthened over the last decade, a console generation can last as little as four years. While backwards compatibility is sometimes included, it is never a guarantee, rarely a priority, and often physically impossible for reasons of hardware incompatibility (as in the case of some Nintendo systems).

Even when games are re-released or remastered, this is often a case of skimming off the commercially successful top layer of games from previous generations, missing the strange, the unsuccessful, and the arthouse.

Even an otherwise terrible game can have archival value, as an example of since-surpassed theories of game design, legacies of the development culture at the time it was made, as a record of an individual studio or creator’s growth, or as a showcase for the limitations of hardware. For obvious enough reasons, publishers have no enthusiasm to re-release cuboid evolution and mating simulator Cubivore (2002, Intelligent Systems) but it’s hard to deny it’s an interesting jigsaw piece in the historical record.

Taken together, this makes gaming a veritable graveyard of abandoned concepts, forgotten games and dead hardware. But this cemetery shows unmistakable signs of life. Within the labs of hobbyists and enthusiasts, muscles are twitching and neurons are firing. Rising from the slab is a whole underground ecosystem of homebrew development, raising the bar of what can be achieved out of sight of manufacturers. Free of the need for development kits, licensing and the sales targets of brick and mortar retailers, the homebrew developers have created their own world, replete with jargon, tools and utilities with which the majority of players will be unfamiliar.

Home-made games have existed almost as long as video games – indeed in the technology’s earliest days, there was no meaningful distinction between the two  – but the wholesale and extremely rapid move of gaming culture online, followed by the creation of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon, has transformed their prospects. Within the last decade, it has finally become commercially viable for a team of dedicated enthusiasts to create games for outmoded systems and break even or make a profit.

The simultaneous explosion in popularity of game jams – timed game development challenges, often themed around a particular restriction  – has also brought new homebrew developers into the fold, with many focusing especially on retro systems such as the Game Boy.

Cubivore is a game that defies description but no part of this image should not make you want to see more.

Lastly, the ability to form lasting communities of enthusiasts with the ability to pool collective knowledge has reduced the lead time and skill barrier for new developers. Rather than figuring out how to work with hardware and compilers from first principles, or wait for unpopulated bulletin boards to update, active Discord groups and forums now offer a back catalogue of resources in order to get started. Plenty of developers now release their games with source code and many development tools even come with demo projects. It’s still hard, but it’s no longer the exclusive realm of electronics hobbyists and off-duty professionals.

Homebrew is not to be confused with the independent game development scene more broadly. This conflation would have had more merit around the turn of the Millennium, when the proprietary and publisher-led games industry was at its zenith, but has been increasingly misleading since the rise of digital distribution from the mid-2000s onwards enabled smaller developers to get their game ideas off the ground. Today, it is more accurate to think of homebrew developers as occupying a cubicle within the indie game office block. Developers enter, leave and pass through – homebrew may be the only string to their bow, or something they practise as a hobby alongside more mainstream development work. After all, while the technology and programming language needed might change from system to system, the principles of game design are fairly universal.

This book explores the shadowy, grey-market world of homebrew – taking readers behind the scenes of the development process, ranging from its apogee, with high-quality boxed releases by professional developers for well-loved systems, through to quirky tech demos for systems you might not have realised anyone still remembered or cared about.

Along the way, we’ll work through the best of the homebrew software available on each platform, explore the question of funding, licensing and manufacture, and even take a look at the people making non-game software, like art and music utilities, creating a punk rock scene quite unlike any other.

What is homebrew?

It risks descending into the art of nit-picking to try to define too closely what we mean when we discuss homebrew. We all know that its boundaries are blurred – many professional developers work in the homebrew scene as hobbyists or, less frequently, for money, while plenty of homebrew developers go on to find paid work in the formal industry.

However, a few very basic guidelines are useful in giving this book a structure. Primarily, we will focus on games not sanctioned by a manufacturer, either explicitly or implicitly.

Most consoles require developers to accept a restrictive license agreement before releasing their software, but a few, primarily home computers and the odd handheld system, do not. They use what I will call implicit permission – if you can get your software running on their system, in practice there is no chance short of outright criminality that you will be stopped from distributing it – and as the prevalence of malware proves, even that is scarcely enough.

Expanding the scope of homebrew to include independently developed software in general would make this book far too long and unfocused, and not do justice to the unique stories of those who make their games explicitly against the grain of industry intent.

Therefore, the primary effect of this rule is that we will mostly limit our scope to consoles, with games for home computers and specialist Android handhelds generally set aside other than as useful background or when they serve to illustrate another point. This is not to negate the achievements of other hobbyist and indie developers, but when working with relatively open platforms like Windows, there is little meaningful difference between homebrew and formal independent development.

This restriction in how hardware is used is not arbitrary, but seems to be crucial to the self-conception of homebrew developers. As Brett Kamper put it in his 2005 thesis on Game Boy Advance homebrew, ‘One aspect crucial to understanding how homebrew GBA development differs from other kinds of hobbyist computer programming (for instance, on a widely understood and open standard such as the PC) is this intense focus on technical specifics  – a product of Nintendo’s close guarding of the machine, but also of its inherent technical limitations in comparison to “modern” computer systems of the past decade.’

Similarly, we will not be considering the often quite impressive games produced using tools like Media Molecule’s Dreams – while they sometimes stand alone as games in their own right, having been produced on officially licensed software within the confines – however loose – of the tool’s capabilities, this generally rules them out of contention.

Second, we will focus on real, full games, with occasional diversions into fan-created works like ROM hacks and modding, to the extent that they tell a useful story about the homebrew scene.

I think this was an episode of the Pokémon anime that never made it to the West

The experience of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color multicarts provides us with a useful case study in teasing out the boundaries of homebrew – those who owned and played them at the time will be all too familiar with the market stall fodder of fake games like Barve Boy – Kung Fu Pokechu (often sold as Pokémon Crystal Version – not the official game, but a ROM hack of an old Jackie Chan NES game replete with glitches and terrible gameplay). These are mostly functional games in a strict sense, created and released outside of the official manufacturer ecosystem. They were almost all created by non-professional developers as a quick cash grab and some may even have been enjoyed to a limited extent. As we see elsewhere, building on top of existing code does not exclude a game as homebrew.

Indeed, the primary distinction most would draw between homebrew and those ‘fake games’ is less one of content and process and more one of intent. It perhaps veers into philosophy to try to define homebrew solely as something created as a labour of love – there’s no reason homebrew can’t or shouldn’t trade on nostalgia simply to make money or achieve kudos for the developers. A  line should probably be drawn, however, at the fake games’ intention to deceive. Nobody ever consciously bought a cartridge labelled as Pokémon Crystal Version with the intention of playing a bad Jackie Chan ROM hack.

Thus, for our purposes, I  will exclude them from the scope of this book, save for where their role in the grey market proved relevant to the development of bona fide homebrew games produced with honest intentions.

Lastly, we will mostly explore games and interactive software over other forms of homebrew. A homebrew project does not need to be finished to be included in this book, but it does need to be something I  can interact with – this provides material to write about, and ensures that the project is to some extent real, rather than simply an overambitious concept.

We will define the term playable quite loosely, to mean it must run on official hardware or in an emulator. Interactivity is not a prerequisite in some very specific cases, for example graphics or animation-based tech demos.

The demoscene  – hobbyist development of tech demos that showcase the graphics, sound or other capabilities of consoles, often taken to their furthest possible extent – is a rich tradition with its own interesting history, but it is not what most readers with an interest in gaming history are here for, so it will be touched on only when relevant to homebrew game development.

Necessary gatekeeping aside, the twisted road of homebrew development has visited some strange corners indeed, and the patchwork quilt of variable quality and out-there ideas is part of what makes it such a joy to explore. I  say let a thousand flowers bloom – all out of the sight of the copyright-holding gardener.

Prehistory

To have a homebrew scene at all, you need to have a conception of what counts, and what doesn’t count, as an ‘official’ game. In early computing, particularly in the UK with its tradition of computers rather than consoles, this was a very blurry line indeed. Manufacturers imposed no licensing restrictions, and what counted as publishers could be a company of any size accepting games on tape from bedroom hobbyists. As games could be reproduced with a simple twin tape deck, piracy was rife, as was home production of games.

While differing in extent – consoles generally took off earlier and more successfully in the USA than in Europe, where home computers remained the primary platform for video games until the 16-bit era of the early 1990s – virtually everywhere computers were available, a dedicated independent development scene followed. The inclusion of BASIC on most home computers of the early 1980s – and their promotion as an educational tool – meant there was enough of a common benchmark for coding to be learned quickly, and the primitive graphics technology of the time meant even the inexperienced could produce playable games within a reasonable timeframe.

In much of the developed world, the bedroom programming scene was a fun sideshow to the growing professionalised industry, which as well as adding extra learning functionality to justify the purchase of a games machine to sceptical parents, occasionally launched its solo creators into unprecedented fame, kickstarting careers that would go on to define the direction of the games industry for years to come. Matthew Smith, creator of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, as well as the Oliver Twins (creators of Dizzy the Egg and at one point responsible for 7 per cent of games sold in the UK market), plus David Braben and Ian Bell (who created the ground-breaking Elite while at university) all began as hobbyist developers in the anarchic world of the early 1980s.

While in the West it offered low-cost escapist fun with a real chance of breakout success, in Communist Eastern Europe those few enthusiasts with access to computers formed an intriguing underground core of creatives.2 Somewhat contrary to the vision of the late Eastern Bloc as drab and technologically backwards, several computers and at least one East German arcade cabinet were manufactured, mostly featuring clones of successful Western games (in Czechoslovakia for example, the most common platform was the Didaktik Gama or Didaktik M from the Didaktik Skalica factory)2 – but limited production meant access was extremely limited, and home computers were available only to the very well connected or those willing to trade on the black market at obscene mark-ups.

This, along with travel and export restrictions, had the unexpected side effect of forcing most hobbyists to join dedicated computer clubs and to aim their games at a domestic audience with little experience of the outside world – resulting in an aping of Western gaming culture, even down to creating adolescent company names like Hellsoft.2

While there was no commercial market, with games primarily created by teenagers for their own amusement and that of their friends, the flipside of the underground world of Eastern Bloc game development was that it encountered relatively little censorship relative to other creative industries – primarily because virtually none of the Eastern Bloc was computer literate, so intelligence services and the aging communist authorities lacked the resources or understanding of the technology to impose it.

This, of course, led to it being one of the more subversive media in which to operate  – and teenagers being what they are regardless of their political climate, many used it to rebel and spread anti-regime messages. In the 1988 game P.Ř.E.S.T.A.V.B.A, for example, the player uses dynamite to blow up a statue of Lenin, under which is a gold brick allowing them to escape to the West.3

But the scene’s lack of connection to the outside world, along with games being produced in comparatively obscure Slavic languages, as well as the post-communist recessions and emigration stifling the development of domestic commercial games industries, meant that it never produced leading lights in the same way as Western countries.

Until it’s translated, P.Ř.E.S.T.A.B.V.A remains a good opportunity for you to practise your Slovak

Until recently, many of these Eastern European games were either lost entirely or remained highly obscure, owing to the language barrier for most players in the West. In late 2021, however, the Slovak Design Museum released ten translated versions of games from 1980s Czechoslovakia, which are available to download from its website.3

In both spheres, the main limits imposed on homebrew development were the distribution channels. A small publisher might pick up games from solo developers, but this was of limited use if they could not be put on store shelves, particularly in a time before home internet connections. Indeed, it perhaps makes more sense to think of two homebrew game development scenes – one existing as a solo or geographically limited circle of creatives, operating before the widespread availability of home internet connections, and one existing afterwards. Brett Camper dates the border between these two homebrew worlds as 1994, citing the first independent Atari 2600 game to appear on fansite AtariAge having been released in 1995 as evidence of entry into the new world.4

One should not overstate the distinction between these worlds. If  there is a border, it is a border with friendly guards and lax passport restrictions. Those creating homebrew games in the online era are certainly aware of the successes of the offline era – indeed, that many of gaming’s most important pioneers, as mentioned above, began as solo hobbyists, and that Spacewar, often cited in popular memory as the first computer game, was an entirely unofficial and noncommercial product created for academic and military hardware with an install base of just fifty units. It  is these pioneering successes the new breed of homebrew creators often have in mind when they embark unsupported on their journey to realise their creative vision.

Tell a modern UI designer that the game must be circular and watch them grimace

There is a certain aptness in the Atari 2600 being the first console to see a large-scale homebrew scene develop. Founded by one of the Spacewar creators, Nolan Bushnell, in 1971, Atari was in effect the first console manufacturer to realise the importance of quality control and licensing, and to fall foul of its inadequate execution. Its draconian policing of rules around publishing games for the Atari 2600 is the source of much gaming trivia, including the launch of Activision as a splinter group from the company, the first Easter egg in the form of staff credits (usually forbidden in Atari games) hidden away in Adventure, and the lack of quality control that led to a flooded market, a loss of consumer confidence in home video games, and ultimately to the video game crash of 1983. While the crash is often attributed to the E.T. tie-in game, that game is better thought of as a symptom than a cause. One poor game would not have pushed the market over the edge any more than one poor film would topple Hollywood – the issue was that E.T. was not unique, but representative of the poor and often lazily produced games players were then coming to expect from the Atari 2600.

In its attempts to rebuild the industry in America, Nintendo introduced the Seal of Quality when it launched the NES in 1985. As players of such ‘quality’ games as It’s Mr Pants or BMX XXX on Nintendo systems over the years will attest, this was little more than a guarantee that the developer had paid Nintendo a licensing fee, followed brand guidelines and done some cursory checks to make sure it wouldn’t brick the console, but it became a touted feature and acted as a serious block on home development. The need for expensive and proprietary cartridges, rather than cheap and readily available tapes, was a further block on those wishing to operate outside Nintendo’s sphere of influence.

This proprietary hardware was the first obstacle to clear in the homebrew world’s early days in the 1990s – after all, it’s impossible to create new games for a system if you can’t get into the code and understand how it fits together. This is where we first encounter the inextricable link between homebrew and piracy. The homebrew scene might be pure in its intentions to merely explore the capabilities of hardware, but it needs to reckon with the reality that the majority of interest in devices and software capable of doing so is to enable owners to play games for free. It was this interest, not the more noble art of homebrew, which provided the financial base to crack open the consoles and feast on the capabilities inside.

So it was with the first devices to enable the capture of stored information from cartridges on machines available to home users. The first widespread models for the SNES, sold under names such as Professor SF (for Super Famicom) or Game Doctor, were floppy-disk based and sat between the console and the cartridge, reading and copying data that could then be transferred to a home computer. These were sold as a backup solution, but the rapid creation of Bulletin Board System boards for swapping and sharing files formed the nucleus of a soon burgeoning (and virtually unstoppable) piracy scene.

A Japanese Super Famicom equipped with a Professor SF game copying device

The availability of these devices, and the rapid rise in computing power during the 1990s, led to the development of early PC-based emulators, such as NESticle (first released in 1997) and Snes9X (1998). The adoption of CDs as a gaming medium, first with the release of the Sega CD and other systems, then on a widespread scale with the launch of the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn, made the process significantly easier, since games could be ripped (often with dedicated software) and written using common commercial drives. Viable PC-based emulators such as Bleem! emerged quickly, although the Saturn’s byzantine architecture slowed emulation progress for many years, and to some extent the console is still not completely understood.5

While Nintendo stuck with cartridges, partly in an attempt to deter piracy, the move did almost nothing to arrest the spread of ROMs. Devices such as the Doctor V64, which operated much like the SNES systems but used CDs instead of floppy disks, were available virtually from launch, and even enhanced the console’s capabilities by enabling it to play video CDs and audio discs. Since third-party aftermarket manufacturers were able to provide this functionality, it marks out as even more commercially reckless Nintendo’s decision not to include a disc drive, which could have avoided the problems with third-party developers their insistence on cartridges caused them during that period.

This also soon led to viable emulators – first the experimental Project Unreality in 1997–98, then UltraHLE in 1998, the first to be capable of running commercial N64 games at reasonable frame rates.

The development of commercial game-capable emulators and the ability to rip data from cartridges and discs were inseparable from one another, and both were crucial to the explosion of homebrew onto the scene from the 1990s onwards. ROM files being small and easily transferred through rudimentary early internet connections massively expanded the amount of work that could be done to crack and understand consoles in the early days of the scene.

Of course, the ability to read and use proprietary data is only half the battle. Development of homebrew games for the Nintendo 64 was typically done from scratch, using a language like C, and compiled using a copy of the official software development kit (SDK). The same was essentially true of other early consoles, but the ability was finally there for those willing to put the time in. By the late 1990s, the confluence of storage technology, home computing power and the rise of the internet meant homebrew was on the launchpad – and the following years would see it take off.

Homebrew only became easier with the sixth generation  – from the Dreamcast’s launch in 1998 onwards  – as all consoles became to varying degrees internet capable, enabling easy data transfer to PCs, and as hardware capability became more standardised in favour of third-party developers. This did enable additional anti-piracy measures, particularly once the popularity of WiFi rendered many consoles online by default, but these restrictions were usually quickly overcome or worked around.

Arguably the first modern console to see significant homebrew development during its supported lifetime was the Game Boy Advance. While not online capable itself, its 2001 launch meant that in many ways it was the first handheld console entirely of the internet era, which set the stage for a scene to develop from the moment the hardware was available. Its simplicity relative to the Dreamcast and other contemporary home consoles also made it a better bet for ambitious homebrew creators.

LAN Master: A rare example of a homebrew game with anachronistic subject matter

There was something about the Game Boy Advance that tapped into another major draw factor for homebrew – a sense of nostalgia. The GBA was promoted as having the power of a portable SNES, an impressive prospect to gamers who remembered that machine as having been Nintendo’s flagship home console as recently as six years prior to launch, many of whom had fond memories of it.

As Camper rightly points out, ‘There is special aesthetic appeal: the system’s 2D-based graphics, in opposition to the 3D presentation of today’s home (e.g. non-handheld) consoles, make it the contemporary carrier of an older visual and gameplay style for which homebrew developers harbour a childhood nostalgia.’ As even handheld systems advanced in subsequent years and 3D gaming became a reality on the DS and PSP, that 2D sprite-based look retained a special appeal.

This speaks to a broader truth about homebrew – it cannot often be divorced from the constraints a system’s manufacturer places upon it culturally, even when it manages to break past a system’s technical restraints.

Homebrew games that touch upon themes not present in the console’s active lifetime stand out by their rarity (LAN Master for the NES being one good example covered later in this book) and graphics, sound and gameplay often operate within the console’s milieu as set by its most prominent or memorable games  – there is no grey-brown military shooter of the mid-2000s style as represented through the Nintendo 64, even though such a thing would be perfectly possible within the confines of the hardware.

This has little to do with the manufacturer’s restrictions and mostly a product of the audience to which homebrew caters being driven first and foremost by nostalgia.

The expansion of access to digital distribution through the mid to late 2000s, and the release of user-friendly game creation tools like Game Maker Studio (1999) and Unity (2005) led to an increase in activity both directly (both systems would go on to be compatible with mainstream consoles) and indirectly (by expanding the pool of hobbyist developers from which homebrew developers could be drawn). While unquantifiable, it’s entirely plausible that homebrew fell as a proportion of independent development at this stage, while simultaneously seeing an aggregate expansion in raw numbers due to the rapid increase in the overall number of creators.

For most players in the West, and as far as this book is concerned, the state of the games industry with regards to independent and homebrew development can be broken into four discrete periods, though their edges are fuzzy:

• Prehistory: 1950s to circa 1980. Defined by the limited availability and technical development of video games. Video games are rare objects of novelty, only rarely to be found in the home, and most common in arcades, academic computer laboratories and the living rooms of the wealthy and forward-looking. Consoles are primitive, games and media attention are limited, and player capacity to develop new games is virtually non-existent.

• The First Open Period: circa 1980 to circa 1991. The first inexpensive home computers begin to achieve significant market penetration. Coupled with writable home media hitting the market in the mid-1970s with the rise of the magnetic audio cassette, creation of home-made video games becomes intuitive and many independent developers achieve success with solo or small team-developed games. Consoles exist and establish a market, but are viewed as a child-focused novelty with a high cost of entry that prevents their dominance, particularly in a market nervous of consoles following the video game crash of 1983.

• The Closed Period: circa 1991 to circa 2004. As games and home computers become more complex, and home consoles broaden their capability and appeal with the launch of the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo Entertainment System, bedroom programming declines as a subculture.

With the rise of 3D acceleration in the mid-1990s, barriers to producing industry-standard games rise, and independent development energy, where it remains strong (such as on DOS, Windows and the Amiga), becomes more focused on modding of existing titles such as Doom, using official player creation tools such as Doom Builder or Duke Nukem Build.

The adoption of home internet connections during this period allows the creation of the first homebrew communities online, although these remain small. By the end of this period, a combination of copy protection, game complexity and limited distribution channels render independent games a niche interest.

• The Second Open Period: circa 2004 to present. Starting with major hits such as Cave Story, digital distribution advances to the point where platforms like Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade give a platform to developers to have their games officially sanctioned and available for new players to find.

The development of easy to learn programming tools like Game Maker Studio and Unity lower the barriers to entry, as does the increasing power of home computers. Widespread internet use allows for larger homebrew communities with the benefits of accrued knowledge and tools reducing the lead time for new games to be created.

The creation and adoption of online crowdfunding platforms allows for capitalisation of more ambitious homebrew projects, rendering an increasing number financially viable.

By the time of writing, we have reached what look like the final frontiers of homebrew’s expansion. Only a small handful of quirky old systems remain without having been conquered by enthusiastic programmers, and development kits – admittedly of highly variable quality, documentation and user-friendliness  – are available for virtually every system for which any nostalgia exists.

The market for homebrew games has matured significantly since the availability of crowdfunding. A  physical game release for a retro system was a remarkably rarity up until the 2010s, primarily because of the high overhead costs of production and the difficulty of marketing and distribution without a formal licence agreement. Now, the more popular systems like the Dreamcast receive several such games annually, and there are functioning (if still very small) publishers bringing stability and structure to the process of releasing a game.

This is not the end of the story; the continual trickle of new commercial games for the Dreamcast and Game Boy in particular demonstrate that homebrew is now undergoing a period of consolidation and continued growth in popularity. But it is a turning point in the life of homebrew – and such a juncture feels appropriate as a site from which to pause and reflect.

CHAPTER 1

Breaking the Seal

Famicom, NES and Master System

In the historical canon of American games enthusiasts, this generation is often considered to be where it all began. Although systems like the Atari 2600 had hit all the major beats – cartridges, proprietary licensed software – the NES and Master System provide the first uninterrupted through line to the modern day, establishing the controller layouts, franchises and visual styles that still draw the boundaries of video games in popular imagination.

They also marked the point at which consoles could draw on enough processing power to walk and chew gum at the same time. The earliest wave of recognisably modern RPGs like Final Fantasy, Mother and Ultima IV appeared in this generation, bringing new narrative experiences to a medium often pigeonholed as being primarily composed of blocky platformers, into-the-screen racing games and side-scrolling shooters, with story, if existent at all, confined to a badly translated paragraph in the manual.

Their age, and consequently the ease of emulation, has given birth to a healthy emulation scene, and this lack of a need for original hardware, as well as the generation having been the birthplace of a great number of nostalgia-inspiring series, means a fairly vibrant homebrew market.

The NES was one of the first consoles to receive a widely available commercial-grade emulator (the unfortunately named NESticle) in 1997, a milestone not just in the NES homebrew story but in defining the fundamentals of how we interact with games today. For example, it is often credited with introducing the idea of screen capture of gameplay  – a huge advance in the prehistory of both speedrunning culture and the modern concept of Let’s Play, which has since morphed into the giant industry of gaming video and streaming culture.

Crucially, the ability of players to load commercial games on their computers led them to the ability to hack into, interpret and edit the code running on their system, which was hidden from view when cartridges were played on a console. NESticle was even updated to include an in-built graphics editor, allowing the changing and replacing of sprites to allow for some very early modification.

The availability of a good-quality NES emulator coincides with the first basic demos of NES homebrew being released as users started to get their heads around the hardware. The earliest entry on the fairly exhaustive NESworld.com listings is a charmingly late-’90s demo called Fade 2 Black, which does nothing but play a music sample and display a NES-grade image of Metallica. Fully fleshed out games – albeit of an often primitive sort  – started to arrive around the turn of the Millennium. The first still to be available online is a port of Sokoban, released in 2000 by Johannes Holmberg.

The box-pushing puzzle game, originally developed in 1981 for the PC-8801 series of Japanese home computers, recurs throughout the history of homebrew, since due to its simple gameplay loop (players must push boxes into their designated slots on a grid-shaped level without getting stuck), limited technical requirements, and the easily availability of additional rulesets that change the gameplay and add or remove complexity, it fills the role of an introductory game for learning one’s way around new hardware. Consequently, despite being not actually much fun to play, it is available in some form or other for a vast array of devices, by no means limited to consoles.

Holmberg’s NES version was released as an open source program and the source code is still available to download.1 As well as giving us a useful look into the game’s code, consisting of just 850 lines of Assembly 6502 (a low-level programming language used by the NES’s processor), it’s a charming window into shaky early experimental stages of NES development.

One of Sokoban’s almost infinite iterations.

The first truly original homebrew game was Solar Wars, a tank combat sim released in 2001 by Chris Covell, who like many developers at the time was still working out the many strange complexities of NES development.

His development diary, released alongside the game’s source code, details such challenges as how to handle shots disappearing off screen – when by default, due to the console’s lack of resources for handling off-screen objects, sprites that leave the NES’s display area simply wrap around to the other side of the screen, necessitating code that tracked the object’s location and destroyed it when it was within eight lines of the screen’s edge before recreating it in the appropriate place on the way down. Since the NES was developed with analogue televisions in mind, and no expectation it would ever be used with pixel-based digital displays, it was assumed lines 1–8 would always be hidden within the screen bezel.

This kind of compromise in the design of consoles was common in the early days of console development, a product of limited machine resources, very specific expectations of the role a home console would fill, and expectations of the functions games would need to make use of. Both fixed, non-scrolling display areas and objects wrapping around the screen are incredibly common features of NES games, although it’s not clear in either case whether the default behaviour was driven by professional developer need, or whether developers adapted their games to the hardware default to make their work easier. Probably, the truth varies case by case.

In any event, both the presence of these limitations and the absence of useful documentation demonstrate the impact that the arrival of consoles had on the video game development scene when they arrived in force in the mid to late 1980s.

Home computers not only allowed users to create their own software, they often came bundled with documented and widely known programming environments such as BASIC; consoles by contrast were tightly closed systems, and while this allowed them to include these unusual hacks to circumvent hardware limitations, it would set a trap for enthusiasts to fall into when they came to break into the systems years down the line.

The story of NES homebrew is one of slow maturation followed by rapid acceleration, and it helpfully describes the arc of homebrew development more broadly. From 2000 to 2009, just forty-three playable games or demos were recorded on NESworld.com, over half of them in the final two years of the decade. From 2010 to 2019, the figure was 180 – a more than fourfold increase.

Not all these games were sophisticated – many were tech demos, unfinished attempts, or ports of existing games – and the widely distributed and unofficial nature of homebrew means that some titles will inevitably have been missed, but it’s hard to dispute that the turn of the decade saw an upsurge in enthusiasm for homebrew, one reflected in the uptick in interest in other consoles, not just the NES, although the console’s obvious nostalgia value for Americans has helped it.

Although the NES’s major rival, the Sega Master System, hasn’t entered the gaming canon in the same way, it’s worth remembering that its global sales of close to 20 million units are of a scale that would delight many electronics manufacturers and still look reasonably respectable today. Much as with the more well-known console wars between the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis, Sega is badly served by comparison with Nintendo’s success, rather than by its own failure. The Master System performed particularly well in the PAL regions (Europe and Australia), where it outperformed the NES, and in Brazil, where Nintendo products were not officially available until 1993. Incredibly, the Master System was still in production in Brazil via local licensed manufacturer Tectoy as of 2015. Brazil’s stringent import restrictions and widespread poverty mean that consoles can stay in circulation there far longer than we might be used to in North America and Europe.

The Master System’s few hit games, such as Alex Kidd in Miracle World (for my money a better and more varied platformer than Super Mario Bros.) still hold up well today, even as the console has largely faded in popular memory.

Before Sega had a radical blue hedgehog, they had a big-eared child who fought bosses with rock-paper-scissors

Despite a fairly large library (234 titles of varying levels of complexity, according to SMSpower.org,2 and slightly more technical power under the hood (able to display 64 colours to the NES’s 56) the Master System is not a headline destination for homebrew developers, with a lot of tech demos and few must-have games. While interesting titles like Zombi Terror (a largely text-based adventure game) and polished puzzler Bara Buru make their presence felt, much of the homebrew library listed on resource sites like SMSpower are clones of classics like Snake, Sokoban or Solitaire, and feel more like they were made to prove the point that these consoles can be developed, more than experiences that can stand on their own feet.

This is probably an outcome of the SMS’s limited popularity in the West, which cascades into the lack of interest and utilities, which ultimately leads to the lack of serious games. While much nostalgia exists for Sega, it is primarily focused on the Mega Drive/Genesis and the Dreamcast, with the less successful Master System, Saturn and handheld systems overlooked.

That said, some powerful tools and tutorials are available. Z80-ASM is an assembler for the system’s CPU and is where the bulk of development takes place. Mod2PSG2 is a music tracker that can produce compatible tunes for the system’s sound chip. Indeed, the chiptune scene is where the Master System has found some lasting impact, at least in part due to its outsider status as the less successful rival to the very common NES, and to the additional channels its sound chips can offer (six in Western systems, nine in the Japanese units).3

Similar to the NES, the Master System shows a marked uptick in interest around the turn of the decade, driven, one suspects, by many of the same factors.

Ultimately, though, the SMS development scene suffers from the lack of sophistication of its resources for developers. It  certainly doesn’t compare to the drag and drop simplicity of tools like GB Studio (discussed in Chapter 3) and is very much a system where experienced enthusiasts might wish to try their hand at homebrew, rather than an accessible entry point for beginners.

Having the tools is one thing – having to work with scattered tutorials and forum posts to learn how to use them is quite another. As the case of the NES shows, there is a long lead time to the development of a homebrew scene – it took eight years for that system to take off, and even if changes in digital culture since then have lowered the start-up time, the smaller audience of more obscure consoles prevents the agglomeration effect of people starting to build on one another’s experience, expertise and source code.

Homebrew highlights

Until we reach the end of the homebrew story, we’ll stop off to take a short look at a representative sample of the homebrew games released for the systems we’ve covered in each chapter. Often these will be the best examples of the medium, but others will be included where they tell us something useful or interesting about the industry. Most are easily found online and it’s well worth playing them yourself!

Slow Mole – Erik Rosenlund – NES

It would be hard to accuse Slow Mole of not doing what it says on the tin. The game keeps itself incredibly simple, with little more for controls than directional movement and a jump button, but this is to its credit – attempting to shoehorn in more features than the NES can comfortable carry off would probably result in overreach, and the fiendish platforming challenges each stage presents offer challenge enough.

The titular mole will die a lot during a session of Slow Mole, as he struggles to avoid enemies, navigate trickily timed jumps and dodge hazards in the varied range of environments that take him from grasslands to filthy sewers. Happily, rapid resetting and a respawn point in each room (if you can beat the relatively strict timer) means that frustration doesn’t set in easily, and among the many modern trends that have crept into the game, the abolition of any sort of life system is among the best.

Platforming is so hard at times that it becomes less a test of reflex and more a puzzle game, as you attempt to figure out the correct sequence of timing and jumps to make it past obstacles. This is where the gameplay niggles arise, as hitboxes are not always as generous as they appear, and it’s not clear the NES can quite pull off the pixel-perfect calculations this genre of player-punishing platformer calls for.

Still, it’s a good solid challenge with a fundamentally fair approach to difficulty, and if you’re willing to persevere, there’s a good chunk of replayability buried within. Add in exquisitely executed pixel art backgrounds – which push the console’s capabilities and occasionally verge on SNES-quality  – and you have a game up there with the NES’s best.

Slow Mole moments before yet another of his frequent fatalities

The game’s repeating textures leave something to be desired

Solar Wars – Chris Covell – NES

Released in 2001, Solar Wars is one of the earlier NES homebrew titles, but emerging just a few years after the console’s demise hasn’t stopped it getting most of the basics right. It’s a simple two-player tank game, based on the DOS game Tank Wars and various imitators, in which players take turns to lob projectiles at one another, with three hits to win a round and three rounds per match. The concept is basic, but reasonably well-executed, with a solid projectile arc and aim correction carried out via adjustments on the X and Y axes, as well as accounting for wind effects on the various planets where battles can take place.

A good impression of the level of particle spam Lunar Limit makes you deal with

Graphics are accomplished, and the terrain destruction mechanics feel fairly advanced for the system’s capabilities, although disappointingly it doesn’t do much to hinder enemy movement, so opportunities for creating cover and trapping opponents are limited.

The game’s age shows in its failure to implement quality of life measures like an aim arc, with aiming carried out without a visual indicator. Unlike more polished games in this vein, like Worms, wind seems to be fixed in each level and doesn’t change between turns. Opposing players are siloed off into their own halves of the screen, which might be for technical reasons but feels primitive even for the NES.

Lastly, there’s no AI control for the enemy tank. This is probably a result of it being a solo project – programming AI is hard, doing it for the NES is harder – but disappointing. When you have friends round for a multiplayer gaming session, obscure NES homebrew is rarely on the cards (unless you have really cool friends), so this will probably hamper enjoyment.

Lunar Limit – Pubby – NES

Researching this book, it’s striking how many of the games on show were developed as part of game jams. I’ve become a big advocate of them as a way of imposing a handy deadline – solo game development can otherwise run headlong into feature creep.

So it is with Lunar Limit, a basic but engaging concept in which the player controls the earth and its orbiting Moon Cannon in order to avoid enemies and rack up a high score. It makes use of an innovative control scheme involving controlling the Moon’s orbit in lieu of a dedicated fire button, with gameplay variety provided by a range of power-ups.

Setting a game in the blackness of space is a handy shortcut for developers wishing to avoid designing too many sprites, and that’s certainly true here, but what is here shows its work, with a neat parallax scrolling background to add depth to the field of play. The NES was not natively capable of layered parallax backgrounds as later consoles would be, although developers found ways to include it in a few commercial games, so to see it in a game jam project is particularly impressive.

Enemy AI is basic, and in the limited world of a NES shooter, that means difficulty can get unplayably brutal fairly early in a run, and more enemy variety would have been a bonus, but for a quick time killer, Lunar Limit squares up to any number of modern phone games sold for actual money.

One of LAN Master’s best features is its clear and stylish user interface

LAN Master – Shiru – NES

There’s something delightfully meta about making a game about a concept that didn’t exist in the popular imagination when its console was relevant.

LAN Master is a puzzle game based around rotating tiles to link together computers, and for a free game the puzzles are extensive and can get pretty fiendish. Bonus points are awarded for quickly completing levels, and that adds an addictive frantic element to the puzzle solving that adds to a real moreishness.

In common with some of the best homebrew games, LAN Master pulls off graphical success not by trying to impress by pushing limits, but by working within the console’s capabilities to create a distinct style that makes great use of clean lines and smoothly done animations to good effect. Without knowing it was a homebrew title, you wouldn’t pick it from among some of the more polished published NES titles.

If you’re not an accomplished puzzle solver, there can be an element of trial and error to some of the puzzles as their difficulty increases, particularly when elements such as tricky corners and overlaid cables come into play, but no matter how complex the puzzle, it remains clear which cables lead where.

It’s the sort of game one could imagine as an unlockable minigame in a WarioWare title or similar compilation – at once as addictive for a thirty-second burst as it is to kill time during an hour-long podcast. Solid work.

Nina Cat – Arkia – Sega Master System

Given Shinobi’s origins on the Master System and the fondness the Alex Kidd games had for traditional Japanese imagery, Ninjas were a perfectly natural fit for a Master System homebrew game. This one was produced for the Retro Platform Jam in 2021 and its premise should be clear from its title.

The basics work well, platforming is tight and functional and the sword attack is somewhat satisfying, plus the graphics do good work with the Master System’s limited resources – but it’s hard to call it very far advanced: the whole thing will take you a couple of minutes to complete and the enemy AI reaches as far as hovering up and down. Blame the constraints of a game jam’s time limit, perhaps, but it’s a shame there’s not more of it.

These enemies’ lack of real AI is useful in your goal of slicing them up

Picking up that diver should be easy! Things get busier

Sub Rescue – Haroldoop – Sega Master System

Another entry from the Retro Platform Jam, this is a lot more feature complete and if you didn’t know it was a game jam project, you wouldn’t guess it. Based on the Atari 2600’s SeaQuest, the main loop has your little submarine dipping below the waves to rescue divers and blow up enemies (sharks and enemy subs) before returning to the surface to drop off your bounty before your oxygen runs out.

It’s addictive and challenging with well-balanced difficulty scaling, and despite the console’s primitive graphics there’s a good attention to player training and threats and goals are well marked. One always judges homebrew on its own scale, but this most certainly holds up well against some official Master System games, and the usual frayed edges that mark a game jam project aren’t in evidence – all I’d ask for is a multiplayer competitive mode, which would raise this from a fun pastime to an actual hoot.

CHAPTER 2

Doing What Nintendon’t

Mega Drive, SNES and Turbografx-16

Although consoles have always competed, this generation, running approximately from 1989 to 1995, saw the beginning of what were dubbed the Console Wars. While there had always been competition between systems going back to the home computer period of the early 1980s, this period bedded in a strong sense of brand loyalty among owners of the Sega and Nintendo systems in particular. It’s that generation, now in their 30s and 40s, which is reaching the peak of its cultural power. As a consequence, these are the most obvious manifestations of 2D retro nostalgia, with the attendant homebrew community that fosters.

Pier Solar and the Great Architects is a sterling example of the power such a community can generate. A  fully fledged 2D RPG developed by Watermelon Games, it was the brainchild of a Mega Drive homebrew forum first conceived in 2004, and after six years of development and several delays was released to great fanfare in 2010. This was notable for a few reasons – primarily being a successful physical game release at a time when this was a vanishingly rare phenomenon, but also for gathering press attention and being a full-length game released to a professional standard at a time when homebrew was still an almost entirely amateur affair. Though they could never have known it when development began in the PlayStation 2 era, the release was well timed.

Maybe Pier Solar’s Great Architects should have put some railings on that bridge

The game straddled the boundary across an important marker in homebrew history – the rise of crowdfunding. With the ability to raise capital in advance of release, it became possible for developers to dedicate serious time and talent to their creations. With $231,000 raised by more than 3,500 backers, Watermelon were able to bring an HD version of the game to multiple new systems, including adding to its homebrew appeal with a port for the Sega Dreamcast.

With this HD rerelease, Pier Solar again broke new ground, being possibly the first homebrew title to attempt a crossing of the barrier between unofficial and official – the game’s ports for Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PS4 required manufacturer approval, and the PS Vita release was cancelled due to an inability to obtain development kits for the handheld. This highlights an important trend in homebrew during the 2010s  – the blurring of the previously impenetrable barrier where developers were separated from enthusiasts.

Pier Solar might have only scored fair-to-good review scores – it is undoubtedly a bit heavy on grind, although this does lend it an authentic ’90s feel  – but the fact that it was reviewed by mainstream publications at all stands as testament to its achievements. It  still serves as a standing example of homebrew success for up and coming developers, especially those with commercial ambitions for their games, and it’s hard to think of any other homebrew titles with that kind of legacy.

It’s not, however, the only Mega Drive title on the market. The system’s homebrew scene now boasts a library of several dozen games, often made using SGDK, an easy framework for coding in C, ingesting sound and graphics that can be created with modern software (no more entering pixel grid references), and compiling for the Mega Drive. Things have come a long way from having to code in Assembly without any guidance.1

Comix Zone squeezed astonishing visuals out of the Mega Drive’s limited palette.

While ‘blast processing’ rightly became a punchline about the exaggerated claims and overblown hype of the console wars, the Mega Drive is legitimately very capable in its processing. The limitation actually comes in terms of graphics. Although you wouldn’t know it from visually impressive titles like Another World or Comix Zone, whose developers used impressive techniques to hide the restrictions, the Mega Drive can only display 64 colours on screen, well below the SNES’s 256.

Due to limitations like this that now seem unbelievably primitive, the nostalgic impulse for this era can only carry developers so far, and the undeniable reality is that working with these systems can be very hard. Unlike modern consoles, serious hardware limitations restrict ambitions for what a platform can do.

On the Nintendo side of the aisle, the scene is developed enough that the SNES Dev 2021 Game Jam was able to signpost developers to useful technical documents including a 400-page manual for the system’s processor, as well as tools for converting more modern music tracker files for use on the SNES, and a highly system-accurate emulator (bsnes) for debugging, but despite this accumulated knowledge from such a popular console, and a three-month window of development time, the reality is still that just four games were submitted.

The SNES had one of the earliest homebrew scenes in the modern sense of a distributed online community. Swedish hacker Sauron posted a number of technical demos online via the Bulletin Board System group Miracle in 1992, just a year after the console’s official release in Europe.2

Such innovations have been uncommon, however. Most of the key hardware demos were created as part of the development cycle for the bsnes emulator, and full games are rare. Prior to the four games released as part of the 2021 Game Jam, the only really notable release was Jet Pilot Rising, a surprisingly accomplished game with strong indie sensibilities released in 2013.

Sauron’s Miracle, believed to be the first piece of SNES homebrew.

Until fairly recently there was no SNES equivalent of SGDK for the Mega Drive, and programming still required writing directly in Assembly. The release of PVSnesLib in 2012 changed this, and coding in C is now possible, with the resultant code compatible with popular flash-based carts such as the Super Everdrive. However, it’s still less developed and well documented compared to SGDK, so the scene remains small.

This emphasises an unusual phenomenon in homebrew, one that recurs throughout subsequent generations. In general, the tendency is not for games to be most frequently developed for the most popular console of a generation, but for the runners up. The Master System has a slightly larger homebrew library than the NES, the Mega Drive a larger one than the SNES, the N64 larger than the PS1, and so on. While there are exceptions (the Game Boy has a far more developed and expansive library than its rivals), these only tend to occur where there is a huge and lopsided advantage in sales and cultural impact.

The Turbografx-16 is too often treated as the unloved middle child of the generation, having been a mainly Japanese affair and without the polarising mascot and brand loyalty wars of Nintendo and Sega. But Hudson’s machine, sold as the PC Engine in Europe and Japan, has left a surprisingly long legacy, not just through introducing most of the world to the Bomberman and Bonk games, but through a consistently high-quality range of games including many scrolling shooter titles.

This has lent it an enthusiast community that belies its relatively weak sales at the time – aided no doubt by its surprise inclusion on the Wii’s popular Virtual Console download service.

One pillar of this community is the prolific Chris Covell, a developer living in Japan, who you will probably remember from the previous chapter (he developed Solar Wars for the NES) and who has produced a number of hardware demos and games for the system over the last couple of decades, as well as a useful series of video tutorials on programming for the PC Engine.3

Indie studio Aetherbyte provide the bulk of the commercial interest in the system, with nine released games and the Squirrel music utility for PCE composers.

Like the NES, you’ll need to be able to program in Assembly, but that hasn’t proven so much of a stumbling block for PCE enthusiasts as it has for some other systems. Nicole Express, a programmer by day whose homebrew games and blogs have proved very insightful in compiling this book, told me,

‘Before I actually made homebrew games I made “fake” homebrew games, which mostly ran in the web browser and mimicked the look and sound of games for a particular system, while not actually following the close limitations.

‘A big reason I  moved into actually making homebrew was because as a professional developer in my day job, I mostly write JavaScript, which is a fairly high-level language very disconnected from the machine it runs on. On the NES or PC Engine, you have to know about the bare metal, but the bare-metal layer is also simple enough to be reasonable for a single developer. So it’s a fun challenge.’

She has a particular interest in systems that pioneer with hardware, which makes the PC Engine and its derivatives a fertile ground for exploring new concepts and understanding how these machines squeeze potential out of their often limited hardware. She’s recently focused on the SuperGrafx, a successor to the PC Engine released in 1989 and built to unlock new potential from the CD-ROM2 add on, itself the first commercial CD-ROM add on for a home console.

Its poor sales and limited game library (totalling just five titles) meant no commercial games ever made use of these features, which included advanced features like parallax background layers. There are good reasons for this  – as Nicole identifies, ‘With skilled developers, there was plenty to milk out of the base PC Engine hardware anyway; look at Castlevania: Rondo of Blood for a good example of a game that doesn’t need a second VDP to even do some parallax scrolling. So it’s really not surprising. Creating a game for the SuperGrafx-CD is just a complete waste of time that massively limits the market for your game.’

However, she’s still interested in its potential – which is why she became (as far as I was able to tell) the first developer to make an enhanced CD game for the SuperGrafx at all – commercial or homebrew – when she released Space Ava 201 in October 2020.

Nicole Express’s Space Ava 201, showing off its incredibly shiny floors.

‘It’s pretty well documented and while my use of it was mostly gimmicky, I  think you could do something really impressive by combining the different layers of graphics, especially if you also throw in the Arcade Card.

‘This sort of thing is actually way more accessible for players now than it used to be, thanks to products like TerraOnion’s Super HD System 3 and Analogue’s upcoming Duo clone console, as well as the MiSTer project. It really surprised me; I expected the SuperGrafx-CD features of Space Ava 201 would be seen by maybe one or two people at most, but it actually ended up getting a lot of attention.’

While homebrew, of course, exists across the spectrum, it’s the fourth-generation consoles that mark the earliest group of systems to receive serious developer attention – bookended by the sixth generation at the other end.

The early 1990s was, of course, the period when gaming matured as the computing power required to deliver complex experiences miniaturised in size and cost to the point where it could be placed in the average home, and graphics technology advanced far enough to deliver a reasonable enough simulacrum of reality to allow for immersive play. Combined with a general period of prosperity across the developed West, this has implanted that era of console gaming with a strong feeling of nostalgia, which drives demand to produce more games for those systems even today.

Homebrew highlights

Classic Kong – Bubblezap – SNES

Besides the Game Boy’s Donkey Kong ’94, Nintendo don’t make a lot of play out of the first formal outing for Jumpman and his simian nemesis. There’s plenty of nods – Donkey Kong himself has a series of successful games, which Nintendo seems much more keen on, and Pauline’s appearance in Super Mario Odyssey shows there’s still some residual love, but I  think even Nintendo would admit that the original title is a very flawed game, with sluggish and repetitive gameplay, awkward controls, and a punishingly brutal system of collisions and fall damage.

This version of Donkey Kong has been seriously polished up, but Pauline could use a haircut

So this 2012 port of Donkey Kong actually manages to improve on the original in a few areas, not least the controls, which finally reach a state of responsiveness that meet modern standards, and the visuals, which call to mind the 2000s-era Mario vs. Donkey Kong games. If  you ever have a hankering for the classic arcade game, and you want some semblance of authenticity by playing it on a Nintendo system or emulator, give this version a try.

Jet Pilot Rising’s aesthetic is delightfully weird

Jet Pilot Rising – Dieter von Lazer – SNES

Coded in just twenty-four hours by a German homebrew developer in commemoration of the SNES’ twenty-third anniversary in 2013, this quite addictive single-button game sees you playing a cat clinging for dear life to a rocket as you steer up and down to avoid enemies and obstacles through a series of three increasingly difficult levels. The most apt comparison is to Flappy Bird, but with a significantly fairer difficulty curve and much more accomplished graphics.

For a SNES game it’s delightful to look at, mainly using the Donkey Kong Country style of pre-rendered 3D models for sprites, deployed in a world with an aesthetic reminiscent of a Scandinavian metal album cover. The surreal energy of your rocket-bound cat dodging through waves of burning demons as a chiptune rock band squeals in the background is worth the download – which you’ll have to do as only six physical cartridges were ever produced.

The slightly choppy frame rate is a reasonable price to pay for a very accomplished experience, particularly so for its speedy development.

Super Rambler – Torte00 – SNES

It’s important to remember that for all the noise we make over the very accomplished homebrew games beginning to hit the market, everyone starts out with the very basics, and it’s quite something to be one of four entries in a game jam with your first ever SNES development effort. Essentially a short platforming demo with primary-coloured graphics, Super Rambler is well made if a bit limited, with just one level and gameplay based on time attack rather than any enemies. Still, it has charm, and from small acorns do mighty oaks grow.

A walking simulator in the strictest sense of the term

Not pictured: me screaming at fiendish world-flipping puzzles.

Sure Instinct – BennySnesDev – SNES

Probably the best of the four games produced for the 2021  SNESdev Game Jam, Sure Instinct is an accomplished puzzle game reminiscent of titles like Kuru Kuru Kururin and Marble Madness. Controlling a beach ball in a colourful maze, the player’s object is simple – reach the goal – but the path is littered with traps, obstacles, gems and coins to collect, as well as a wide range of pickups to aid progress, such as keys to unlock new areas, parachutes (extra lives) and nets for covering small gaps.

It’s very well designed – other than a few instances of Dead Man Walking syndrome where you’ll be forced to restart a level, there’s a logical progression to most levels that allows for speeding to the exit, or a more considered approach that allows for cautiously gathering collectibles.

The key mechanic besides rolling is the ability to flip the level upside down like two sides of a game board, using some rather nice Mode 7 graphics to handle the transition. What looks like an impassable obstacle can actually reveal an extra rich layer of puzzle solving hiding underneath like so many woodlice under a rock. The best puzzles set out a simple-looking problem then slowly deconstruct it over the course of a whole level using multiple keys, items and level flips.

The main obstacle is, of course, the digital-only controls, which add a layer of difficulty given the ball’s fairly heavy inertia and difficulty turning in small spaces. To compensate for this, the difficulty of other hazards such as spikes and lasers is dialled down considerably, to the degree where it’s unlikely these will ever kill a moderately skilled player. That’s the limitation of the hardware I suppose, although I might have made the inertia effect less pronounced but kept the danger from other obstacles higher. In a pleasant bit of attention to detail, it is possible to play using the SNES Mouse (either the official peripheral or an emulated equivalent), which makes the game notably easier with a much better approximation of analogue control.

The visual style is iconic and very well realised, including use of parallax backgrounds, as is the pitch-perfect soundtrack, the anime voice samples really suiting the style, which would be indiscernible from a commercially released game but for the relatively small number of levels. The developer seems keen to iterate further on the game, which invited feedback, and chief among the features I’d like to request is a level editor, since the game’s mechanics seem to offer a huge range of possibilities.

There’s a disappointing reliance on obvious horror tropes

With a strong central gameplay loop, lovely presentation, and good use of the hardware’s capabilities, this is a seriously impressive achievement for a three-month project. Sure Instinct is better than a great many SNES puzzle games with a commercial release, and absolutely deserves a chunk of your afternoon.

Sacred Line Genesis – Sasha Darko – (Genesis/Mega Drive)

The second professionally produced Mega Drive homebrew game (after Pier Solar), Sacred Line Genesis is an expansion to a free horror adventure game released in 2013 by Russian multimedia artist Alexander Kibanov.

Those who have experienced the Black Mirror special Bandersnatch may recognise the surreal environment created by the use of dingy pre-rendered 3D backdrops along with text descriptions and limited player choices used to unspool the narrative.

It’s extremely intense as far as imagery goes – it’s a Russian horror game, so perhaps that was to be expected – although it does fall into the common text adventure pitfall of exposition dumps.

For the understandable reason of being on a console with no keyboard, all player choices are menu-based – which does add to the sense of protagonist Ellen being hauled along on an unpleasant journey against her will, but significantly shortens gameplay and eliminates the fun of other text parser games like Zork or Trilby’s Notes in trying to decipher the wordplay the developers employed to build puzzles.

You’ll see the scrolling background tiles in your dreams after playing 2048 long enough

One unique innovation is the explicit use of dice rolls to determine combat, although these are still presented in terms of menu-based choices with listed probabilities. The sense of lack of agency that other horror games like Silent Hill or the early Resident Evil games try to conjure through fixed cameras is instead brought across through making most player choices that advance the plot  – whether jumping into the unknown or leaving combat up to dice rolls – about the abandonment of control.

With all these interesting concepts and the uniqueness of surfacing on the Mega Drive, it’s just a shame that the plot isn’t up to much, largely stringing together a standard set menu of horror cliches  – reanimated skeletons, an evil cult, impaled corpses, creepy diary entries, a giant eyeball – for just long enough to feel like a journey, before offering us a menu of possible endings based on the limited choices available.

The end result, when coupled with the lack of peaks and troughs in the cavalcade of horrors, and the rather gratuitous profanity that seems to crop up whenever emphasis on a plot point’s seriousness is required, is that the effort feels a bit teenage (indeed the creator was born in 1997, so it literally was created by a teenager).

It’s an interesting artefact as a professionally published game, and for doing something very different with the hardware, but if you’re minded to check it out you won’t lose anything by buying the $1.49 Steam port.

2048 – PortableDev – SNES

The SNES is not by any stretch the only system to enjoy a homebrew port of 2048, the addictive mobile puzzler heavily inspired by the trickier and more polished (and in my view stronger all around) Threes. But this 2014 version by PortableDev with music by KungFu Furby is the most compelling version.

All the best video games are about piloting large, destructive machines

Complete with a delightfully funky soundtrack and a consistently and well implemented aesthetic that far outstrips the care for graphics present in the original app, the developers have used this as more than a simple programming test and tried to make it their own. The animations as you click together tiles with powers of two in order to merge the titular eleventh power have a bit of life to them, which helps draw the player in even as the addictive appeal of the popcorny gameplay starts to wear off.

Like plenty of homebrew games, you notice the lack of bonus content a commercial SNES puzzle game might have included to stretch the play time and perceived value, particularly in an era when such a game might have retailed at around $50 in 1990s money. While it’s understandable why these were missed, basic features like a proper high-score table or time trial modes would have added a lot of replayability.

Arkagis Escape – Arkagis – Sega CD

This spiritual sequel to the 2019 top-down shooter Arkagis Revolution (also a homebrew game for the Mega Drive) shares very little with its stablemate in terms of gameplay or presentation, and it’s the latter of these that makes Arkagis Escape, currently in demo form, such an interesting prospect.

During the mid-’90s’ rapid shift in gaming technology, developers and players alike were keen to realise 3D worlds to play around in, but the early years of this ambition lacked the technology to carry these off using real polygonal 3D, let alone such later innovations as physics engines. As a result, a few technologies were tried as stopgaps to simulate 3D without the stress this placed on hardware.

The most well-known outcome of this is the umbrella category of 2.5D, covering technology for manipulating, stretching and scaling 2D sprites and planes in order to create the illusion of 3D space. Games in this oeuvre include such classics as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Blood, while Nintendo’s Mode 7 technology for manipulating backgrounds to create the illusion of depth in games such as Super Mario Kart also falls under the umbrella.

The alternative technology, and one with much less staying power in the memory, was voxels – short for volumetric pixels. In short, voxels allowed for the construction of more complex-looking 3D worlds with texture 2.5D couldn’t provide, as well as early uses of graphics innovations like reflections and bump mapping, at the cost of a noticeable bumpiness to its surfaces and the impression of a world constructed of Lego bricks.

It failed relative to 2.5D because its advantages in accuracy came at the cost of a hit to the ability to produce games quickly, and its incompatibility with many graphics cards led to a need for slow and inefficient software rendering – and once the ability to render polygonal 3D appeared, starting with efforts like Star Fox and advancing rapidly once the fifth generation of consoles entered the scene in 1994, it quickly became mostly obsolete for all but those applications (like CT scans) requiring very high fidelity.

It’s this historical curiosity of graphics technology that Arkagis Escape employs to pretty good effect, working with the Sega CD’s Mode 1 graphics to allow what is, if you squint a bit, a fairly realistic 3D rendering of a mine in its demo level. Combined with a sprite-based graphical overlay, you can pretend for a while that it’s really you piloting this drill-armed mech around an underground cavern.

There’s a curious association between Sega and the admittedly small subgenre of games based around industrial machinery. From the addictive Dreamcast puzzler Mr. Driller to Shenmue’s extensive forklift sequences to the delightfully dumb Sokoban clone Shove It! The Warehouse Game, they’re the place to go if you like your machinery loud, dangerous and with large control panels – such is the case here, as the Sega CD’s very limited homebrew library introduces destructible scenery.

Not that the gameplay so far is particularly scintillating  – your main threat is from falling down holes, and with no ability to look down you’ll be reliant on the (thankfully very intuitive) mini map to hop over these hazards – although it is at least impressive that they’ve managed to bring 3D platforming of a type to the Sega CD.

The voxels are so large and chunky that getting stuck against a wall can result in a blurry mess as you attempt to three-point turn your mech, but mercifully the controls, despite the Mega Drive’s inadequate controller being very much not built for 3D, are comfortable enough to avoid serious frustration.

Since the developer comes to this with a proven record of having released a boxed commercial game (even one in a very different genre), there’s at least a reasonable hope of Arkagis Escape coming to fruition, and hopefully that will be with some more variety to the challenge and more chances to show off the impressive technology. At present, it bears playing just for the technical achievement of it, although there’s really something satisfying about drilling through a wall in moments, too.

Your real enemy is the colour palette

Insanity – Aetherbyte Studios – Turbografx-16

Heavily based on the classic 1980 arcade title Berzerk (known for the existentially horrifying pursuer enemy Evil Otto), this 2009 release makes use of the console’s CD compatibility to offer CD-quality audio, in keeping with the main uses of the technology for developers of the era. Gameplay wise it suffers from an initial slow pace, although this does change as the player’s suspiciously Samus Aran-esque character advances through maze-like sci-fi levels battling robots.

It’s basic in concept and its visuals aren’t up to professional standard. Similarly, the early suicidal robot AI is fleetingly entertaining, but probably doesn’t contribute to a player’s sense of their own agency. But as the studio’s first game, it’s a worthy enough effort.

For the purpose of the historical record, I should note here that the same developer created an asset flip of this game titled Insantaty (by Andrew Darovich with artwork by Paul Weller. Not that one, I assume, although I’d like to think so) about the bearded gift-bringer losing his mind and massacring gingerbread men. It  meets with my immense approval.

CHAPTER 3

On the Move

Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear

The history of handheld gaming differs from that of console gaming because it has generally been forced to innovate in its hardware to an extent home consoles have not. In its most basic form, a handheld system is still detached from the standardised display options of a television. It  is limited by battery life, and this was especially true before the introduction of modern rechargeable internal batteries when low-capacity AAs were a severe restriction.

When the first generation of popular handhelds entered the market around the turn of the 1990s, there were serious limits on the amount of data each cartridge could contain, even by the standards of contemporary console games that were themselves heavily circumscribed.

If you need this game explaining you are probably reading too advanced a book

Combined, this forced the innovation of ways of thinking about game design through the lens of how people used handhelds. With a few exceptions, long play sessions and complex storytelling were out – gameplay had in general to be a cathartic, pick up and play experience that could work within the constraints of a fifteen-minute bus ride or the lowest common denominator of battery life.

The success of the Game Boy effectively came from its understanding of these limitations and ability to work effectively within them. Its rivals – chiefly Sega’s Game Gear and the Atari Lynx – were built and marketed as much more powerful systems, boasting colour screens, backlights and plenty of their own quality games, but a combination of poor battery life (between one-third and one-tenth of that offered by the Game Boy) and a lack of understanding of how to craft handheld-specific games put paid to their ambitions.

By 1989  Nintendo was already a recognisable and popular brand, so could benefit from system-exclusive instalments of its popular franchises, such as Super Mario Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, but also made the most of the addictive gameplay of its pack-in title Tetris, created in the Soviet Union in 1984 but finding by far its biggest market when licensed for Nintendo’s handheld.

As tends to happen with nostalgia, even the Game Boy’s limitations became overlooked in retrospect  – the green-grey four-colour screen could be woeful to play on with extensive ghosting and blurry animation, but three decades on its look has become a recognisable aesthetic marker of retro appeal. Its lack of an integrated light for playing in the dark was not finally remedied until the Game Boy Advance SP in 2003 (or exclusively for lucky Japanese players, the Game Boy Light, released in 1998), yet this undoubted inconvenience has settled into a reliable element of ’90s-kid nostalgia culture.

Baked-in backgrounds and the ability to display colours helped the Game Gear Sonic to disguise how limited it was

As the console’s lifespan went on, it spawned a number of franchises that helped to define the handheld as something more than an underpowered adjunct to console gaming. Pokémon Red and Blue, released in the West towards the tail end of the console’s life, were vast successes, and despite some well-received console games, the franchise remains associated with handheld gaming in general and the Game Boy and DS lines in particular. But behind the flagship titles, smaller properties such as WarioWare and Kirby also got their start on the Game Boy.

Meanwhile, the Game Gear’s output was reliably mediocre. It received ports of the Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Mega Drive/Genesis, but fast-paced gameplay struggled to translate well to a small screen, and it pushed at the limits of the system’s hardware, which was based on the Master System, leading to a slow-paced and all-round inferior version of the game that drew in few new players.

By the standards of the time, the Game Gear was no slouch in terms of sales – shifting around 10 million units over six years – but comparison to the Game Boy’s 118 million leaves it looking distinctly unimpressive. Sega never again made a major handheld (leaving aside the Genesis Nomad, a portable Mega Drive without its own game library, and hybrid peripherals like the Dreamcast’s VMU).

The Lynx struggled to get off the ground from the start, at least in part due to its lack of a strong base of brand loyalists with which to build the system’s profile. It  lacked either a mascot character like Mario or Sonic, or a killer pack-in game like Tetris. Despite some innovations  – an ambidextrous control scheme that could accommodate left-handed players, and eight-player multiplayer support – its lifetime sales of just three million left even the Game Gear looking like a runaway success.

It was in effect the end of Atari as a serious gaming power after a series of missteps through the 1980s, including the ill-fated and frustrating XEGS console/computer hybrid, and its main legacy was to shift focus onto the Atari Jaguar, which flatters the Lynx by comparison – at least the Lynx never became a punchline.

All of which quite swiftly left the Game Boy as the only serious competitor on the market by the mid-1990s, a position it would hold until the 2004 release of the PlayStation Portable, which we shall address later in this book.

With its four-colour screen, iconic games like Pokémon, ground-breaking portability and battery life and enormous sales figures, the Game Boy has imprinted itself on the landscape of gaming culture to this day. The line was by far Nintendo’s most profitable meal ticket both through the 1990s and during its displacement by the PlayStations for the home market during the early 3D era, and it remains fondly remembered.

The ROM hack has traditionally been the more popular form of off-grid development for the handheld systems – a profusion of Pokémon mods and tools for creating them standing as the most obvious sign – but Homebrew Hub now counts more than 500 entries for the original Game Boy, which technically makes homebrew games total around one-third of titles released for the system. Many are ports, tech demos, unfinished tests or very basic minigames – but still, it’s an impressive achievement.

This growth has been helped in recent years by the astonishing technical achievement of Chris Maltby’s GB Studio. This desktop utility is not just a polished and elegant drag and drop game creator – it’s capable of spitting out both HTML5 games and compiling a Game Boy ROM, which, combined with cheap and readily available flash carts, can be played on original hardware.

GB Studio is slightly limited in terms of its capabilities  – it is primarily geared for creating top-down adventures, platformers, point-and-click adventures and shooters, so you’ll be hard pushed to really advance the boundaries of gameplay mechanics here – but games of other genres can be hacked together out of the moving parts provided by those defaults with enough will power, and the compromise is well worth it for the engine’s accessibility and range of features, which include Game Boy Color compatibility and a huge range of pre-programmed logic to get users up and running.

It’s aided in its acceptance by players due to the Game Boy’s already limited potential meaning that many of the commercial games released during the console’s lifespan used simple grid-based movement or basic platforming gameplay, so the games created with the small toolkit on offer measure up fairly well to real products right out of the gate.

Crucially, its HTML5 output means it can be configured for web and mobile use. Cross-platform releases are reasonably common in the more professional end of the homebrew community, partly because a simultaneous release on a modern console can be one of the only ways to adequately finance development (as in the case of Dreamcast title Intrepid Izzy, released simultaneously on PC and PS4) and partly to raise a game’s profile and player base among those who might admire the effort involved, but are unwilling to extend that to buying a flash cart and digging their old handheld out of the attic (or delving into the murky world of emulation).

The Analogue Pocket, with handy cartridge for scale

The recent release of the Analogue Pocket includes GB Studio compatibility, making the new system (which is sold as the definitive way to play legitimate older cartridges) a platform for hardware-compatible homebrew development for handheld creators as well. This matters because dependence on a dwindling supply of old hardware, with their accompanying tendencies to break or decay, is one of the major limitations on finding an audience for homebrew titles.

Importantly, the accessibility of GB Studio and the rise of simple Game Boy development are a reflection of design decisions made three decades ago, with no thought to what future homebrew developers would make of the console. The attempts to expand battery life and limit cartridge use by Nintendo engineers in the 1980s have paid off in lowering the bar to entry for creators long after the console’s formal demise – something current generations of manufacturers may wish to bear in mind.

The Atari Lynx has been flattered by its homebrew prowess, especially in the last few years, with more than 100 homebrew titles and a dedicated fan community, particularly driven by the fan site Atari Gamer, which focuses on hosting, cataloguing and promoting Lynx homebrew titles, as well as providing links to the extensive Lynxdev tutorials for budding developers. The site also hosts an embedded emulator to make playing Lynx games on PC easier for those without real hardware and lower knowledge of emulation. The Lynx’s homebrew library skews heavily towards the professional, with a fairly wide (and quite expensive) range of boxed titles available on cartridge via homebrew publisher Songbird (discussed later). The Lynx’s heavy focus on new boxed games might be a result of its limited official library, and the desire for collectors to feel they have got the most out of their systems. As the most powerful of the three systems of this era, there’s also an air of self-conscious luxury to the Lynx that makes it feel more justified not to spare expense in new games.

Garbagefield Saves Christmas also provides a handy Castlevania plot summary

The Game Gear encounters similar difficulties, although its roster includes some fairly impressive technical attempts like an admittedly very short conversion of Resident Evil, plus some, er, original ideas like Garbagefield Saves Christmas. The devkitSMS toolkit does make working on the system a little easier than hard coding Assembly, and the similarity in processors does mean it can also be used to develop for the Master System and SG-1000, but it isn’t a patch on GB Studio, and absent a serious nostalgia market, it’s unlikely such a product will ever exist.

Game Boy Color

That the Game Boy Color, released in 1998, is so similar to its predecessor, released almost a decade earlier, is a testament to the latter’s success, and to Nintendo’s winning formula for handheld devices. Its processor is twice as fast, and the RAM available to developers was trebled, but the screen resolution remaining at the tiny 160 × 144 used by the original Game Boy, with the concomitant simplicity its games demanded, meant that this additional power was seldom on full display in most titles, other than in the titular 56-colour display.

There are some notable exceptions that make good use of the Game Boy Color’s hardware, mostly released towards the end of the system’s life, of which Wayforward’s Shantae (2002) is probably the best example.

This upgrade proved enough for customers to overlook more powerful competitors like the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which couldn’t compete with the GBC’s brand recognition and ready access to the entire back catalogue of Game Boy games. As such, the Game Boy Color was, if anything, more of a dominant system relative to its rivals, with games being released well after its hardware had been surpassed by the Game Boy Advance. Its last games in Japan and Europe were released in 2003. The final game released in North America, the movie tie-in for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is a surprisingly accomplished Final Fantasy-style RPG utterly unlike the mediocre Game Boy Advance game, and well worth seeking out.

Back to Earth 3D doesn’t offer much gameplay but the graphical possibilities it opens up are intriguing

Its release coincided with the explosion in home internet access in the developed world, which combined with a glut of readily available flash carts, and the tiny file size of the games, lent itself to a huge piracy scene. It was a rare player who hadn’t encountered a multicart crammed with Chinese knock-off games, to the point where such black market carts are often remembered fondly as a slice of nostalgia.

This ease of playing pirated games on official hardware has surely done no harm to the GBC’s status as a popular homebrew system. It combines the simplicity of Game Boy development with a level of power necessary to create fairly complex games, and its low-res screen and distinctive colour palettes lend themselves to a unique retro style that the nostalgia market tends to enjoy.

The underuse of the system’s power makes it an interesting challenge for the demoscene and homebrew developers alike  – although many attempts have been abandoned, efforts like R-Lab’s Back to Earth, which pulls off an impressive 2.5D movement engine around a Wolfenstein 3D-like maze, show the system’s real potential.

Several of these titles were released as freeware through the 2000s, particularly by R-Lab and SkyRank games, but it was in the early 2020s that the Game Boy Color scene received its biggest catalyst, ironically via a game that was never meant as homebrew.

Infinity offers a reasonable amount of detail for such a tiny screen.

Infinity is a tactical RPG developed by Affinix Software between 1999 and 2001. Originally featured at E3 20011 and slated for publication by the now-defunct Crave Entertainment (mostly a publisher of Wii shovelware but also responsible for the early From Software RPG Eternal Ring and the PAL version of Vagrant Story), it was shelved in 2001 after the release of the Game Boy Advance steamrollered demand for new Game Boy Color titles. The game languished until 2016, when the developers released a 90 per cent complete ROM online, sparking interest in finishing and releasing the full game.

In 2021, new publisher Incube8 picked up the title for a Kickstarter campaign aimed at finishing Infinity and producing a full boxed release, as was originally intended over twenty years before. The fundraising campaign was a runaway success, raising over CAD$370,823 (around £210,000) from over 3,000 backers in mid-2021.

This windfall has not only allowed for the game to be finished and released, but also to be ported to Steam and Nintendo Switch, vastly increasing its potential player base and offering a source of ongoing income for Incube8. Since their success in this project, they have since unveiled plans to publish half a dozen new commercial releases by homebrew developers for Game Boy and Game Boy Color, mostly coming in 2022.

This provides a good demonstration of the symbiotic relationship between homebrew and the rest of the industry. The credibility given to the publisher by its association with a professionally produced, but unreleased, game in Infinity lent it permission to demonstrate its capacity for producing new titles, underpinning the scene with a sense of confidence.

This has encouraged new developers to seek to release their games commercially, providing in turn an extra push to polish and finish homebrew games that would not be present without a financial incentive.

Provided these games succeed – never a certain thing, and the existence of one viable commercial publisher does not a totally revived industry make – this new lease of life in the Game Boy Color scene seems to provide a template for how other consoles’ scenes can inject new life and creativity:

1. Identify a nostalgia market and create a product that can grab their attention.

2. Imbue confidence in your abilities through successful crowdfunding and publicity campaigns.

3. Use profits to incentivise new development, and widen revenue streams with ports for contemporary systems.

4. Repeat in a virtuous circle of creativity.

Homebrew highlights

Infinity – Affinix Software – Game Boy Color

The lost game is an important subgenre of homebrew, which tends to act as a catalyst for further growth in the scene. The end of a console’s life is usually not a pretty affair, as consumer eyes and publisher cash wander elsewhere. As a result there’s usually a small graveyard of in-progress or near complete games that, by virtue of being produced late in the cycle, often have interesting knowledge of how to best use a system.

Such is the case with Infinity, scrapped by its publisher in a 90 per cent complete state in 2001 as the Game Boy Advance ran roughshod over interest in the Game Boy Color. I was unable to get hold of a copy of the upcoming finished version currently in production by homebrew publisher Incube8  Games, but the 2016 prototype gives a good impression of its direction.

Unlike plenty of ambitious homebrew titles, lost games seldom have the intention of being someone’s ground-breaking opus, and as such they can bring a more neutral perspective on a system’s capabilities. So it’s therefore impressive that Affinix did as much with the Game Boy Color as they did – some Mode 7-esque sprite stretching on the world map does feel a bit like showing off (and due to the low resolution has a basically detrimental effect on the otherwise well-pitched 8-bit RPG aesthetic) but there are plenty of other nice touches  – a clear and readable HUD, nice gradients on the text boxes, and a wide range of competently made combat animations.

With a fairly generic fantasy plot following a disgraced knight sent on a mission from a sleepy medieval village by his local king, it’s left to the gameplay to carry the torch for Infinity, and it does so with aplomb.

Resisting the well-worn fantasy RPG turn-based battling system in favour of a hybrid system that allows characters to be positioned on a grid around the battlefield, there’s something of an early Fire Emblem title creeping in when you realise you’re positioning your magic users in ranks behind your melee fighters.

Given the absence of buttons on the Game Boy Color (two face buttons, Start, Select and a D-pad were your lot, in case you’re young enough not to remember) they’ve deftly avoided an excess of menus, using a D-pad controlled contextual menu to handle combat, which clears real estate on the 160 × 144 screen and has incentivised the creation of pleasing icons for all combat options and item use. Instead of selecting ‘attack’ and choosing your target with arrows, you simply move your cursor onto an enemy and push A. It’s a surprisingly modern touch for a game from 2001, and a significant quality of life improvement.

The innovative combat system in action

It’s a morsel of modernity you may wish to savour, however. The game’s incomplete state does mean combat is poorly tutorialised, and you might find yourself accidentally skipping your turn or performing spider-like feats of D-pad manipulation as you try to work out your next move.

Other innovations from the last two decades have also passed the game by – there’s no auto-save, as I  found to my dismay when killed by random encounters an hour in. Saving must be done manually at inns, and while that might add some challenge, it’s of an artificial sort and punishing to those still playing on real hardware with battery limitations.

Frustratingly there’s no prompt to equip newly purchased weapons and armour (doubly annoying since an NPC reminds you to equip them manually, which should have been the point at which the developers twigged).

Much like other games of the time, your movement speed in the overworld and in combat feels slow  – this was an era before Pokémon added running shoes, and while it was probably a response intended to spare players’ eyes in the unlit blurry screen era of the early 2000s, here in the 2020s we have modern OLEDs and virtually all games have a sprint option.

Dappled god rays and detailed pixel art on a console from 1990 are very impressive

Still, complaining about a 20-year-old handheld game for being retro feels like tilting at 56-colour windmills, and the combat system is certainly an interesting enough innovation to make it worth playing in its own right. Crucially, I’m glad it seems interesting enough for thousands of fans to have Kickstarted it – no doubt a useful development in the story of Game Boy Color homebrew.

Lynx Quest – New Generation – Atari Lynx

Released in 2019 for the Lynx 30th Birthday Programming Competition – which it won – Lynx Quest is a top-down arena battler in which a hero armed with a bow must journey through four distinct lands defeating enemies and battling bosses while earning periodic upgrades to their power.

With eight-direction aiming, combo attacks and relatively advanced enemy AI capable of pathing towards the player and aiming their shots pretty accurately, it’s quite an accomplishment for a seven-person team, and there’s enough level variety in patterns of enemies to defeat that the game feels fresh all the way through its four worlds.

The key thing to its success is the superb use of graphics – although working within the Lynx’s limited colour palette, there’s a distinct flavour and unique animations to each world, as well as the mid-level upgrade screen that looks simply gorgeous, up there with the best late-period GBC and Wonderswan Color games despite appearing on a console released almost a decade earlier. There are even flourishes such as screen shaking on impacts, which are now natural additions to game design but were rare on the early handhelds.

It’s not flawless. The inability to recover health coupled with the inability to save or restore at the start of a level means it can be unfairly hard, and one bad level can send you reeling back to the start of the game, which would have added frustrations on real hardware given the Lynx’s battery life. The Lynx’s limited resolution also limits the options for UI, so it’s a matter of guesswork to figure out how close you are to killing the requisite number of enemies in a level.

The game that will make being aggressively presented with milkshakes something you fear

Still, it definitely merits playing, if only so you can see the culmination of what these systems were capable of when put in the right hands.

Hamburgers En Route to Switzerland 2 – Gamegearguy – Sega Game Gear

You perhaps wouldn’t be able to tell from the title that this is a rather basic side-scrolling shooter that has you play a flying burger blasting at milkshakes above an alien planet, but, well, that’s what it is.

It’s clearly in the vein of a programming test, but there’s something bizarrely compelling about the anti-art quality of a basically animation-free and highly frustrating game about fast food playing over a doom-laden 8-bit drone.

You will curse loudly at the boss fight, which has a tendency to kill you out of nowhere for having such airs as to shoot down the boss’s onion ring projectiles.

Don’t let the cutesy graphics fool you – things are going to get extremely dark

Deadeus – IZMA – Game Boy

The top-down 2D horror game is a staple of the indie world via the easy to use RPG Maker platform, which has spawned a number of very well-regarded titles as well as, it must be said, a large quantity of forgettable landfill.

The Game Boy, however, is not known for its horror games. Much of the genre’s staples were codified towards the end of the system’s life, and then largely on PC and the home consoles, with titles like Alone in the Dark and Clock Tower setting the pace on the modern survival horror genre.

So it’s encouraging that the closest thing to a flagship title for the impressive GB Studio is Deadeus, which brings a deep sense of unease to Nintendo’s premier four-colour handheld through its minimalist storytelling and open-ended investigative gameplay.

Faced with a three-day deadline to avoid a terrible fate foretold in a dream, you must explore a small and deeply disturbed town to uncover secrets, with changing NPC locations and puzzles depending on when you attend the town’s many locations. The range of endings is impressively broad and numbers almost a dozen, including (and I always love it when games give you these kinds of options) sleeping straight through the events, or simply wandering off and leaving the town to its fate.

The best homebrew works with the limitations of its system, and Deadeus avoids major text dumps or complex graphics that would stick out on the small screen. The grubby grey-green graphics palette of the gameplay and the electronic squeals of its famous sound chip already lend a sinister air to even the mildly troubling (think of Lavender Town in the first-generation Pokémon games) and they’re used to good effect here, with a unifying eye-based visual motif recurring throughout, along with some ominous backing tracks that, in a nice touch, only relent when you’re in the safety of your bedroom.

Although each play through will only take you around an hour, there’s enough content here that it measures up to the best of the adventure games actually released for the Game Boy, and Deadeus is a perfect showcase for the strong viability of GB Studio as not just a quirky curiosity, but a serious prospect for ambitious developers.

CHAPTER 4

The Turn to 3D

Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, Neo Geo, 3DO

The widespread adoption of 3D graphics during the PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn era was a momentous watershed in the development of video games. Along with similar advances on the sharply declining home computer front, it made possible whole genres like First Person Shooters that hadn’t been possible, or had been subject to severe limitations, in a world without 3D acceleration.

While we marvel today at the complexity and processing power on display in titles like Spyro the Dragon, Zelda: Majora’s Mask or Burning Rangers, the technological advance presented a significant ramp up in difficulty for homebrew developers. As well as more complex hardware architecture, especially in the case of the Saturn, homebrew is constrained by higher expectations from presentation and narrative from players.

In the same vein as the difficulty of coding for consoles with complex architecture and requirements is the challenge of creating art assets for 3D games, which not only require less common skills (far fewer people are experienced in 3D modelling software than can use Photoshop or similar 2D art programs) but place extra strain on the hardware. The Nintendo 64 can only handle greyscale textures of up to 128 × 64 pixels, and the Saturn and PS1 have similar limitations, with 32 × 32 a more common texture size.

This forced professional developers to use tricks such as replacing rounded objects with sprites (think of the coins in Super Mario 64) or using untextured polygons with flat colours to avoid excessive stretching. For amateurs, it’s a tall order to think in terms of those restrictions when working on homebrew games.

This means that the majority of homebrew that does exist on the mainstream fifth-generation consoles is either limited in scope or sticks to 2D, where the systems’ power usually proves more than adequate. As a result, there have been fewer homebrew titles that directly ape the style of PS1, N64 and Saturn games – in fact, in recent years there has been more of a nod to that style in Ion Fury, Toree 3D and other indie titles for PC and modern consoles.

While texture conversion utilities are available for the Nintendo 64, programming games requires using the official development kit and a strong knowledge of C – not exactly the easiest prospect for professional developers, let alone enthusiastic amateurs. As a result, new games for the system have historically been rare. Instead, mods have been the preferred way for the fan community to tinker with their N64 experience. Impressive expansions like Zelda 64: Dawn and Dusk and Super Mario 64: The Green Stars offer brand new experiences within the framework of existing games, while HD texture mods and UI upgrades are plentiful for a huge number of games (though primarily built for emulation, since they require power the original system can’t provide).

In recent years however, things have begun to change – in 2020 the N64Brew Discord community launched the N64Brew Game Jam, which was repeated in 2021 – and at time of writing is just about to finish. A focused competitive environment seems to have reinvigorated the scene, with some highly accomplished games and demos emerging from solo developers and small teams.

At present, however there is no real commercial homebrew scene for the Nintendo 64 – the only successful Kickstarter campaign I  was able to find was to release the Nintendo 64 version of 40 Winks, a platformer developed in 1999 (and in fact released to middling-to-good reviews on the PlayStation) but cancelled shortly before release. It was brought to Kickstarter in 2018 by Piko Interactive, a veteran of the homebrew. While it’s unremarkable on its own terms (the game was ready, and just needed to be manufactured), it does demonstrate a strong potential demand after raising $131,000 and becoming fully funded on the same day in 2018.

Historical note: 40 Winks did not, in fact, displace Mario

The PlayStation scene fares reasonably well in terms of available resources, with access to the Psy-Q development kit created by Psygnosis (creators of Wipeout) providing many of the necessary tools. Emulation is advanced and fairly capable, and distribution on CD renders production of games for real hardware simpler. However, the games aren’t quite there yet  – a few competently made tentpole titles such as Roll Boss Rush and Marilyn in the Magic World showcase the development capability of the PS1, while not pushing the hardware particularly hard. But there’s little by way of an ongoing scene – no game jams that I  could find, with even the enthusiast community being more focused on the PS1-style games coming out for PC on Steam and itch.io.

This is another example of a console’s homebrew scene being a victim of its success – the huge library of the PS1 means it doesn’t have an identifiable genre or style, beyond perhaps its reputation for quality horror games (most notably Silent Hill and Resident Evil).

Despite its reputation for being difficult to develop for even at the time,1 the Sega Saturn has received some committed work in the homebrew space in the last decade or so. Chief among these is the Jo Engine, the brainchild of Johannes Fetz, a French developer who first released it in 2015.

Prior to its availability, the Saturn homebrew scene was virtually lifeless, according to fan site Sega Saturn Shiro: ‘The Saturn’s complicated architecture and lack of available tools & documentation has long stood in the way of many who have come before, hoping to achieve “victory” over such a convoluted yet monolithic machine.

‘Sure, there were the Dezaemon 2 guys, building their own unique and inventive shooters, which is kind of like homebrew …2 Then you had your Game Basic folks creating fairly rudimentary 3D demos in the mid-2000’s and Rockin’B with the 2007 SEGA Saturn Coding Contest. But aside from that, it’s been a fairly barren landscape in terms of anything that would constitute an original “homebrew game”.’

Dezaemon 2 was among the first serious game creation utilities for a major console.

It’s not going to make Saturn development easy if you’ve never made a game before, but it handles gamepad input, sprite editing, background scrolling and 3D model rendering, taking an awful lot of the hassle out of the process. The actual releases leave something to be desired – most are at the demo stage – but the system seems to have hit a critical mass where new ideas are being generated and progress made fairly regularly.

The highlight is probably Sonic Z-Treme, a fan-made demo reconstruction of the never-released flagship Sonic game for the system, Sonic X-Treme. It’s notable not just because it’s pretty accomplished despite having been built from the ground up, but because it was started as a hobby project by its developer, XL2, while trying to learn Jo Engine in 2017. By 2018, it had developed into a fully fledged recreation of some of the levels and at least one boss fight.3

While XL2 doesn’t intend to finish the game – and has since built on the basics of the code to begin work on his own original project, a first-person shooter called HellSlave, it’s a testament to how quickly a fairly inexperienced developer can now pick up Saturn development from scratch.

He described his short development journey to Sega Saturn Shiro in 2021: ‘I tried adding a shitty Sonic model that I made to the 2D Jo Engine demo, and then I tried to animate it. Slowly, I learned how to code, learned how C works and how 3D works, and I managed to animate that 3D model (even if it was very rudimentary). So while the Saturn is super complicated, for doing basic things with SGL/Jo Engine, it was easy to get started, thanks to Johannes Fetz aiming for simplicity. It  might be even easier than trying to set up OpenGL on a PC … Even today I can code on PC, but I’m quite limited compared to what I can do on the Saturn.

‘From my point of entry, it’s been brutal in some ways, as I  started learning to code in my own free time, but it always feels great to see things I’ve created working on my TV! The hardest part, really, is the fact that you need to create all your own tools, write all your own collision detection routines, all your own occlusion culling functions, etc.

The homebrew scene: bringing more Sonic platforming to the Saturn than Sega ever managed

‘Since this is just a hobby after all, these games don’t make you money, so you need some sense of progression in order to keep your motivation … I’ve seen so many people arrive in the forums, promising grandiose games fully written in assembly, and (as usual) nothing ever materializes, as they often spend six months writing a useless function in the most optimal way but at the cost of completely losing motivation … Meanwhile, others like me simply focus on getting things working as quickly as possible.’

This is a fairly revealing insight into why the fifth-generation consoles are less developed than others in their homebrew scenes. In keeping with the experience of professional developers of the period, development is hampered by system complexity and a lack of experience  – the transition to 3D game design has now been made, which solves half the problem, but when 3D games can be made more easily and with fewer technological limitations on more modern systems, it seems to be only the Nintendo 64’s scene that is now incentivising innovation in fifth-generation homebrew for the major systems.

But there’s also little commercial infrastructure available, which lowers available development bandwidth. XL2’s experience is by no means unique – rather it’s the standard experience of trading time for money that is life in a market economy. Without publishers, large-scale manufacture of games and packaging, distribution networks, or even an audience large enough to reliably sustain crowdfunding campaigns, it’s difficult for new games with any ambition to be given the sustained development time they need to reach fruition.

The alternatives

In keeping with the trend of ‘dead’ consoles having more scope for homebrew, some of the more minor players on the mid-’90s stage have had something of a late flourishing, due to their status as enthusiast systems. This was a time in the history of gaming when a surprising number of new manufacturers, inspired by the popularity of Sega and Nintendo’s consoles and spying the opportunities offered by CD technology, tried their hand in the console market. Few worked well, and some failed miserably, but they do offer some intriguing examples.

The Atari Jaguar in particular, known as a failure to the extent it has attained semi-memetic status in gaming communities, now has an active and fairly accomplished homebrew scene, owing at least in part to Atari’s decision to release all tools and documentation into the public domain in 1999, a few years after the system’s discontinuation.

Many of its games, such as Frogz 64 or Fast Food 64, are merely ports of classic Atari arcade games, while others such as American Hero and Caves of Fear showcase unreleased titles never seen by the public due to the console’s discontinuation. However, the console plays host to several original games, too.

One early and notable title was Protector, developed in-house for Bethesda by Joergen Bech in the mid-1990s, but cancelled due to the Jaguar’s declining prospects and only released in 1999 following the declaration of the Jaguar as an open platform after its acquisition by Hasbro. A  side-scrolling shooter based on Amiga game Datastorm, it received favourable reviews and has since been followed up by two special editions.

Hyper Force’s visibility distance looks incredibly frustrating

Hyper Force, released the following year, told the same story – a middling 2D action-platformer originally developed by Visual Impact Productions (best known, if that’s the right term, for the GBA ports of Rayman Raving Rabbids and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) in 1994, it was shelved until being picked up by Songbird Productions, also the publisher of Protector.

Songbird was founded by Carl Forhan, already a big fish in the small pond of Atari homebrew by the time the company was founded. He made a small splash as the creator of SFX, a basic sound creation tool useful in other development work, he told Arcade Attack in 2019.4

Starting with Protector, for which he had the source code and was able to track down all the rights holders to make the release legally sound, Forhan set about bringing lost and new games to the small community of enthusiasts that make up the remnant Atari fan community.

‘Rescuing a lost game is typically a long, slow process that usually starts with me acquiring at least a playable binary of the game,’ he told the website. ‘After that, it’s a lot of hunting and negotiation, especially over the years as properties and even entire companies change hands.

‘Once I have a game ready to publish, then it’s a lot of dull logistics to make it all work — getting the manual layout, box layout, screen captures, manual text, proofreading, PCBs, OTPROMs, game testing, menu testing, and so on. Fortunately I  have had some talented people assist me through the years, both in the layout process and in the fabrication process.’

Getting started wasn’t easy, he told me, particularly getting hold of the necessary materials. ‘The scene has changed significantly since I  got started back in 1999. In those days, Jaguar fans were thrilled that I had acquired publishing rights to several “orphaned” professionally developed Jaguar games, and at the same time I  was also self-publishing my first original Lynx games.

‘I was fortunate on the Jaguar side that I could still acquire or produce the circuit boards, shells, and boxes needed to publish a game with a professional presentation; I’m sure that helped those early sales. However, on the Lynx side, I didn’t have anyone who could design a tiny PCB or reproduce the signature curved lip cartridge shell, so I  approached those releases in a more economical (read: less visually appealing) aesthetic.’

Songbird now sells over twenty games via its online store, and Protector SE has reached over 500 sales – a pittance in the mainstream industry, but a relative success story in the homebrew world. Primarily a Lynx developer, Forhan has now released one of his own Jaguar games, Loopz, which retails for $80 on the publishers’ store (the high prices are inevitably a result of the need for custom PCBs and chips coming up against low production runs, he explains).

While not quite as successful as the Jaguar scene, the Neo Geo AES (a home console conversion of the MVS arcade cabinet hardware) has also found some attention as a homebrew platform, primarily via multiple releases by Timm and René Hellwig, the German siblings behind developer NGDEV. Focusing primarily on independent scrolling shooter titles (a staple of the arcade-heavy Neo Geo fanbase), they have released seven games for the system, five of which were also ported to the Sega Dreamcast, another homebrew favourite.

In a 2011 interview with Game Developer, Timm Hellwig described the financial challenge of running a commercially viable homebrew game developer. He told the website that ‘Nowadays we don’t see much future in these niche systems, as the markets are [steadily] declining.

‘We still love them, but we’re a business that makes money to fund our projects, after all. To date, Fast Striker only sold 60 percent of what Last Hope sold on Dreamcast, which is kind of disappointing [considering] the quality of the game … we also try to expand to more active and profitable platforms like iPhone and WiiWare.’5

Having originally worked with Sturmwind developer RedSpotGames on trying to publish Last Hope, the brothers eventually self-published, and Max Scharl, that company’s CEO, disagreed with their assessment, claiming they had done little promotional work for their games – perhaps understandable, given the lack of supporting commercial infrastructure that exists around homebrew development  – and pointing to strong hype and pre-orders around his own Dreamcast-only title.

The NGDEV games’ status as cross-platform titles may also play a role – as many interviews with those in the homebrew scene show, its enthusiasts are driven by a loyalty to a console that only they and a small crowd share, and as important to them as a game’s quality is that it exists as something unique to that community. It  is possible that by trying to spread their games too thin and publishing on more popular and contemporary platforms, the Hellwig brothers became less able to capture the enthusiasm of any one console’s homebrew scene. It could be that aiming for both niche homebrew appeal and commercial success might be trying to have one’s cake and eat it too.

The 3DO, officially the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, was another contemporary console released in 1993 and discontinued in 1996, with lifetime sales of a fairly unimpressive two million.

NGDEV’s output is largely in scrolling shooters, a major genre for an arcade-derived console

Despite being named Time’s Product of the Year in 1993 (in a pre-internet age when magazine endorsements still made a big difference) the console never made a huge impact and Crystal Dynamics’ platformer Gex is probably its most well-known title (although mostly from its later PS1 and Saturn ports).

It had a fairly strong pedigree – the hardware was designed by the duo behind the Commodore Amiga and claimed to be the most advanced system on the market at time of release – but like many other challengers at the time suffered from a weak game library and launching too early to allow its hardware to stand up to Nintendo, Sony and Sega.

Its homebrew library is very small with a basically non-existent scene, although a few notable exceptions do exist. Dutch programmer GameBlaBla released a collection of four minigames under the name GameBlaBla’s Crappy Compilation in 2013, although now seems to devote most of his time to work on emulation projects across a range of relatively obscure systems such as the Wonderswan Color and Pokémon Mini.

The OpenLara engine has enabled all sorts of ports to odd systems, including the 3DO

Probably the most technically impressive achievement for 3DO is the 2021 port of the original Tomb Raider using the OpenLara engine, both developed by professional developer Timur Gagiev, best known for his graphics work on World War Z and Saint’s Row The Third  – Remastered. Despite some choppy frame rates, the game does run reasonably well for an early alpha version (at time of writing) managing around twelve to fifteen frames per second on real hardware.

Homebrew highlights

Kumo-Daiko Beatoff – Team Riistahillo – Nintendo 64

Developed in two months for the N64Brew Game Jam in 2020, this tricky but addictive high score challenge showcases a very impressive use of physics for the N64. Most reminiscent of the 2009 indie title Hammerfight, the player is tasked with fighting off hordes of tengu masks using a taiko (a traditional Japanese drum)* on the end of a rope, and must whack them with sufficient force to knock them off the screen.

There’s a really satisfying impact when you successfully belt a mask away, and clearing an entire screen with one majestic sweep is an experience you’ll be excited by every time. Difficulty ramps up quickly, and the challenge swiftly turns from pinpoint accuracy to finding room to wind up your swings. It’s a similar shift in challenge that brings the appeal to Nintendo titles like Pyoro, where the inevitability of being overwhelmed and defeated only intensifies the desire to postpone it.

The different masks for multiplayer show real attention to detail

* The term Kumi-daiko refers to a form of drumming ensemble performance popularised in the 1950s.

It’s a very mechanically simple game, which is why it’s a good thing its core loop is so moreish. But there are some pleasing quality of life additions, including the impressive addition of multiplayer, including a competitive battle mode. It  might benefit from the addition of some power ups, or at least the ability to regain health and prolong a play session, as well as some enemy variety – but for a game jam project it’s seriously impressive.

Collecting balloons is just the start

The developers have even taken the time to add small touches that help a game shuffle up the ranks from good to great – Okami-style Sumi-e cel shading, subtle rumbling of the screen on impacts and a pleasing Japanese-inspired soundtrack stand out for the effort they must have required on a severely time-limited project.

The Swoop 64 – Blastsoft Studios – Nintendo 64

Directly in the vein of quirky PS2 darling Katamari Damacy, The Swoop has you playing a crow whose only aim in life is to collect enough materials to make a new nest in the centre of a town. To that end, you set about flying through a 3D world and making periodic returns to build your home. As your nest expands, so does the range of items you can collect, which gives the game an intriguing inverse difficulty curve as what starts out as pinpoint dives at balloons and daisies escalates to the delightful incongruity of swooping through a soccer field hoovering up children.

It’s limited by its lack of development time, having also been developed for N64Brew Game Jam 2020 – there’s only a small range of objects to collect, the soundtrack contains just one song, and there’s only a single map to explore – but the central mechanic is very solid.

What it loses from not adopting Katamari’s ever growing ball (it’s not always easy to visually communicate which items are of a size you can absorb, leading to ugly and obvious white circles around newly collectible objects) it gains in the additional complexity of the format. The need to return to base to expand the nest gives the player a dilemma – use up the time limit on frequent return journeys, or stay out for an extended flight to gain more height upon their return.

The Saturn’s very pixelated textures in 3D games are a charming hallmark of that console

The primitive graphics are reminiscent of Katamari’s pleasingly blocky low-poly effort, and presumably for the same reason of not taxing the console when it already has to render hundreds of discrete objects. This is served well by the cartoony art style and helps the absurdist humour of the game, although the lack of proper lighting can make depth perception difficult, leading to some unfair misses of small objects in the early stages.

A highly ambitious effort that succeeds in its central aims, additional development time could make The Swoop 64 something very special.

Sonic Z-Treme – XL-2 – Sega Saturn

It feels unfair to critique this as a piece of homebrew in its own right, since it is only an attempt to recreate an unreleased game without the aid of any of the original developer’s tools. That having been said, this recreation of the ditched Sonic X-Treme has totally validated Sega’s decision not to release the original game.

Primarily the issue is one of player control, but these issues are mostly defined by the system’s limitations rather than poor design. If  you are minded to play it, the first thing you do should be to map an analogue stick to the D-pad, because controlling movement in 3D space using digital directions works about as well for Sonic as it worked for Samus in Metroid: Other M, although Sega had the partial excuse of their console not shipping with an analogue stick.

Since the levels are composed primarily of right angles, this could be worked around but for the Blue Blur’s molasses-slow change of momentum, which means the prospect of skidding off ledges and into spikes will loom tauntingly towards you as you dig grooves into your thumb trying to make the D-pad press down harder.

Visually it’s fairly strong for a Saturn game, with vibrant levels built on very few polygons leaving the level design reminiscent of Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker as Sonic navigates his way through a relatively compact 3D maze on the way to the level exit. Unfortunately, Captain Toad never made any claims to going fast and the imperative thereof. Getting up any kind of speed without swiftly meeting a plummeting doom is virtually impossible, reminiscent of the level design of Sonic 1, before the series had found its notably fleet feet.

Fortunately you’ll have some superb music to bop along to, and you’ll need it to salve the frustration you’ll feel at the lack of quality of life improvements (which, while understandable due to its status as a demo, don’t do much to cool the blood in the moment).

Sonic’s trademark health system allowing you to recover rings is absent, so you can only take one hit before death, and with no mid-level checkpoints it’s straight back to the start with you should you mess up. The camera can only rotate in 90 degree increments, which the level design accommodates but which makes turning corners a laborious process akin to taking a tanker round a tight bend.

Marilyn’s sidekick appears to be Luvbi from Super Paper Mario

As a homebrew project it’s a fantastic accomplishment, having been developed from nothing by a tiny team with no experience in little over a year – but it’s a problem of source material. Sonic X-Treme could never have worked because it was ill-conceived from the start, a product of Sega’s flailing as it realised competing with the PlayStation would be a challenge and trying to cram Sonic into a 3D game on a console without the power to support it, made by a team with no concept of how to design a 3D game.

People talk about the lack of a 3D Sonic platformer as a major reason the Saturn failed, but if anything the cancellation saved 3D Sonic from having his reputation ruined earlier. By the time of Sonic Adventure’s release in 1998, 3D platforming had come a long way – doubtless the gameplay and level design had improved – but since that was the game that introduced Sonic’s menagerie and birthed a generation of embarrassing fan culture, maybe releasing 3D Sonic to the cold winds of public opinion on the Saturn would have been a mercy.

Marilyn in the Magic World – LameGuy64 – Sony PlayStation

This 2D platformer must be among the PS1’s most accomplished works of homebrew  – while it’s short, consisting of just five levels, of which three are test areas, there’s some undeniable game design talent on display. The engine is robust and allows for a wide range of player movement and interaction, and includes mechanics like duck sliding from professional platformers.

Since the framework is in place, it’s a shame we never saw more content for it after its release in 2014 for a PS1 coding contest (in which it justifiably placed first). The gameplay is somewhat reminiscent of Mario platformers but its use of destructible blocks and unique platforming moves to access hidden areas is somewhat reminiscent of the Wario Land games, too.

The jaunty music and well-animated character sprites make up for the crudeness of the pixel art and the eye-rollingly fourth wall-breaking humour in the dialogue.

It’s hard to judge how much of the game’s extreme ease of challenge is accounted for by only the first couple of levels having been completed, and how much by a lack of professional game development experience – other than deliberately hurling myself into a pit at the start of the game, there’s little real risk and the coin-based health regeneration makes even those rare hits you do take easily shrugged off.

Still, all the elements are in place for a really solid game – the controls, level systems, graphics tricks such as parallax scrolling, and the dialogue system are all in place and work well. All we need is for someone to take it and run with it to the tune of a few dozen levels and we’ll be on our way.

CHAPTER 5

The New Millennium

PlayStation 2, Sega Dreamcast, Xbox, Nintendo GameCube

When I  first started researching the murky world of consoles being kept on life support by their homebrew communities, the one that stood out most was the Sega Dreamcast.

Here was a system that sold poor-to-middling numbers during its lifetime, is underpowered relative to the other machines of its generation, has had the majority of its most well-loved games already carried off in a life raft to other systems, and which still has enough capabilities to suffer from the limitations of 3D which the previous generation ran into.

It is notoriously hit and miss even when it comes to emulation on modern computers. And yet, it has one of the best-served homebrew libraries, an active, vibrant and seemingly financially viable development scene, with games that measure up to professional standards even today.

Part of this, I found while speaking to developers, was a strong fondness for a system they often saw as having been killed off before it had a chance to match its full potential. This is pretty undeniable – few of those who owned a Dreamcast saw it as fatally flawed, but it was the sole competitor against Sony’s juggernaut, the PS2, and in that context struggled to compete for a whole host of reasons, including a lack of DVD support, a single analogue stick, and an early release that, while giving it a head start on competitors, meant it couldn’t match up to the GameCube, Xbox and PS2 for power.

One of the factors that led to its demise has ironically been a boon for the Dreamcast’s homebrew industry  – the almost total lack of copy protection for Dreamcast discs made them extremely easy to pirate, and now means that burning games to play on actual hardware is as simple as pressing a fresh disc.

Homebrew for the PS2 is far less common, and fully fledged games, as opposed to tech demos or ports of other games, are rarer still. This is initially puzzling, as the PS2 has an even bigger nostalgia base than the Dreamcast, its hardware is cheaper and more plentiful, and disc protection is, if slightly stronger, very easy to break.

However, the PS2 also has an enormous library of games – over 1,800 by some counts – which means there’s little sense that there was a major gap that the console never filled. It also means it was not notable for a particular genre of game in the way that the Dreamcast was for say, one-on-one fighting games. This removes some of the appeal that powers crowdfunding efforts behind many titles – a strong core of genre fans who associate the chosen system with their preferred type of game.

This can only partly explain the lack of content, however, since the GameCube and Xbox, which – some hardware differences aside – are incredibly similar to the PS2, albeit with smaller libraries, also have very small homebrew outputs. Simply put, this generation runs into the beginning of the problem the next generation would make plain  – by the time a nostalgia market existed for these consoles, simple game creation utilities like Unity and Game Maker Studio were beginning to become widespread, and it was easier to pay homage to older systems with gameplay and design nods in games for contemporary systems than to create new games for the old systems, with the disadvantages in distribution and potential audience that would entail.

So we are left with the Dreamcast carrying the flame for the sixth generation; happily, it does so with aplomb, not just playing host to a range of quality titles but attracting serious crowdfunding money to do so.

Carlos Olivera, part of Retro Sumus, the developers behind 2020’s Xenocider, told Wireframe magazine in 2018: ‘The Dreamcast has some quite good open-source tools for developing games, and extensive documentation is available.

‘Sure, there is nothing remotely as versatile as Unity, but you can create a little something here and there in a reasonable amount of time … and it’s not nearly as frustrating as developing for the Saturn!’1

Xenocider is the Dreamcast’s first fully 3D homebrew game, and marks a considerable achievement over several years of development.

But the history of Dreamcast homebrew goes way back to the console’s lifetime, and revolves to a surprising extent around one enthusiastic individual and his collaborators. Dan Potter is a Texan, raised around computers with a father who worked for Texas Instruments, according to an online interview from 2001.2

Within the Dreamcast development scene, his achievements are easy to rattle off – working with Mike Brent, alias Tursi, he developed libdream, the first development system for bootable Dreamcast games, in 2000. A  year later, he attended E3, distributing a demo CD of homebrew software called DC Tonic, which contained several playable game demos as well as utilities like an MP3 player.

Through 2003, now working with Jordan Delong, he developed KallistiOS, which was and remains the primary development platform for Dreamcast, with ambitions to make it cross-platform and compatible with systems including the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2. One of the first games released using KallistiOS was a rhythm puzzle game, Feet of Fury, co-developed with Roddy Toomim, and the first known commercial homebrew release for the Dreamcast.3

Potter seems to have vanished from the internet, but a 2001 interview with fellow developer Wraggster shines some light on the development process: ‘KOS was originally a project for the PC. I had a book called Advanced 386 Programming (I think that was it) that introduced me to protected mode, multitasking, etc. I had to sit down and write one. I did all of that from that book and manuals I found on the net, so it proves you don’t need a bunch of official devkit materials nor a degree to do this sort of thing. Just a keen interest and a lot of determination.’

He confessed to being surprised at KOS’s success. ‘I didn’t know that it would eventually be looked upon as one of the most significant pieces of hobbyist software, when I  started (or rather, when we started). I  guess it started the same way as any free software/open source project: there was a need to be filled, I wanted it filled, and I worked towards doing so. I guess the DC is complex enough that once there was a base and someone was working hard on it, no one else wanted to take the effort … I can’t name any names, but a developer at Sega told me once that my tools were easier to use than theirs for some things!’

The interview took place at an interesting time as the Dreamcast had recently been discontinued and although a trickle of games continued to be released, the writing was heavily etched into the wall. It looked to observers at the time – Potter included  – that there was little future for the nascent Dreamcast homebrew scene: ‘The one thing that could really help the scene is the one thing that’s never gonna happen now: continued support for the hardware. I had glittery dreams of a hobbyist section in ODCM (which is now dead), some sort of hobbyist area on Sega’s DC site (slowly dieing [sic]), who knows.’

This was always fairly unlikely, but Potter’s pessimism was evidently misplaced. The Dreamcast would go on to become one of the most successful platforms for commercial homebrew, playing host to several critically successful new titles after its 2001 discontinuation.

Quite why the Dreamcast attracted such success is worthy of discussion. It  was never a major success in terms of sales, shifting around 10 million units over three years – not to be sniffed at for a normal product, but paling in comparison to the towering sales figures of the PS2 (just shy of 160 million) and handily beaten by the comparatively unsuccessful Xbox and GameCube (around 25 million apiece).

But an install base of 10 million – plus a release much earlier than the other sixth-generation consoles – leaves plenty of room for enthusiasts, and the hardware made life much easier, too. The Dreamcast was exceedingly vulnerable to piracy thanks to its almost total lack of copy protection. The theory was that its proprietary GD-ROM disc format would provide the protection, but the majority of games could be easily burned to and run from widely available blank CDs. While overstated in terms of its impact on the console’s financial viability (the imminent release of the DVD-capable PS2, and its lack of power leading to trouble with third-party titles were bigger factors), this exploit proved extremely useful to homebrew developers.

Samba De Amigo: Probably among the best maraca-themed rhythm games

It was also a highly experimental console in terms of its hardware, possibly the last system to have such a wide range of peripherals. The maraca controllers used for Samba De Amigo stick in the mind, but so do the mouse and keyboard attachments for its surprisingly wide range of online games (it was the first system to really embrace online multiplayer) and the microphone used to converse with the titular Seaman in what remains one of the strangest games ever to see widespread release.

While many of its games were flops in the West, its relative success in Japan meant it had a substantial library of quite interesting ‘lost’ games, such as the extremely meta RPG Segagaga, released at the very end of the console’s life and serving as a kind of swansong for Sega as a manufacturer. It  was also highly influential in its legacy on game design – this was the system that brought us Shenmue, which while narratively not up to much was the game that brought us the Quick Time Event (for good or ill), while Unreal Tournament codified much about how to handle console first-person shooters.

None of these things directly help the homebrew industry, of course, but they have helped to brand the Dreamcast as a ‘fun’ console made with gamers in mind, and experimentation encouraged. The staid, down-the-line normality of the PS2, despite its if anything even wider range of strange experimental games, doesn’t encourage developers to explore their quirky ambitions to the same degree. Branding matters, and the fact the Dreamcast still has such a well-defined reputation twenty years from its demise is testament to that.

Also helpful was the serial port, originally conceived for use with peripherals like a console-to-console link cable or connection to the Neo Geo Pocket Colour handheld (compatible with just five games),4 which with a bit of work can be easily used with a ‘coder’s cable’ to allow direct data access to and from the console. This allows for on the fly debugging (and doubtless saves money on blank CDs) rather than relying on a PC emulator (which for Dreamcast was notoriously patchy in the early 2000s and still is to a large degree now).

Of course, the success of the Dreamcast means that the bar for homebrew games is higher for those wishing to create new titles for it, but fortunately they’ll find more help in doing so, too. At time of writing, the Dreamcast is probably second only to the Game Boy in ease of access for homebrew creators – and of course, the system’s far greater power means the possibilities are far greater, too.

The abandoned playground – Nintendo GameCube

In many ways Nintendo’s sixth-generation offering bears many similarities to the Dreamcast. Its unorthodox form factor marked it out as the weirdo of the bunch and gave it a kiddie image its fairly broad library of games didn’t really merit. Like the Dreamcast, its lack of support for full-sized DVDs in favour of a 1.5GB mini-DVD format limited its use as a multimedia system, and made it more awkward for third-party developers to work with. And like Sega’s console, it was a hotbed of hardware and gameplay innovation that didn’t find its ingenuity rewarded with commercial success.

Indeed, both systems share the distinction of having been handily stomped by the PS2  – though the GameCube always turned a profit, and unlike Sega, Nintendo could fall back on its utter dominance of the handheld market in the form of the Game Boy Advance.5

A further similarity is that both consoles are highly regarded by enthusiasts despite their poor sales, with many of the GameCube’s flagship titles among the pantheon of gaming classics, including Metroid Prime, Zelda: Wind Waker, Resident Evil 4 and Super Smash Bros. Melee, with a strong stable of boundary-pushing, second-tier titles including Killer7, Luigi’s Mansion and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. After the Dreamcast’s demise, Sega even gave Nintendo exclusive rights to republish major Dreamcast titles, including the flagship Sonic Adventure series.

And yet, the Sega Dreamcast is probably the largest and best-supported homebrew community, and certainly among the consoles of the twenty-first century. The GameCube, by comparison, has a vacuum where its homebrew scene should be.

Martin Holtkamp, a Florida programmer who has worked on one of the system’s very few homebrew titles, Retro League GX, told me that part of the issue is the need for fairly limited tools for modding a real GameCube  – which unlike its successor the Wii, has only proprietary data ports and memory cards.

But the same is true of the Dreamcast, which not only requires external hardware to modify, but also has far less capable emulation options than Dolphin  – the main GameCube and Wii emulation platform – which these days can run the majority of games near-perfectly and makes a perfectly suitable test bed for homebrew software.

‘Working on the GameCube can be challenging at times because there aren’t really any learning resources or tutorials out there. It  takes a lot of trial-and-error,’ Holtkamp told me, citing a complaint common from those working in smaller homebrew scenes. But once a developer gets over that barrier, it seems the GameCube has a lot of potential to offer.

‘As far as working with the GameCube hardware itself, I’ve been very surprised at just how powerful the system is. It is really a huge leap up from the N64.

‘And I was also surprised to learn that GameCube supports a primitive form of pixel shading, although it works much differently from modern shaders. Having the ability to use custom shading really lets you do some cool effects.

‘The biggest challenge of the GameCube hardware is definitely only having 24  MB of memory. You can run through it pretty quickly, so you have to manage it carefully.’

Beyond his custom-built engine, which he ported to GameCube over the summer of 2021, the GameCube is otherwise extremely bare of homebrew games. A  demo version of a fairly inventive-looking 3D action game called Toy Wars was made available for the system in 2010, but it refuses to run on the current version of Dolphin and the Windows version is similarly incompatible with modern systems. Beyond that, you’re limited to the usual shelf of emulators, proofs of concept (including a Linux distribution) and early programming projects.

Until the GameCube has a tentpole homebrew title that can revive a flagging homebrew scene, it’s going to struggle to carve out a space next to Sega’s system in the sixth-generation nostalgia market. The 3D engine Martin Holtkamp is developing could in theory be the key, if it’s as easy to develop for as KallistiOS or Jo Engine for the Saturn.

The nostalgic feelings for the GameCube are certainly there to be exploited (the critical and commercial success of A Hat in Time is testament to that) if only someone can dedicate the time and effort.

Victim of its own success – PlayStation 2

At the other end of the sales spectrum we find Sony’s big black colossus, which stood astride the sixth generation and eclipsed everything before it. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal the PS2 was – its lifetime sales of over 155 million have still not been matched, despite the solid growth in the gaming market over the last twenty years.

Some of this was aided by the time in which it emerged, as the flagship device for the relatively new DVD format and carrying the momentum of the PlayStation’s own vast popularity, as well as arriving before the popularity of PC games had rebounded with the rise of digital distribution. But it’s undeniably a huge achievement, and only natural that along with that, plenty of amateur developers would be inspired to make their own games for it.

The option is there – several versions of the official devkit have been leaked online, while a homebrew version, titled PS2SDK, can be downloaded and installed from GitHub (even if it is a little old), while the use of DVDs means writing games for real hardware is fairly easy. Not that it’s strictly necessary – PS2 emulation is fairly advanced.

Half Life: Blue Shift actually looks pretty good for having been made to run on the Dreamcast

Here’s the thing  – although there’s plenty of enthusiastic effort on display in the forums that make up the PS2 scene, there’s yet to be any sort of must-play content to emerge from it.

Perhaps the most fun to play is the complete port of Half-Life: Blue Shift, developed from the Dreamcast and PC versions and released in 2018. The original expansion pack, developed by Gearbox rather than Valve, was a reasonable hit on release in 2001, although by then the game was starting to feel distinctly dated. Rather than a straight port, there has been significant work to add new models, updated animations and lighting, and cheat functionality back into the game. But it’s still a port, and a port of an expansion pack rather than the original game (which was already officially released on PS2, the code for which provided much of the base for this effort).

Perhaps the game with the most notable impact on the homebrew environment was Beats of Rage, released by Senile Team in 2003 and eventually one of the most popular homebrew titles ever, with more than a million copies downloaded by 2006.6

This clone of Streets of Rage with King of Fighters resources was primarily developed for the Dreamcast, however, with its PS2 port coming later, along with its engine, OpenBOR, which is a royalty-free and fairly flexible platform for developing new beat-’em-up games, but also does not officially support the PS2.

Why is the PS2 lacking a killer homebrew app? It seems as though the PS2 may be a victim of its own success. More niche consoles tend to develop a particular flavour with which their fans associate them – the GameCube for its colourful first-party games, the Dreamcast for 3D fighting games, the Turbografx for scrolling shooters – but a console as successful as the PS2 provides little in the way of an overall aftertaste. It was a console that contained basically every sort of game you could hope to play, with an official library of over 4,000 titles – and that has left the scene with no clear idea of the sort of content the system is missing.

Almost everyone, it seemed at the time, owned a PS2, and as a result, nobody now feels that they need to continue its legacy.

Odd one out – Xbox

The Xbox has always occupied a strange place in the canon of gaming history. Arriving late to the game in 2001, it was never easy to view Microsoft as an underdog in any technology market, and although a few of the original system’s games planted their feet firmly in the historical record (Primarily Peter Molyneux’s Fable and the first two Halo games), it is often overlooked.

It has few homebrew games of its own, but its high-system power for its time, the ability to accept an internal hard drive up to 2.3TB (still large by 2022 standards) as well as being a relative pioneer of HD graphics with a small selection of 720p- and 1080i-capable games, long made it a favourite for modders, who created several options for turning the system into a fairly capable do-it-yourself emulation box or media centre. These have since largely been surpassed by the capabilities of later systems, most notably the Xbox 360, which also found favour as a media centre device.

What homebrew does exist has largely been created using the official Xbox Development Kit, which makes the process relatively easy as the Xbox uses many standard PC libraries – however, this also severely limits their availability due to issues around copyright. Many are only available via peer-to-peer torrent sharing sites or private forums as a result, and commercial releases are virtually impossible.

Stepmania is a staple of modern homebrew, including on the original Xbox.

Ultimately that’s a severe restriction on the agglomeration of knowledge that previous chapters show to be a key factor in building a homebrew scene that can support and inspire new developers. If  you arrive fresh-faced to the Xbox party and are told that while you can make games, virtually nobody will ever see or play them, it’s hardly the most encouraging start.

As a result, virtually the only homebrew titles easily found online fall into a couple of categories: ports of homebrew standby games available on virtually everything (Stepmania, Sokoban, Beats of Rage), ports of retro PC games (Doom, Quake) or classic arcade titles (Asteroids, Space Invaders). The remainder are incredibly simple programming projects or demos, such as the delightfully named Dead Babies X.

The cumulative effect is that, with the notable exception of the Dreamcast, the sixth generation of consoles feels very flat in terms of its homebrew scene. The reasons are perfectly understandable – the systems are not in general old enough to have come around to retro status, the standard expected of their games was in general beyond the scope of the enthusiastic amateur, and they were mostly generalist systems without a recognisable visual style or gameplay genre to act as a lodestar to aspirant developers. It is conceivable that the first of these may change with the passage of time (the window for retro appeal hovering somewhere around the two-decade mark) but the latter points will likely to continue to dog efforts to build a homebrew scene.

The Dreamcast scene continues to go from strength to strength, however, led by ambitious developers and an enthusiastic crowdfunding base. Having proved its capability, it seems likely the system will continue to draw in new games on an ongoing basis, the only question mark hovering over what will happen as the affections of retro enthusiasts shift to more recent systems.

Homebrew highlights

Retro League GX – Martin Holtkamp – Nintendo GameCube

One of the pleasures of writing this book has been when something unexpected shows up to ruin my prepared narrative. The GameCube’s vestigial homebrew scene was so lacking in games that I was attempting to hunt down a text-based Sonic fan RPG written entirely in French,7 and then I discovered that someone had begun a surprisingly full-featured demake of the remote-controlled car football hit Rocket League for various Nintendo systems.

Your car may look like a mutated teapot but it drives just fine.

Xenocider’s ethereal background art is top notch

It’s only a demo so far, and the developer has stated he won’t resume work on it until at least late 2022, but for a game developed on a custom engine in a scene with virtually no supporting infrastructure, it’s extremely impressive  – gameplay handles very similarly to real Rocket League, with small teams of cars zooming around at high speed trying and largely failing to score goals using an extremely bouncy oversized football.

In common with many homebrew projects, the AI is singularly useless (in half a dozen games I  only saw them score a single goal by hoofing the ball directly off the spot) but since scoring yourself is equally tricky, there’s still an enjoyable challenge to it.

Eventually, the ambition is to add network multiplayer (something of which the GameCube was capable, but almost never used), which might make for some fun, if extremely niche, esports contests.

Xenocider – Retro Sumus – Sega Dreamcast

Retro Sumus, the team behind Xenocider, embody the image of the new, thrusting, crowdfunding-empowered homebrew development team  – so it’s worth noting that their original Kickstarter project was cancelled in 2016 when they fell $78,000 short of their funding goals.

That makes the final release of Xenocider in 2021 all the more impressive. Originally conceived for PC, Mac, Linux and 3DS as well, ambition for the formal launch and marketing activity was scaled back to the Dreamcast, and the end result is better for it. By definition any multi-platform game will be limited by the capabilities of its least-powerful console, and by focusing on the Dreamcast it’s given Retro Sumus the opportunity to squeeze the system as hard as possible while also milking the nostalgia market.

On its own terms, Xenocider is a fun on-rails shooter clearly inspired by Sin and Punishment – an apt choice given that game’s status as one of the few standout games on the Sega Saturn. The 3D graphics, kept low-poly but with a strong nostalgic feel, are particularly impressive as Xara, the cyborg protagonist, blasts her way through waves of enemies in alien environments.

Intrepid Izzy – Senile Team – Sega Dreamcast

Backed to the tune of €36,000 on Kickstarter, Intrepid Izzy was billed from the start as a multiplatform game, with releases on PC and PS4 as well as Dreamcast (which must have been slightly painful for Xbox owners). That the game performs as well on the Dreamcast as on the other systems is a testament to the developers’ ability to do a lot with the limited hardware.

You’ll swiftly come to despise these aggressive kiwi fruit

Besides the obvious handicap of the lower resolution (hardly critical in a cartoon-stylised platformer) it’s a well-animated and colourful adventure of a girl with scene kid hair from 2005 battering her way through levels full of monsters with a comparatively sophisticated combat system that incorporates combos, ranged special attacks and costumes that change her abilities.

Its heritage from Sonic the Hedgehog is fairly evident, from the primary coloured nature-meets-technology aesthetic of the opening levels to the omnipresent spike hazards, and even down to the ribbon-style act screens that open new stages. That’s hardly surprising given the audience, but in most other respects it feels more like the sort of game we’d expect from a modern indie title (with its split pin-style hair animation and smooth cartoony graphics) than a classic console – which gives it fidelity at the cost of some of its unique identity.

When reviewing homebrew it can be tempting to grade on the curve of its amateur status, but since Intrepid Izzy is a commercial game, it’s worth pointing out some areas for improvement. Pinpoint platforming can be a tricky proposition, particularly with the Dreamcast’s single analogue stick or sub-par D-pad. There’s a quite heavy feeling of momentum to Izzy’s jumping, more reminiscent of an old step platformer like Prince of Persia or Flashback, which makes course correction in midair difficult.

This leaden movement extends to the combat – there’s no ability to attack while moving, which means Izzy comes to a sudden halt if trying to attack an enemy in her path, which breaks flow and given her short reach can make landing blows in a hurry rather frustrating. When hit, Izzy has a tendency to fly back, interrupting gameplay and making getting back in the action more of a chore.

These are small niggles, and they don’t take away from what is basically a fun and colourful romp that will feel familiar to fans of the Mega Drive Sonic games and to brawlers of the period. Fans of lovingly drawn platformers like Wario Land: Shake It  will probably get a lot from the visual style, and if you don’t own a Dreamcast, well, it’s always available on Steam.

CHAPTER 6

Homebrew on the Advance

Few consoles have ever dominated their market in the manner of the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s. The DS lasted longer and arguably innovated harder, but it also faced a strong challenge by the Sony PSP, while Sony’s own PS2 churned out console sales and critical darlings with the energy and reliability of a nuclear reactor. But Nintendo’s first new system of the new millennium occupied a league of its own, its rivals barely heard from outside of enthusiast circles.

After striding across the scene like a vast, poorly lit colossus, it’s unsurprising that the Game Boy Advance is, along with the Sega Dreamcast, one of homebrew game development’s success stories – albeit for very different reasons. While the Dreamcast has been kept alive by nostalgia and a sense of loss, the Game Boy Advance’s homebrew scene is driven by emotions at the opposite end of the spectrum – a feeling that it represented the zenith of handheld gaming. It is surely no coincidence, too, that both consoles landed around the time that internet communities began forming in sufficient numbers to create and sustain a scene.

Don’t let the bright colours fool you – Mother 3 can get extremely dark

Similar to the Dreamcast, piracy plays a significant role for the GBA as a handmaid for homebrew  – the Game Boy Advance, as well as the DS, represented a high water mark in the growth of flash carts, allowing nefarious copyright infringers to copy free games, yes, but in the process enabling both the writing of files to hardware and the ripping of game code to allow understanding and reverse engineering of the Game Boy Advance’s titles.

This contributed to the widespread practice of ROM hacking, a feature of games since the early days but particularly popular on the Game Boy Advance. While not strictly homebrew, as they typically involve modification of commercial games, the spirit behind the creation of mods, expansions and fan translations on the Game Boy Advance is similar enough to merit inclusion.

Perhaps the biggest success story of the system’s ROM hacking scene was the Mother 3 fan translation, which led to a professional-grade localisation of the sequel to cult hit Earthbound once it became clear Nintendo had little interest in bringing the game to English-speaking shores.

Fronted by Reid Young, co-founder of gaming merchandise site Fangamer, and professional Japanese–English translator Clyde Mandelin, alias Tomato, and backed by members of Earthbound fan community starmen.net, work on the translation project began in late 2006 once it became clear an official translation was not forthcoming. Challenges in translation were legion, and well-documented on the translation project’s official blog. They included the need to translate Japan-specific cultural references and idioms – bread and butter to professional translators, but often done badly nonetheless – as well as technical obstacles such as altering the game’s programming to allow larger numbers of characters.

Finally released in 2009, the fan translation was a triumph, and although Mother 3 still has no official release (and has been so long in waiting that it’s become a running joke among Nintendo fans) players can now enjoy the game almost as it was meant to be played. The enthusiasm generated has led to fringe benefits for series fans, too – the eventual release of Earthbound in Europe via the Wii U Virtual Console, and the official release of Earthbound Beginnings (previously only available via a leaked ROM of a never-released English version) both owe much of their existence to pressure from fans.

In fact, it’s arguable that the fan translation was a victim of its own success. Nintendo has never given an official explanation for why Shigesato Itoi’s handheld masterpiece never left Japan, but a strong working theory is that the game’s themes and characters are not family-friendly enough for the image Nintendo wishes to cultivate; or, more straightforwardly, that sales would not be strong enough to justify the outlay.

Both may be true, and are exacerbated by the fan translation project. The existence of a near-canon English script, which dedicated fans have already played and enjoyed, both reduces the prospect for sales from diehard and would increase resistance to any more fundamental changes to plot to excise those elements Nintendo considers unwholesome. Of course, this assumes that these factors make the difference between Nintendo deciding for or against publishing – which seems unlikely.

In either case, the Mother 3 fan translation stands as a testament to the dedication of fan communities to creating their own fun where the closed market of manufacturer licensing fails to fill a need. So it is with the GBA’s formal homebrew titles, reasonably large in number and containing sophisticated projects that easily match or exceed officially published games.

The tools available are fairly extensive, and the system has been opened up significantly by the availability of gbsenpai, a tool for widening the export scope of GB Studio to new platforms, including GBA, since 2021. While that’s a great way to get started, it’s worth remembering that GB Studio’s actual capabilities are still limited to the sorts of games you’d see on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, so you won’t be cranking out the next Pokémon Ruby straight off the bat.

However, for more heavy-duty development, you’ll want to use devKitARM, the same tool used for programming for the DS and 3DS. The Tonc tutorial1 is the recommended go to for new developers, and includes helpful advice on getting started, including making your first demo.

One such example of a game making a strong impact using that framework is Goodboy Galaxy, believed to be the first commercial release for the GBA since 2007 and originally spawned from a Ludum Dare entry. Goodboy Galaxy was funded via Kickstarter and shattered its fundraising goals with an astonishing £203,000 in 2021, reaching fully funded status within eight hours.

It’s not particularly hard to see why it did so well  – the trailers currently available show an incredibly polished game, and the proof of work in the form of the free demo gives it a degree of confidence other projects might lack.

A GB Studio game converted to a GBA ROM – note the wider screen.

Goodboy Galaxy’s Maxwell heads off on another journey

One of the game’s two developers, artist Ric Nicol, thinks the level of care was vital to making crowdfunding the game a success:

‘We had a really good press release that got picked up by some bigger publications. The headline “First commercial GBA game in 13 years” really quantifies the uniqueness and generated some interesting discussion. ‘“2D pixel-art platformer” is a pretty crowded group, so I think having some kind of a memorable identity is especially important. We worked really hard on making a good impression with the video with this in mind.’

The choice to develop for the GBA will also do no harm. As a system it exists in a sweet spot for homebrew – identifiably retro, with power similar to a SNES, but at the height of its popularity during an era of widespread internet use. The generation that grew up with the Game Boy Advance – which happens to be my own – is now primarily composed of young professionals with disposable income, literate in crowdfunding and therefore a good fit for this kind of offer.

‘Lots of people that grew up with the GBA would really like to relive the excitement of unboxing and playing a new game on it,’ Nicol said.

Playing the game’s downloadable demo is also a good education in why it’s done so well – it’s rare to find a project that so thoroughly gets its source material and target audience, both in terms of obvious influences, and in terms of the level of polish applied even at this early stage.

Many of the homebrew ideas in the GBA scene seem to primarily come from game jams, although these are not necessarily console-specific.

Goodboy Galaxy developer Jeremy Clarke was one of the hosts of the GBAJam 2021, which saw forty-four games entered over a three-month period, signifying serious interest (and probably not hurt by $1,000 in prizes). While, of course, some of the entries were mere demos or were otherwise incomplete or unsophisticated, some solid and impressive games were on display, including Skyland, an FTL-like airship game, and Inheritors of the Oubliette, a first-person dungeon-crawling RPG.

Between this enthusiast interest and the clear market, along with the growing availability of technical knowledge, the GBA looks as though it may be the nearest candidate for another explosion of homebrew interest as we saw with the Dreamcast in the early 2010s and more recently with the Game Boy following the release of GB Studio.

‘One of our stretch goals was to release the source/engine after the game is concluded, with some tutorials, to hopefully assist more similar projects,’ said Nicol, adding that another project to create a development environment, Butano, is already under way and comes bundled with two example games.

Also aiding the GBA’s prospects is the expiration of the patent on its cartridges as of 2021, aiding the process of producing a physical game significantly. If  your retro appetites stretch to early 2000s handheld gaming, it looks likely that the 2020s will be an encouraging few years.

Homebrew highlights

Blast Arena Advance – Matthew Carr – Game Boy Advance

Form follows function when it comes to the best handheld video games. This was primarily why the PSP failed, despite a strong performance, to displace the DS as the standout handheld of its generation; players preferred quick and simple handheld-focused games over the technically impressive but time-heavy shrunk-down PS2 titles in the PSP’s library, and the cumbersome UMD discs they necessitated.

I make this point to explain why, despite its simplicity, Blast Arena Advance is a very solid game indeed. Its fast-paced and addictive gameplay might be brutally hard, as your dot protagonist skids urgently around a screen, dodging explosions in a quest to collect golden shapes as a thudding electronic soundtrack sends a visualiser flying across the background. But failure is fleeting, and you’ll be back in the game in a moment to try again.

In its gameplay design, steadily escalating difficulty and its fiendish but marvellously modelled movement physics, Blast Arena Advance easily stands with the better examples of GBA puzzle games, and its homebrew status is most evident only in its lack of additional features. A  licensed game released during the console’s lifespan would likely have had a few challenge modes, perhaps even link cable multiplayer.

Blast Arena Advance keeps its graphics abstract, but it works well in motion

The gravity-flipping gameplay on full display.

But form follows function, and as a homebrew title on a defunct system with no online play, no developer can expect the install base that would enable multiplayer or similar bonus features. Still, as one of very few GBA homebrew titles given a physical release, it’s as good a bet as any for banging into your Game Boy Micro on the bus home and killing a few minutes (and yourself – several times) while building your high score table ever higher.

A Werewolf Tale – Genecyst – Game Boy Advance

The Game Boy Advance was rightly praised for some stupendous Metroidvania games including Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Metroid Fusion, and it’s from that well of inspiration that A Werewolf Tale draws. But its ambition reaches further, with clear inspiration from the gravity-altering mechanics of indie platformer VVVVVV and some beat-’em-up elements appearing, too.

Dropped into a villain’s castle with few instructions, the player makes their way through room by room, using the ability to walk on walls and jump from floor to ceiling to navigate and survive. The game and its Italian developer, Genecyst, are clearly very proud of its high difficulty, which more casual players may begin to find obnoxious after a few tricky rooms, but the game is forgiving enough to offer room-by-room restarts on defeat.

It’s a highly accomplished game visually, with rich backgrounds and pretty smooth animation accompanying a good use of colour, no surprise from a developer with some pedigree. Obstacles and dangers can be difficult to discern, however, particularly spikes, and the game suffers from a lack of enemy variety that, along with the repetitive soundtrack and minimal sound effects, make it ring with the sound of an abandoned work in progress.

While gameplay contains some strong core loops – the gravity mechanics and the ability to reflect projectiles are both solid  – the combat struggles from unclear hitboxes that punish new players and defy the precision that should allow the more experienced to overcome the high difficulty.

As disputes with the neighbours go, it’s more direct than complaining to the council

While it’s unlikely we’ll ever see it finished after nine years, it’s very positive to see big ambitions on a small machine, and A Werewolf Tale certainly stands out from the majority of puzzler fare on the Game Boy Advance.

Skyland – Evan Bowman – Game Boy Advance

Games such as Skyland make this book a joy to write. Produced for a 2021 game jam, Skyland takes evident inspiration from FTL: Faster than Light in its ship-to-ship combat, exploration of procedurally generated encounters, and highly tactical gameplay based around quick thinking under fire (and liberal use of the pause button).

Taking command of a house floating through the sky, you and your crew of sky sailors must build, maintain and protect it from sky pirates, as well as working your way through a series of zones with escalating difficulty. If you can survive long enough, you’ll be gleefully piloting a hulking sky galleon and obliterating your enemies in no time.

The main thing you’ll notice is it’s absolutely gorgeous, with a lovingly detailed and colourful atmosphere that calls to mind a Studio Ghibli film as rendered through a Game Boy Advance. There’s quite a bit to remind players of the Advance Wars games too, with its fun incongruity between gruelling combat and cutesy visuals.

It’s missing a few details as a result of its rushed production schedule, having taken about three weeks to develop for the game jam, and is still in development. As a result there’s little sound and only a limited range of encounter types, although the building options have expanded to encompass an impressive number of construction options from basic hull blocks and cannon up to forcefields and teleporters for crew infiltration.

It could also benefit strongly from some balance and testing  – early encounters can be brutally difficult, missile weapons are totally overpowered, and the complexity of the game, which the optional tutorials only partly help, mean that frustration and confusion will be the order of the day if you go in unprepared and aren’t a quick learner. Difficulty remains high even once you’ve grasped all the mechanics, and trying to operate without the aid of frequent pausing to grab thinking time is the sort of task only the deranged will attempt (even if it does reward them with extra points).

Personally I think this needs even more colours

In presentation and concept, however, Skyland can hardly be faulted, and demands perseverance to see it properly. There’s little as satisfying as watching your army of chibi crew tear apart an enemy ship from the inside. Fans of complex tactical gameplay will be delighted once they get their heads around it.

PowerPig – Genecyst – Game Boy Advance

The prolific homebrew developer Genecyst returns for this basic but competent platformer, in which you play a pig armed with a gravity gun who, along with platforming his way past enemies and hazards, must gather as much treasure as possible, Katamari Damacy style, into a large clump to gain bonus multipliers and additional score. In common with the developer’s other games, PowerPig is unforgiving in its difficulty, although restarts are mercifully granted for each room.

While it’s fun enough and the graphics are as stylish and polished as we’ve come to expect, with strong characterisation in both protagonist and enemy designs, it’s lacking in strong gameplay loops along the lines of A Werewolf Tale. It’s easy to play it as a bog-standard platformer, without much incentive beyond high score bragging rights and the impressive visual effect to push players to gather all the coins and enemies into a big ball.

PowerPig also illustrates the role that the ancillary content around games play in player training and adding value. In the absence of a manual, it can be hard to work out the core mechanics and how they work, with trial and error the only remaining option at the cost of leaving the player feeling a lack of direction. Some gameplay issues would have been resolved by QA testing too – the ability to collect enemies is only made clear when they have been fully stunned, which requires multiple hits from PowerPig’s weapon, something the player will have no reason to understand they should do.

All these are pitfalls that it’s easy for homebrew games to fall into. It’s understandable – the games are mostly made by solo developers, and who wants to spend hours in InDesign laying out a manual when you could be designing levels and fun challenges? But while it’s easy to admire the gumption, it’s important to remember that sometimes the mainstream industry is onto something.

The expressive character portraits add endless charm to every conversation

Goodboy Galaxy – Rik Nicol, Jeremy Clarke – Game Boy Advance

One of the best-supported homebrew Kickstarter projects of the 2020s so far, this action-platformer is a good example of the value polish can add to a game.

On its own, the mechanics are decent but unremarkable – playing as adorable pup Maxwell stuck on an alien planet with a jetpack and a gun, you must explore Metroidvania-style sprawling levels solving platforming and collectible-based puzzles for a cast of characters each with their own missions and objectives. So far, so Metroid Fusion, but there’s evident love suffused in every pixel.

From the subtle screen shakes that help emphasise impacts to the evident inspiration taken from diverse sources such as the impactful combat, shifting powers and destructible blocks of Wario Land 4, the colourful atmosphere and animation of Drill Dozer or the step-platformer aspects taken from Another World, it’s evident that Goodboy Galaxy is polishing each element to a mirror shine.

Reaching for familiar tropes and touchpoints, it’s creating something that, from its demo at least, seems quite unique with a lot of depth. Little touches, like the characters’ facial reactions to dialogue in each box, to the detailed, exaggerated idle animations, the vibrant colour palettes on the parallax scrolling backgrounds and the funky background music, add to a sense of immersion that demonstrates its huge potential.

The single chapter demo doesn’t offer quite enough level or enemy variety to call it a certain hit and go home, but the puzzle design, mechanical complexity derived from simple rules, and tight writing with a cast of adorable characters give me strong reasons to continue to be excited as the game builds towards release.

Homebrew fans will be pleased that it’s coming to GBA first, with PC and Switch releases down the line – so dig out the tri-wing screwdriver, replace the almost certainly dead battery in your GB Micro, and settle in for a delightful canine romp.

CHAPTER 7

Handhelds Level Up

Nintendo DS, 3DS, PSP and Vita

As the 2000s reached its end, the console market started to enter something of a more stable state. The Xbox 360 and PS3 were roughly matched in power, and the re-emergence of PC gaming as a major force meant that cross-platform games largely started to become indistinguishable.

That put the emphasis of homebrew titles on those platforms still capable of interesting hardware configurations. The DS series’ touch screen in particular offered unique gameplay opportunities, while the PSP was the first major handheld to allow for sideloading software via easily accessible rewritable media (the proprietary Sony MemoryStick) rather than relying on custom cartridges or exploiting proprietary ports, which along with its considerable power allowed and encouraged a vibrant homebrew and emulation scene.

It’s easy to forget after two decades of hardware innovation how interesting the DS was when it first launched in late 2004. With a few gimmicky exceptions, the model for video game control systems had been set for the best part of a decade – consoles used a joypad with analogue sticks, handhelds played 2D games and used D-pads, and PC games relied on mouse and keyboard.

While the DS didn’t start the trend towards touch screens (that had been a feature of non-gaming hardware like PDAs since the 1990s) it was unique in combining its stylus controls with a dual-screened clamshell layout. Those with long memories might remember some of the more ambitious games produced early in the system’s life, when several games insisted on a touch-only control method that never worked perfectly, while others struggled to work in the feature, resulting in a slew of touch screen maps and token scratchcard mechanics.

In this respect, it was often the homebrew community that saw the true potential of the touch screen. Throughout the system’s life, loading homebrew software was fairly easy, thanks to a wide range of inexpensive flash carts, mostly used for piracy but also enabling some fairly unique experiences.

Curiously, homebrew development on the DS focused quite heavily on non-game software, including many web browsers, file management systems, organisers, comic viewers, and even a Muslim prayer time reminder app.1 Many of these were released through 2007–08, when smartphones were on the cusp of widespread adoption. As such, it’s not a stretch to see the DS fulfilling the role that phones would later go on to play, incorporating as it did such features as a touch screen and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Developers made extensive use of the Wi-Fi connectivity, for which utilities were developed to transfer files without removing the MicroSD card from the console, or even to control a PC over Wi-Fi (in an incredibly cumbersome fashion, admittedly, but this was the first time it could be done).

The DS is not an easy device to program for, but the task is eased somewhat by the availability of devKitARM, one of the bundles of programming tools created by the devKitPro team for Nintendo systems. It allows for compiling of code for ARM-based devices, in this case meaning the DS family. Programming is largely done in C++2, which trades complexity for increased flexibility in the use of hardware, but the libNDS API  – used for most homebrew projects – provides a basic toolkit for most game development functions like drawing sprites, capturing user input and dealing with peripherals.

The enthusiasm of fans and the creative flexibility of the DS has resulted in a scene with a lot of very ambitious concepts such as new full Castlevania or Super Smash Bros. games. These have typically outstripped the capacity of hobbyist developers and so remain unfinished, however, and many of the complete games for the system are far simpler, with a wide range of puzzle titles clones from existing concepts.

Among them, however, are some seriously impressive efforts. Aperture Science DS is a fully modelled and animated Portal game featuring unique levels, working portal physics and even a full-featured level editor modelled on that of Portal 2. It’s a perfect example of taking the capability of the hardware and using it to produce something new and interesting that otherwise simply wouldn’t have happened.

As far as I  could find, the only successful commercial release of a homebrew game for the DS was Diamond Trust of London, a fairly early example of a successfully Kickstarted homebrew title that raised $90,000 in 2012 after a publishing agreement with Majesco fell through.

A board game-style strategy game designed for two players, each player competes to gather diamonds in an African diamond field, with gameplay revolving around deception and bribery. While it received somewhat mixed reviews and really requires a second player to be enjoyed fully, the game still makes itself worthy of attention due to the strange circumstances of its creation.

Rather admirably, the creators have since made it available in the public domain, meaning it can be freely downloaded and shared – so perhaps one for your next homebrew-themed board game night.

Not pictured: A catchy Jonathan Coulton song

PSP

The PSP is feted in modding and retro gaming communities for its ease of modification and its status as a workhorse for emulation on the go, with extremely good PS1 emulation the jewel in the crown. Its additional power relative to the DS, plus the presence of its (poor, but existent) analogue nub, as well as its use of Sony’s MemoryStick card storage format, meant that getting custom software and ROMs running on the machine was a dream relative to what had come before.

That having been said, for a console with such a long tail of use for unofficial purposes, the homebrew library for the PSP (as opposed to its ability to run other consoles’ commercial games) is somewhat sparse. It  has the old classics of 2048  – a staple of homebrew programming challenges – and ports of POWDER and Cave Story, as well as an attempt at a 2D Portal clone, and a fairly technically impressive port of Minecraft, but I was unable to find much truly original that spoke to a desire to create in its own right rather than to push the boundaries of what might be cool.

As one moves into a more contemporary era of consoles, this becomes an increasing trend in homebrew. The PSP is recent enough that its nostalgia wave has not yet kicked in (although people forget this in the light of the DS’s runaway success, the PSP shifted a highly respectable 80 million units, making it by far the most successful non-Nintendo handheld of all time and more successful than the 3DS) and its games do not have a particularly distinct ‘flavour’ in the way other expired consoles like the Dreamcast or the Turbografx-16 have.

Unlike the DS, the system also lacks a defining hardware feature to spur ideas. The DS’s dual screens and touch screen forced creativity from some professional developers (those who didn’t simply use the extra screen for a map screen or inventory) but also inspired some fairly unique homebrew ideas as well. In terms of hardware capability, the PSP offered little that wouldn’t become common in the wave of Android-based emulation handhelds that would sweep in from the early 2010s.

It’s lovely if you want to relive your GBA games on a bigger, brighter screen or take Spyro the Dragon on the bus, but it would be a missed opportunity if more developers didn’t indulge themselves with original ideas. Perhaps as the system’s 20th birthday in 2024 approaches, the PSP might see the love it deserves.

3DS

Like its predecessor the DS, the 3DS also makes use of devKitARM for homebrew development purposes, with the added benefit that it can use the Homebrew Launcher tool to load software over a Wi-Fi connection without needing to manually transfer files between computer and console using an SD card.

Several libraries are available, including C, C++ and Pascal, which expands the range of options for developers.

Since the DS is the longer-established console, and other than the 3D display, the 3DS’s additional power is not usually required for the scale of project homebrew developers have pursued, the 3DS’s homebrew library is less accomplished than that of the DS, although since they share a common development environment, many games have been ported over, such as Aperture Science 3D. A port of Quake would be fairly impressive, but as it’s just a wrapper for playing the original game’s files with 3DS controls, it’s less of a must-download.

That Rabbit Game from 2011 is probably the most original game out there and makes interesting use of the additional hardware – the player must manipulate a rabbit head in front of crosshairs using the 3DS accelerometer controls, and the game features full stereoscopic 3D. This was adapted from an earlier game, but the adaptations made to get it going on 3DS make it worth a look.

That Rabbit Game shows off the 3DS’s accelerometer controls

PlayStation Vita

In comparison to its predecessor the PSP, the Vita homebrew market is comparatively replete with homebrew games, running the full gamut from obvious first attempts at game development through the ubiquitous ports such as Another World to pretty accomplished original games.

This has little to do with any particular love for the Vita, which despite solid and comfortable build quality, a lovely OLED screen and some unique games, was a commercial flop that sold just 15 million units to the 3DS’s 76 million.

Instead, most of the success in the homebrew space can be attributed to support for the Vita from popular game engines.

While Unity, the free 3D development environment familiar to many amateur developers, was intended for professional independent developers and therefore required a licence key, these were easily found and, along with the widespread prevalence of Unity tutorials online, changed the game for homebrewers. Absent the need to understand low-level programming languages or figure out proprietary SDKs, developing for the Vita could be done as easily as for the PC.

In a similar vein, a plugin was developed providing Vita packaging for Game Maker Studio, probably the most popular 2D development environment and similarly flush with online tutorials. While this functionality wasn’t carried forward into GMS2 due to an apparent lack of demand, the release of G*Maker by SilicaAndPina in 2018 allowed for GMS2 developers to compile and export their games to the Vita with ease.

There is a paradox to this liberty given to developers. The creation of simple and accessible tools for game creation on a proprietary system gets to the heart of the spirit of homebrew, opening up a system for the first time. At the same time, that such tools exist is part of the increasing sense of pointlessness to homebrew for contemporary systems, since games created with them can just as easily be released through official channels.

Homebrew highlights

Bob’s Game – Robert Pelloni – Nintendo DS

Quite apart from the ethics of interrogating a game that by most accounts made the life of its creator much worse, the major question when reviewing Bob’s Game is where to start. Although the game was eventually ‘finished’ in a manner of speaking, and released as a mediocre puzzle game on Steam in the late 2010s, I settled on the 2009  Nintendo DS demo. This was the version released at the peak of the whole affair, and was therefore developed with the purest intentions of having it released as an actual Nintendo game. It isn’t very long, but it gives enough of a slice of the intended experience to draw some valuable insight.

Given the off-the-rails developments of the saga, I expected this to be a less competently put together demo than it is. There are no obvious glitches, and the basic structures of gameplay are there. Bob’s Game takes the form of a top-down RPG, as in the manner of a Pokémon RPG you arrive in a new town and take control of a teenager roaming around talking to NPCs, primarily your family. After a minor puzzle in which your mum dispatches you to find batteries being jealously guarded by your brother in his bedroom, you’re sent to meet the neighbour kid, who challenges you to play game-within-a-game Tetrid for far, far too long.

The need to complete fifty lines to advance beyond this sequence, which takes the form of a Tetris parody using non-standard blocks, illustrates the essence of Bob’s Game in a nutshell – it’s a game developed with a fair degree of technical skill (it had been in development for six years after all) but zero knowledge of game design theory.

The endless sea of Tetrid faces become a bit haunting after you finally make fifty lines.

There are a few nice ideas. Tetrid is basically playable, the irreverent use of weird-shaped blocks sets a nice tone, and there’s even some pleasing graphical touches in the little faces on each Tetromino. I was also taken by the jarringly out-of-place dramatic background music in the opening house section being revealed to be diegetic, coming from your brother blasting the volume on his GameCube game in a nice subversion of expectations.

However, that’s roughly where the good design decisions end. Contextual button prompts are very wordy and hard to read. There are basic issues of navigability, with some doors being displayed sideways and hard to make out. The walk speed is too slow and the run speed is too fast. The player’s stats offer an intriguing glimpse into the scale of the game’s ambition (few games not in the Sims franchise have a body waste stat) but what we see reveals the creator’s inability to realise it.

The writing is the work of the kind of amateur humourist who sees cynical parody as the highest form of wit. There’s room in the industry for parody games, no doubt, but Bob’s Game lacks the nuanced understanding of its inspirations (primarily Pokémon and Earthbound) that would be required to make it work as a piece of satire. It’s too close to its source material – attempting to brutally skewer Nintendo while still obviously and cravenly craving its approval. It’s the homebrew equivalent of the ditched boyfriend’s excessive claims of how over his ex he is.

Which brings us back to the tragedy of it all. Going from zero programming knowledge to the ability to create workable movement systems and competent enough sprite work and music was a big step for Robert Pelloni. Had he kept his idea short, manageable, and focused on a single gameplay loop, it could have been the first stepping stone on the road towards a real career in independent game development.

For those of us who aspire towards creating games as an expression of our artistic vision, these early steps represent major gains, because they’re how we wire our brains to instinctively understand how to make things happen. Instead of making that important step beginning another project, he remained rooted to the spot, embroiling himself in a weird and pointless spat with Nintendo egged on by the internet’s relentless thirst for drama (see Chapter 10).

The tragedy of Bob’s Game hits me precisely because it’s the sort of story that could curse any of us if we were struck by an inability to rein in our egos. That it didn’t happen to us makes it worse, because it proves it could all so easily have been avoided. The end result is that we can only stand back, look at the resultant pile-up, and say ‘oh dear’.

Visually, there’s not much to set this apart from the real Geometry Wars

Trigonometry Wars – 71M – PSP

One of the earlier pieces of accomplished PSP homebrew, Trigonometry Wars is a conscious clone of Geometry Wars, which itself serves as an iconic example of its era. Geometry Wars was among the first digitally distributed console hits when it appeared as a launch title for the Xbox 360 in 2005 (although it had first served as a minigame in Project Gotham Racing 2).

As DS first-person platformers go, this look has aged better than Metroid Prime Hunters

In common with its inspiration, Trigonometry Wars is a top-down twin-stick shooter based on Asteroids with neon vector graphics in which the player’s reward for gunning down geometric enemies is a sensory overload through the medium of glowing particle effects.

Despite the obvious limitation of the PSP’s sole analogue nub, the controls are comfortable enough to make it thoroughly playable, and the closeness to Geometry Wars’ graphics is remarkable, with the amusing exception of the game’s UI using Cooper Black, the same bubbly font best known for heading the Garfield comics, which does come across as a bit amateurish.

Aperture Science DS – Smealum, Lobo – Nintendo DS/3DS

It’s hard to dispute that Portal remains one of the most inventive and clever games ever created, and it’s a testament to the ambition of the homebrew team behind this that they managed to bring the experience pretty much fully formed to the DS (and later to the 3DS, with a few improvements).

The custom levels are perfectly playable with the same mechanics you’re used to from the full-sized game, although with the obvious caveat that a single-point touch screen doesn’t afford as much flexibility as a mouse, so you’ll have to get used to tapping the switch portal button to change colours, rather than simply working the left and right clicks.

The stylish minimalism also helps avoid distractions from the fiendish platforming.

Graphics have been handled sensibly – since it wouldn’t be possible to bring Source Engine-quality visuals to the DS, the shrunk-down models have been rendered in cel-shading, which is probably a stylistic choice for the better. You won’t have any trouble recognising the key elements though, from the iconic Companion Cube to GLadOS hovering menacingly over the title screen. The only hardware limitation I  noticed is that the low resolution of the DS screen makes long-range aiming somewhat fiddly, something that a proper aiming reticule might have fixed.

Perhaps the most notable feature, absent from the first game until Portal 2 came along, is the level editor, which manages to be not just quite fully featured but actually a joy to use, making it a breeze to zoom around your custom test chamber adding all the gameplay elements you’ve come to expect. This didn’t survive the port to 3DS, though, so if you have ambitions of creating your own portable Aperture Science to carry around in your pocket (a dystopian image of which Cave Johnson would surely have approved) you’ll have to keep it on the DS.

Other notable absences include the voice acting, which is a shame since it’s the performance of GLadOS and the excellent script that really make the game’s narrative, but since virtually nobody will play this without having first experienced Portal in the original, it seems like a minor complaint.

Mobility – Auroriax – PS Vita

Not originally a PS Vita game but released for Vita since its creation in GMS2 allowed for easy conversion, Mobility is a hardcore platformer in the vein of VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy in which you play a stylised box person attempting to wall jump, slide and double jump his way around a large spaceship environment completing challenges against an environment very keen on murdering him.

This subgenre of platformers is a staple of indie development as it allows for high replayability and challenge using fairly simple mechanics, and Mobility is no exception. The quick restart process ensures that the tricky platforming minimises frustration, and although the art style is simple, its aesthetic coherence and unique style gives it a charming quality.

The music leaves something to be desired, not really suiting the tone and quickly becoming fodder for the volume slider, but for a free game it’s an issue worth overlooking for addictive and snacky platforming action. It  merits playing on Vita primarily because the system’s very nice handheld controls grant you more precision than playing using a keyboard, and in the harder levels that edge will be essential.

CHAPTER 8

Developments in Development

It is hard to describe adequately what a profound change the widespread adoption of first the internet, and then of high-speed broadband, brought to hobbyist game development.

While the homebrew and indie games scenes existed in the late 1990s, it would be hard to deny they were at their nadir. Games had become complex enough to require skills beyond those that could be adequately learned and used by a solo developer; consoles, with their proprietary game formats and jealously guarded development kits had apparently triumphed for mainstream appeal over more open gaming formats like the PC; and distribution networks, where they existed at all, consisted primarily of amateur websites with little ability to reach new players.

Moreover, few tools for the easy creation of hobbyist games existed. While it was possible for the extremely pioneering to hack together a game in Visual Basic or learn their way around a programming language from first principles, it represented a barrier that would not face later generations.

It was the ability to develop and distribute, and then for users to find, download and learn, utilities like Adventure Game Studio (first released in 1997), Game Maker (1999) and Unity (2005) that saw hobbyist development gain new disciples in serious numbers for the first time since the 8-bit home computer golden age of the 1980s.

AGS’ delightfully simple room editor in action

Adventure Game Studio

There’s a good case that Chris Jones, who created Adventure Game Studio in 1997 – aged just 14 – after being inspired by the simple user experience of Sierra’s Space Quest IV, is the most important figure in independent game development to have never made a video game.

While it would probably be hyperbole to argue that his extremely user-friendly development environment saved the adventure game genre from its seemingly terminal decline in the dying days of the last millennium, it provided crucial life support during a very difficult period. Following the commercial struggles of Grim Fandango and the rapidly advancing capability of consoles to allow for both complex storytelling and engaging gameplay, the end of the road seemed nigh for the genre that for many represented the epitome of games as an art form in the early 1990s. As Jones told Adventure Classic Gaming in 2008: ‘Generally, games companies don’t see adventure games as profitable any more. In order to release one commercially you tend to have to have a very high standard of artwork, sound and music which costs a lot to produce. Also, in general adventure games don’t have a very high replay value, which can also dent their appeal.

‘I think that because of the lack of commercial releases, it has led people to fill in the void by creating their own games. The availability of tools like AGS these days means that people now have the opportunity to do this without having to know computer programming, which means that making a game yourself is actually a viable thing to do.’1

Yahtzee Croshaw’s Six Days a Sacrifice, part of the popular Chzo Mythos series created with Adventure Game Studio

At a point when few other resources were available for those who wanted to make their own games, Adventure Game Studio offered a creative outlet for its users and in so doing, launched several careers (including Wadjet Eye’s Dave Gilbert and, more indirectly, Zero Punctuation creator Yahtzee Croshaw, first known for his Chzo Mythos series).

While by default AGS can only export games to be played on home computers (in common with the traditional adventure games) compatibility layers have been produced for a number of consoles, including the PSP and, most recently, the 3DS.

While not at the centre of the homebrew wave, it’s interesting that AGS was released in 1997, at the same time that the earliest homebrew for the NES was beginning to emerge, and PC-based emulation for older consoles was becoming a phenomenon. It speaks to a broader trend towards independent game development becoming an ambition, particularly for a generation born too late to experience the free-for-all of the home computer era, and certainly came from the same creative energy. Accordingly, Jones’s advice for AGS beginners could just as well apply to those getting started on homebrew projects: ‘My advice would definitely be: Start Small. Don’t download AGS and then immediately try to make a full-length game; if you try that, you’ll get frustrated as you’re trying to add all sorts of fancy features whilst just learning the basics of how to make a game.

‘Make a small game first, that allows you to get to grips with how things work; and then, once you’re comfortable, start on your main game. But never underestimate how long it takes to make a game; artwork and scripting can be particularly tiresome, so make sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

Game Maker Studio

If you’re starting out in game development and aren’t bothered about working in 3D, this is almost certainly where you’ll begin. Game Maker Studio’s history could scarcely be more different to AGS. Where Chris Jones was a 14-year-old enthusiast when he launched his creation, GMS creator Mark Overmars was a 41-year-old academic working as a computer scientist in the Netherlands.

The idea developed out of an idea to create a programming tool for children who could not yet read, and while the drawing-based program never got off the ground (Overmars’ own children didn’t use it much) it got the cogs turning for what would become the GMS phenomenon.

Game Maker 8.0, an early version showing the unified development environment.

Overmars never intended it to be a commercial product, he told MCV in 2020.2 ‘It was just a hobby project, with no commercial ideas whatsoever. I was really surprised when it started to become so popular. I guess the name helped a lot – people were searching for something to make games with and ended up with GameMaker. Of course, it helped that it was completely free, but it did take a couple of years – and many improved versions – before this popularity started to happen. If I had started with the goal to make something very popular, I would probably have given up at some stage.’

Overmars has not built much public profile from the success of his creation, and still works in higher education, although he’s very supportive of the indie game spirit of creativity over polish: ‘It is impossible to point to games I have been most impressed with. Sometimes, something small and nameless, created by an 8-year-old, is way more impressive than one of the big game titles.’

GMS was sold to YoYo Games in 2007, and since then has become a commercial product, albeit still one available at low cost, and is widely used in education as an entry-level platform for game creation.

While it does contain a drag and drop system for game creation (which is perfectly usable for simple games), most serious creations have used the program’s GML programming language, a simplified game-focused language very similar to JavaScript. The ease of learning relative to picking up more heavy-duty languages such as C, or, in the case of some systems, Assembly, means that it’s a far quicker prospect to make a game in GMS2 than starting with homebrew straight off the bat.

Indeed, a quick look through the homebrew libraries of most consoles reveal that plenty of games were originally developed for PC or modern systems before being ported over  – and although it skirts around issues of system resources or idiosyncrasies of graphics and inputs, developing a prototype of a game using a more easily picked up platform like GMS can be a good way of testing ideas before putting in the hardest programming work.

Unity

First launched in 2005 as a Mac OS X exclusive engine aimed to ‘democratise’ game development, Unity is by far the most extensive of the mainstream game creation programs to have played a role in the homebrew story. It’s a common fixture for mainstream commercial games and its compatibility with a wide range of systems means that it’s likely to stick around for a long time to come.

Though more complicated to learn (an inevitability with any 3D engine) it’s well documented with plenty of tutorials available online, as well as demo projects to learn how all the pieces fit together.

Its unchallenged dominance on the iOS platform after Apple enabled compatibility in 2008 led to it becoming the platform of choice for mobile game developers in the first wave of popularity for that platform.

Like GMS2, its ability to export for homebrew platforms is somewhat limited as it’s far beyond the technical capabilities of truly retro systems, but it has been used successfully in producing homebrew games for the PS Vita.

While it’s also capable of exporting for systems with active homebrew scenes (Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch among them) there’s so far been no workaround found for the need for a Nintendo Developers’ Licence in order to actually compile games for those systems. That may eventually come down the track, but given Nintendo’s remarkable intensity in locking down their systems to development, don’t expect it to come soon.

CHAPTER 9

Pushing the Boundaries

Homebrew as a blank canvas

As we have seen in the previous chapters, all creativity is a response to limitations. Drop someone in a blank void with the powers of a god and you haven’t offered a challenge to be met, so what you end up with is a creativity tool without walls. The irony of homebrew software for consoles is that with the ability for solo developers to make whatever games they might wish, many choose to break the boundary of what the console is – by making software that isn’t intended as a game at all.

This goes against the entire stated purpose of consoles’ existence. Home computers have almost always had more power available, which allows them to run games but also to operate as multitasking devices capable of a very wide range of uses. Consoles, by contrast, are explicitly stripped down to the bare minimum of hardware required to run games (and, more recently, some related but incidental tasks such as playing streaming video), which keeps costs down and standardises system capabilities, making the development process easier.

As such, choosing to port non-game software to them requires either an admirable level of obstinate wilfulness, or a desire to manipulate a game-specific function or piece of hardware (e.g. a sound chip or graphics architecture) to serve a very specific function.

The most obvious form of this is the popular chiptune music scene, where creators use the often quite unique and recognisable palette of sounds available through particular sound chips via their consoles (the Game Boy and Commodore 64 are popular) to produce and perform music. This is not simply a quirky hobby, but has blossomed into a serious musical genre, not just providing soundtracks for thousands of indie games (though it certainly does that) but supporting a number of award-winning chiptune artists and hybrid bands such as I Fight Dragons, who integrate chiptune tracks into rock songs for a delightful electronic crunch.

Fully fledged computing is possible on some systems, although it’s debatable whether it counts as homebrew if it is simply porting existing software to custom hardware. The GameCube Linux project will run on GameCube and Wii, and while not particularly useful for home computing can form the basis of media server and homebrew development use. The original model of PS3, noted for its huge size, large number of physical ports (including a CF card reader) and backwards compatibility with the PS2, also allowed for the installation of other operating systems on top of its system software, including several distributions of Linux and FreeBSD. The console’s Cell CPU was notoriously complex to develop for, but reasonably powerful for a machine of its time and cost, and the PS3 could therefore be used for some light general computing, aided by its disc drive, Wi-Fi compatibility and multitude of ports.

Emulation also falls into this category. As all consoles are effectively somewhat unique computers, it’s possible to use most of them to play games from different systems, given adequate processing power. One of the most commonly ported emulators is ScummVM, originally created to run LucasArts adventure games developed using the SCUMM engine, and now capable of running dozens of adventure titles. At time of writing, it is available on over thirty platforms, from the most mainstream consoles (PS2, GameCube and Nintendo DS all have an official port) to systems that give the impression they were just seeing what they could achieve (want to play Sam and Max Hit the Road on your TapWave Zodiac? You’re peculiar, but you’re in luck!).

Seemingly the first homebrew emulator to be released commercially was Bleemcast!, a PlayStation emulator for the Sega Dreamcast released in 1999. This was notable for a number of reasons – first, that the emulator was released during the emulated console’s lifetime. Second, that the emulator could run PlayStation games full speed on the Dreamcast, a console that was only slightly more powerful, despite emulation usually requiring significantly more processing and graphical power to achieve playable speed. Third, that the developers made it a commercial product and, while legal fees forced them to shut down, were never successfully sued by Sony.1

Bleem was one of the first commercial-grade emulators, kicking off an avalanche that continues to this day.

Hong Kong 97 does not actually feature 1 2 billion enemies

Emulators are now available to commercial or near-commercial standards for most systems, and while they push the boundaries of this book, as they are designed primarily to run other existing software, they demonstrate the range of possibilities available to those willing to think outside the box when developing for their consoles.

Out on the fringes

Homebrew has always played a significant role as a host for outsider art. Start digging, and it’s easy to become mildly obsessed with the absolutely bonkers ideas that proliferate, primarily in the modding scene2 but frequently in entirely fresh games whose gameplay loops, story and graphical complexity might be lacking, but still served as a piece of media that mattered to someone, at some time, for some reason.

While many of these works of interactive creativity are frivolous, there is a serious message to some of them. One infamous example is Hong Kong ’97, a profane and extremely rough around the edges SNES game produced unofficially by Yoshihisa ‘Kowloon’ Kurosawa in two days with the help of an Enix employee and released via mail order in 1995.

The game sees a ripped sprite of Jackie Chan, under orders from former Conservative MP and then-Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, fighting off hordes of ‘fuckin’ ugly reds’ (Mainland Chinese) following the handover of the island from the UK to PRC control. A  Chinese communist children’s song, ripped from a Hong Kong Laserdisc, plays on a loop in the background. After killing thirty enemies, a sprite of Deng Xiaoping appears as a final boss – after which the game resets.

At face value, the game is a comically poor and repetitive scrolling shooter, shot through with a vein of anti-Chinese racism, and indeed its fame in the West comes primarily from mocking exposition by the Angry Video Game Nerd’s YouTube channel. On its initial release, the game sold just thirty copies.

For the first two decades of its existence, this mockery was the default mode when discussing Hong Kong ’97  – not helped by its having been basically abandoned by Kurosawa after its commercial failure in 1995. However, a South China Morning Post interview with the creator in 2018 revealed that he set out to make a deliberately bad game as a satire of the video games industry.

‘When I  was young, I  harboured a dream of working in the games industry, [but] I  disliked Nintendo games,’ he told the newspaper.3 ‘The settings and the characters all felt stale. In those days, all games were manufactured by Nintendo and Sega, so it was impossible to put out your own indie game. You were subject to rules and ethical standards, and you had to pay steep royalties just to make a game.

‘I was sick and tired of consumer game systems and the way Nintendo were at the top of the pyramid. I  was also really influenced by the extreme games coming out of Europe,’ he added.

‘I had an idea to create a cheap, vulgar game that would make fun of the industry. The emergence of game copiers finally gave me that opportunity. With one of them, you could make games and distribute them without needing Nintendo’s permission.

‘The types of people who bought Super Famicom game copiers weren’t the type to spend money on games, so it was like trying to sell something to a thief. So only a few people were willing to wire money to my shady PO box in Tokyo. I  sold the game on floppy disks for a few months, and then forgot about it entirely.’

Hong Kong 97 could not be accused of subtlety

Given his record as a journalist covering travel across Asia, and now living in Cambodia, it’s perhaps worth hoping the racist elements of the game are not sincerely felt, although it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at his admission that ‘China still seemed like a world of savages’. But funny though the story is – as well as Kurosawa’s slightly bitter admonition that people should ‘forget about the game once and for all’ – the motivations behind the game are not hard to understand for the current generation of homebrew creators, and would have been even more keenly felt by early pioneers.

The sense of being locked out of the industry by powerful giants would have been felt particularly keenly in Japan, not just a country with a sense of hometown pride at its video game giants who utterly dominated the mid-’90s market, but one where software piracy risks not just expensive civil suits as in the West, but hefty jail sentences.

As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that those in the Japanese homebrew scene were further out on the fringes of game development. Their activity was less likely to serve as an alternative route into an exclusive industry, and consequently there were fewer incentives to keep their games within traditional bounds. HappySoft, which published Hong Kong ’97, would follow this logic to its natural conclusion in The Story of Kamikuishiki Village, believed to have been created by high school friends of Kurosawa by the name of Takeshi Kanai and Kouichi Kanasawa.4

To understand this game and its controversial nature, some background is necessary.

Founded in 1984, the cult religious movement Aum Shinrikyo became increasingly radicalised following its failure in Japanese elections and believed that its prophecy of a global Armageddon prophesied by founder Shoko Asahara would have to be brought about by direct means.

For a small cult, Aum operated a sophisticated operation – several of its members had advanced science degrees, and the group set up several state-of-the-art facilities, including running an attempted uranium mining operation in a remote part of Western Australia, where it also tested its home-made nerve agents on sheep.5

After a series of smaller-scale attempts at terrorist attacks and assassinations through the early 1990s, Aum made worldwide news in 1995, when a group of acolytes released the nerve agent Sarin on the Tokyo Metro, killing thirteen and injuring several thousand in what remains Japan’s most serious terrorist attack.

Cult leader Shoko Asahara features in The Story of Kamikuishiki Village.

The Story of Kamikuishiki Village  – the titular village shares its name with the location of Aum’s chemical weapons laboratory – tasks the player with running and building up the cult, winning the game if they successfully carry out the Sarin attack on the subway, and losing if their mismanagement of the cult leads to the apocalypse.

While habitual gamers have probably become inured to gratuitous atrocities and the graphically tasteless by this point – it’s a fair bet most of those reading this book have a digital body count in the thousands – the fact the game was released for the PC-98 home computer just three months after the attack, and explicitly based itself on real-life events, would have made Kamikuishiki Village extremely controversial, had it ever reached an audience.

These factors probably ruled it out of coverage in any domestic magazines, and instead it has found a niche online as one of a number of ‘creepy’ games with a semi-legendary status. This led to the urban legend that it was created by Aum Shinrikyo with the intent of use either for propaganda and recruitment or for training purposes; in reality, the game is a mocking parody of Aum, featuring clips of some of its more absurd rituals and hard to mistake for an earnest persuasive piece, no matter how deranged the group allegedly behind it.

It’s easy to see why people might want to believe the game originated with Aum Shinrikyo. There’s a thrill of intriguing discomfort about the idea of a cult with the kind of technical capability to manufacture chemical weapons, with highly educated followers and the ability to strike at the capital. A video game recruiting tool seems like the sort of thing Aum could have made had they been so minded.

It also fits into a long tradition of obsession with the creative output of the dangerous. Charles Manson’s musical ambitions and reputation (somewhat overstated) as a representative of the hippie movement helped him obtain a notoriety other killers with higher body counts did not.

In the video game world, the alleged obsession of the Columbine shooters with Doom helped write the narrative of their crimes in 1999 – and indeed, one of them, Eric Harris, did make and release several low-quality custom maps for the game (though never, as has sometimes been rumoured, a map representing the high school).

The above examples by HappySoft made it to public knowledge and into the pages of this book by the random chance of their discovery by the internet, but they are certainly not the only examples of video games as a medium for highly transgressive art and even anti-art, many of which may well still be lurking on abandoned floppy disks, long forgotten by their creators.

It is this lack of restraint that homebrew serves  – even if the publishing pathways for independent games have become more liberal and numerous since Kurosawa decided to express his frustration with Nintendo and Sega through parody, it seems unlikely they would now accept the profoundly profane, deliberately non-functional or simply anarchic projects that homebrew can still indulge.

CHAPTER 10

Brewing Up Trouble

When homebrew goes wrong

A screenshot of Bob’s Game in the game Bob’s Game, featured in a book covering Bob’s Game

It would be fair to say this book does not in general take a neutral view on the phenomenon of homebrew – you don’t need to read too hard between the lines to work out that I think it’s pretty cool. But like all unregulated creative spaces, it can have its downsides. This chapter explores what happens when the goodwill of homebrew sours, due to events predictable or otherwise, with a few cautionary tales.

The curious case of Bob’s Game

While homebrew games are seldom sanctioned by manufacturers, it’s rare for their creators to come to direct blows with developers. If any manufacturer would, it was always likely to be Nintendo, with its history of shutting down fan games and fiercely defending its intellectual property.

Bob’s Game, though, consists of an attempt to do the ‘right thing’ and publish through traditional means, albeit one gone badly wrong.

Like plenty of aspiring developers, Robert Pelloni found himself frustrated by the state of the games industry when he began developing his own Earthbound-style RPG in 2004. He told the Orlando Sentinel in 2008: ‘I participated in some independent development forums early on, and actually saw some projects get published – however, the final product ended up far different from the original concept. It  seems that it’s a standard practice for some publishers to take a game engine and put in licensed assets to coincide with, say, a movie release for example.

‘Though the result may be far from what the original author intended, it makes a great deal of sense from the business side of things, so you can’t discount this practice – but it was certainly disheartening for me.’1

Plenty of readers may instinctively agree with these sentiments, but events conspired to take a far stranger turn. Originally intending to release his game on the Nintendo DS, Bob Pelloni built it essentially from scratch, learning to create background graphics and program.

The major stumbling block was publishing. He told the Sentinel: ‘It really can’t be 100% complete until I get involved with a publisher. A retail game differs from homebrew in that you need to compile it with official Nintendo tools, which you can’t get access to unless you’ve published a game before.’

Bob during his lock-in protest against Nintendo

This was not strictly true, but Nintendo was still reluctant to grant an SDK to Bob without evidence of his financial backing, business premises, and other markers of an official developer. This official status seems to have been important to Bob – whereas, after a four-month wait for word from Nintendo, other homebrew developers might have settled for releasing the game unofficially or porting it to another system like the PC, he went to war with Nintendo.

War consisted of a 100-day isolation in a room without internet access save for a live webcam feed.

‘I cannot leave this viridian room,’ Pelloni wrote in an update to his website quoted in the Escapist. ‘The door is locked and barricaded from the outside. I  am sleeping behind the camera, and yes – I’ve got a shower. Food is delivered once a week by a friend … This is my 100 day protest to Nintendo!’2

This was never a particularly well thought through plan by which to gain recognition, and as the weeks drew on, Bob became ever more intense in his vendetta against Nintendo. As of day twenty-one he had begun to publish the addresses of Nintendo executives, and threatened to release the game on an unofficial flash cart. Convinced of its commercial potential, he believed Bob’s Game would have ‘the potential to significantly cut into Nintendo’s bottom line’.

It wasn’t to be – Bob’s sit-in protest came to an end on day thirty after he trashed his room and went absent from the webcam feed, leading concerned viewers to make enquiries and leading to a police check in the following day.

Bob subsequently reworked the game to insert himself as a character and to change the game’s plot to focus on his battle with Nintendo, an action that doesn’t speak to a person taking rejection well. Following a formal rejection letter from the company early in 2009, he and some associates were filmed putting up posters and littering with business cards in Nintendo’s flagship Nintendo World store in New York City in late February.3

Events continued to spiral from there, though mainly from the absurd to the pitiable. After claiming the sit-in had been a viral marketing stunt, a playable demo was released online to an indifferent response, with players criticising its boring gameplay and lack of progress after five years in development.4

By 2011, no game had materialised, and Bob was reduced to making impossible promises about a new $20 indie console, the nD. Naturally, no such system ever emerged, and its trailers have since been pulled from the internet.

By 2014, Bob was homeless, working on the game from a laptop and living out of his car. The game was successfully Kickstarted to the tune of $10,000,5 and after a thirteen-year development cycle, the puzzle component of the game was released on itch.io in 2016 and subsequently on Steam in 2017. As of 2021 it had again been pulled.

The story of Bob’s Game illustrates many of the darkest sides of the games industry and its effect on individuals. It’s hard to read the saga of Bob’s struggle with Nintendo and his obsession with his creation without feeling a twinge of sympathy – for many aspiring developers, particularly those with high ambition and low social skills, his case can serve as a warning about the dangers of obsessive interest and the false friends of online drama-seekers.

The tragedy is that there were so many turning points where things could have taken a different path. Had he released his game for the nascent digital distribution services on PC, or released it as a homebrew piece of freeware, he would certainly not have had his self-ascribed genius indulged, it’s true, but a competently made piece of software might have opened doors and allowed him the confidence and respect to work on better games.

Had he worked on the game a few years later, he might even have got a Nintendo developer’s licence, as the indie boom made manufacturers less reticent to allow solo development.

Having been rejected, the internet proved keen to egg him on. Seemingly unaware of his status as a running joke, his obsessions led him to pursue the game long past the point where it had ceased to be funny.

The story of Bob Pelloni is pretty much the worst-case scenario for homebrew game development. Many of us in the homebrew community have ambitions that far outstrip our abilities – but few of us take it quite so far.

Nintendo takes anti-piracy measures to the extreme

There are, of course, plenty of legitimate reasons why manufacturers worry about software piracy.

Many of their consoles are loss leaders, so licensing fees for games make up a significant proportion of their income, for one thing, so significant losses of sales are a risk to profits.

Developers and publishers are also not keen on manufacturers failing to take action to prevent their games being copied and distributed free of charge, and losing developer confidence is not something that does a system any good.

As a result, lawsuits and other enforcement against piracy is a fact of life in the games industry. Nintendo have a particularly harsh reputation for enforcement of their intellectual property rights – with cease and desist letters a common reality for popular fan games that veer too close to something Nintendo considers theirs (including a mass takedown request issued to hosting site GameJolt in early 2021, which hit hundreds of games)6 and the manufacturers of unlicensed peripherals for their systems. Infamously, they also have an uneasy relationship with the Super Smash Bros. fan community after issuing a series of legal takedown requests over their use of mods for online play.7

This shouldn’t be a problem for homebrew developers, especially those whose games are released for free and which use only original assets. The vastness of the internet means that only a small percentage of fan games are ever served with a C&D, and while the experience might be scary and disheartening, it’s rare that serious action beyond the taking down of projects ever results.

However, the homebrew industry is, de facto, dependent on its adjacence to piracy, even when its practitioners have the best of intentions. The devices used to rip and write cartridges, the modchips used to enable custom discs or the software hacks used to enable the loading of homebrew are sustained primarily by their ability to offer less scrupulous players the chance to play free games.

As such, those who exist in the blurry space between the two worlds of piracy and homebrew are, it seems, at particular risk of legal threats, particularly from Nintendo. The case that best exemplifies this is that of Neimod, a Belgian hacker and computer scientist involved with finding exploits for the 3DS homebrew and piracy communities, but involved in the scene going back to the GBA era, according to a GBATemp thread from 2015.8

In 2020, it emerged via leaked Nintendo documents that the company had been undertaking extensive monitoring of Neimod, including compiling documents on his educational and employment background, as well as information regarding his physical movements and visitors to his home, which could only have been gathered by physical surveillance.9

Documentation titled ‘Hacker Enforcement Proposal’10 listed detailed instructions on how they would deal with Neimod. This included ‘Approach Neimod in a friendly, non-threatening, professional and courteous manner’, ‘acknowledge his engineering/programming aptitude’, and attempt to find a ‘mutually acceptable agreement’ by which he would cease exploiting the system in return for information about his exploits, as well as consideration of a ‘bounty’ contract by which he would be paid for discovering exploits, with some of these still able to be revealed publicly for ‘bragging rights’.

This would ‘provide Nintendo with valuable advanced knowledge of upcoming exploits, and possibly provide enough time to address them via update’.

The document recorded further available options, including short-notice ultimatums within which he would be able to comply or face further legal action, including criminal action in Belgian courts.

This ‘carrot and stick’ approach may well have proven effective – there is no real way to know, since Neimod’s online footprint has vanished in the seven years between the planned operations and the release of the documents – but the leak demonstrates a disturbing level of commitment to taking down a single hacker.

Part of the document showing Nintendo’s surveillance of Belgian hacker Neimod

While it might well have been effective in deterring one individual, there has been little slowdown in the exploitation of the 3DS, which is now easier than ever, and it seems improbable that these kinds of actions make a meaningful dent in the availability of pirated and homebrew games. The document’s speculation that ‘If successful, Nintendo’s public image may be further bolstered as a modern, tech-savvy company, while hinting that hackers should be cooperative rather than aggressive with Nintendo in the future’ seems wide of the mark.

Nintendo’s aggressive approach to copyright enforcement may be within their legal rights, but it’s an approach with serious collateral damage, especially for those who aspire to make homebrew games for their systems. Their takedowns against ROM hosting sites,11 for example, as well as the arrests of those making aftermarket modchips,12 have a serious chilling effect on the ability of consumers to use and modify the consoles they have bought in the way they choose. This includes homebrew developers and players whose ability to host and play games is often caught in the blast radius of these actions.

The approach seems particularly backwards when we consider that the vast majority of homebrew is developed for consoles Nintendo no longer supports or sells games for. Indeed part of the demand for ROMs and hacks for older systems is that it is literally no longer possible to buy their games new – getting back to gaming’s woeful ability to archive its past that I mentioned at this book’s outset.

If Nintendo wants to truly enhance its brand image and win the goodwill of its most committed fans, it surely has to find a more effective and less heavy-handed way of enforcing its copyright – otherwise we will simply have fewer homebrew games, and from that we will all lose out.

A mocked-up render of the Retro VGS

Retro VGS and the danger of nostalgia blindness

In late 2015, a group of developers launched an IndieGoGo campaign claiming to be working on ‘the first new video game system to play new games from cartridges in nearly twenty years’. The Retro VGS should have been dead in the water from the day it was announced. That the first line of their crowdfunding pitch was false – cartridge-based systems were then still on the market in the form of the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS, and the Switch continues to use cartridges to this day – should have been a clue.

Things went badly when the system’s Kickstarter was pulled and the fundraising moved to IndieGoGo after a failure to produce a working prototype violated the first site’s terms of service.

But there were other red flags that continued as the system was given more indulgence than it perhaps ought to have been, even after the crowdfunding campaign failed in September 2015 after raising just $80,000 out of its nearly $2 million target.

Many of the claims made in the system’s campaign were either incorrect or improbable, and the sort of errors that a serious campaign wouldn’t have made. For instance, the console’s plan to use old Atari Jaguar cases to cut costs was unorthodox to say the least, and after modification to accommodate new internals would have saved little money anyway.

The claim to be able to run games from the mid-’70s to the late ’90s without using emulation but instead including new internals on cartridges might have been feasible, but would have been rather pointless to all but the most extreme of hardware puritans, even if it wouldn’t have been highly impractical and expensive to manufacture such cartridges.

Despite the crowdfunding failure, in December 2015 the Retro VGS Facebook page announced a new collaboration with Coleco, and a rebrand as the Coleco Chameleon. While Coleco were not exactly a household name anymore, they had some retro appeal, particularly in the USA where the Colecovision had enjoyed some modest success.

The Retro VGS prototype posted on Facebook Its clear shell allowed it to be identified as a fake.

The wheels did not stay on the Coleco Chameleon for very long. In February 2016, a prototype of the system was exhibited at the American International Toy Fair, which attracted attention for all the wrong reasons. A  particular red flag was the use of a SNES controller, after which the online community worked out that the internals of the console had been lifted from a SNES Jr. and placed inside a Jaguar case.13

When the company published photographs of a prototype in a clear case on Facebook, fans quickly smelt a rat. Using the photo and matching it by the layout of its PCB, they discovered the prototype wasn’t a console at all – but was using a board from a CCTV DVR recorder. After a quick investigation, Coleco withdrew their support, and the console’s website and social media channels were shut down on 8 March 2016.

Whether the Retro VGS was a deliberate scam or a case of ambition run wildly out of control, the case is a good example of the risks the homebrew community runs. While the community wasn’t fully taken in by the Retro VGS, enough people wanted it enough to keep it afloat as an idea for several months. It also offered a more direct risk to the developers who signed up to create games for it had it ever come out, several of whom were known quantities in the homebrew scene, including the prolific NGDev, who have created several titles for the NeoGeo.

The nature of homebrew is that it is rooted in nostalgia. But it suffers when it allows nostalgia to blind it to those who wish to exploit it, or when it blinds itself to the reality of its own industry. As David Houghton wrote for GamesRadar at the time: ‘Read through the Retro VGS’ IndieGoGo manifesto, and you’ll find a cavalcade of grumbling, cynical forum post-style arguments about the supposed evils of modern gaming. Lazy development that relies on patches to facilitate the release of unfinished games. System updates that waste time, brick consoles, and make games unplayable. Online-enabled games that lose functionality as servers are eventually deactivated. It’s a desperately selective, horribly sensationalised view of gaming in 2015, and good Lord, do I  unleash a mildly furious yawn whenever I think about it.’14

The truth is that the best homebrew takes what we loved about gaming’s past and builds on it – and we can’t allow ourselves to wallow in an imagined version of the industry that never really existed. There are practical steps homebrew can take to defend itself from scams, of course – and the development of real publishers to mediate releases rather than asking fans to back crowdfunding projects sight unseen is both continuing apace, and a hugely positive step – but there are emotional barriers we have to put up, too.

Copy protection – the industry locks down

Prior to the advent of always-online games platforms at the turn of the 2010s (veterans may remember the controversy when Diablo III demanded a permanent connection in 2011) patching out exploits for consoles was quite tricky for manufacturers to do.

Since these were primarily used by pirates, as well as by the homebrew community, it was understandable that manufacturers would wish to plug the leaks, but effectively they had a limited range of tools available.

They could install new firmware on newly manufactured systems, of course (which pirates and hackers could easily evade by checking the serial numbers on individual consoles), or they could distribute firmware updates on game discs and cartridges that insisted on installation before the game could be played (this was and continues to be Nintendo’s preferred method).

From the seventh generation onwards, online connectivity has allowed firmware updates to become a commonplace part of console ownership. This isn’t just to prevent piracy  – they also offer undoubted improvements to UI, bug fixes, and allow manufacturers to create a connected ecosystem to advertise, sell content and, bluntly, make money.

All of this means it’s more hassle to work as a homebrew developer on more modern systems. If  you want to continue to play official games you’ll probably need a second console you never connect to the internet to prevent your online accounts being banned or your console bricked by an update. You’ll need to make sure it has the right firmware for your needs to allow you to install the necessary software. And you’ll need to keep up with the latest developments to ensure your gains in knowledge of how to work with consoles aren’t about to be wiped out.

All of this destabilises the platforms on which developers work, and makes it a tougher proposition to develop anything complex or to consider monetising it when you do. More time has to be spent on finding ways to make homebrew games playable that could be spent on making those games better.

Unless and until a console passes out of production and is no longer receiving new games (in short, becomes abandonware) it has a chilling effect on the homebrew scene that is still keeping more recent systems frosty.

In short, homebrew might be fun and a great way to build nostalgic communities while creating exciting new experiences – but it skirts with risk, too. That’s not to say it should be shied away from, of course, but there is a reason that, twenty-five years on from the first homebrew titles hitting the message boards, it remains the road less travelled.

Still, the overwhelming experience of most developers is positive, and with that, it’s worth looking at those who are taking the difficult or obscure path even within homebrew.

CHAPTER 11

Because We Can

Obscure consoles, failed consoles and non-consoles

The idea of obscure devices running 1993 2.5D shooter Doom has become so mainstream it’s now basically a meme. At time of writing, the ‘itrunsdoom’ subreddit has over 80,000 members and features the game running on hardware including graphing calculators, mirrorless digital cameras and a vaping pen.

That said, getting Doom running on your fridge is not as impressive as it might seem at first glance. A large proportion of featured entries are on the lines of either installing the Android port of Doom directly, or finding a way to install Android and then repeating step one.

The itrunsdoom community illustrates a truth about modern hardware that is, in most respects, an unalloyed good, but from the perspective of the homebrew developer removes much of the challenge. Most hardware has sufficient cross-compatibility to run one of a small number of embedded operating systems, most commonly Android, which along with touch screen capability drastically reduces the complexity involved in running Doom.

Among much else, Another World achieved immense feats with a 16-colour palette

Where this chapter focuses is on the truly obscure – systems you may never have thought about, as well as systems that aren’t consoles at all, including early concept PDAs, TI’s line of graphing calculators, and Apple’s early attempt to cram a desktop PC into a console.

These systems form a special niche in the homebrew firmament because unlike the other consoles, there’s scarcely any retro nostalgia for them the way there is for more popular consoles. Members of Generation Z undergoing their quarter-life crisis will not sit and reminisce about playing their Gizmondo the same way they might feel about their DS.

These systems are, of course, entertaining to learn about – many of them made catastrophic missteps in their intent, production or marketing that have led to either obscurity or ridicule, but the games industry is not one that often enough reflects on its own failures – so they offer a good learning opportunity all the same.

Another World

Eric Chahi’s beautifully drawn minimalist step platformer Another World may have been a critical success when it was released in 1991, but that alone hardly explains why it shows up on so many lists of homebrew titles. In a 2020 series of articles for his website, Fabien Sanglard explains the phenomenon well. For a start, Another World is built extremely simply, with only 6,000 lines of code; the rest of the game files consist of design assets and sound. Its use of minimal colour palettes further expands the range of hardware on which it can run.

But rather uniquely for a game favoured by the homebrew crowd, the story of Another World shades into the legitimate.

Although the Atari Jaguar is widely regarded as a failure, the company’s long legacy in the early days of video games, and the positive reception of its Atari ST home computers, left a large fanbase with many enthusiast programmers, with French-language ST Magazine continuing, somewhat incongruously, up until 2010.1

Via a French enthusiast group called Jagware, Atari fans were soon federated into a new group called the Atari Association (AC), which held its first convention in 2005. Eric Chahi, who made his name in the French games industry as an artist for Dephine Software on ST/Amiga titles like Future Wars, attended the 2007 convention, where he was given a proposition.

‘The event organizers presented me to [Jaguar programmer Sebastian Briais’s programming group] The Removers,’ he told VentureBeat in 2013.2 ‘They asked me if it would be possible to port Another World on Jaguar. I was impressed by their ability to code on this machine. These guys sounded like crazy people, so I immediately said, “Yes.”’

As well as granting his permission, Chahi made a significant contribution to the development of a new Jaguar release of Another World when he sent The Removers the game’s entire source code, as well as resizing the art assets to the console’s native resolution, ensuring compatibility and avoiding blocky artefacting.

After a long development cycle during which the game was retooled using the Jaguar’s Assembly language, Another World: 15th Anniversary Edition was released on cartridge in 2013 with an initial extremely limited production run of 200 carts. This makes it one of the rarest physical games still available to buy, with boxed copies going for upwards of $750.3

As well as the original game’s 16 colour palettes, the additional power of the Jaguar as compared to the original home computer version and the SNES and Mega Drive ports meant it was capable of switching to a 256-colour mode, and also included speedrun modes.

For those for whom these distinctions matter, the Jaguar’s port of Another World skirts the line of homebrew – after all, it was sanctioned and supported by the original creator – but with the hard graft of conversion done by fans, produced for an otherwise extinct console and without the backing of the manufacturer, it certainly comes in the right side of the line.

The story of Another World does not end there. Most ports of Another World have also emerged from the French enthusiast scene, most often via Gregory Montoir’s New RAW interpreter, which allows the game to be compiled and run on new hardware very easily. As technology advanced and ports became a matter of routine work rather than condensing the game (as in the Game Boy Advance port, begun in 2001, required),4 it has become less special as an achievement to convert Another World, but its ubiquity has also turned it into a staple – a marker that a console’s homebrew scene is established enough to be on the map.

Another World is doubtless popular because it’s a good game that’s easy to port. But I think there’s something about the solo-developed game finding such a lasting audience that temperamentally appeals to homebrew developers, too. After all, that’s what many of them are striving for, and Eric Chahi’s masterpiece proves that it can be done.

: The original Cybiko, with a keyboard too small for human fingers.

Cybiko and Cybiko Xtreme

The Cybiko was a Russian handheld released in 2000 – an early combination of console and PDA, it was equipped with a keyboard too small for human fingers, requiring a stylus to type. Still, it was fairly technically impressive, capable of full 3D graphics on its small black and white screen, and with an early equivalent to the Nintendo DS’s Pictochat, a short-range messaging service using the system’s radio antenna.

It never attained huge popularity, but a relaunched variant – the Cybiko Xtreme – featured a much better human-scale keyboard as well as beefed up internal specs. The console’s homebrew scene is small and now largely inactive, but bigger than you might expect for its meagre sales figures, and features some intriguing proofs of concept including a port of Manic Miner (although, disappointingly, it’s one of few devices not to run Doom).

Its hardware is surprisingly robust, and its official games include racing titles with accomplished visuals (albeit in grayscale), so with enough commitment it could probably be used to produce some quite interesting demos or full games. Whether such a creator is ready to tilt at that Russo-developed windmill remains to be seen.

At present Xeno Crisis is available on eight different consoles, plus three computer operating systems

Neo-Geo AES

SNK’s flagship hardware came in two forms  – an arcade cabinet (the MVS) and a shrunk-down home console version containing the same hardware (the AES). The ability to play full arcade titles at home was a rarity on its mass-market release in 1991,5 which led to a status as a self-consciously elite gaming experience. It  remains one of the most expensive systems ever released, with a launch price of $649 US dollars (equivalent to just under $1,400 today) but despite this has retained a strong reputation for arcade conversions, particularly given SNK’s pedigree in fighting games.

As a system with a limited player base at the time but which gained a cult following later, this makes it a prime candidate for a homebrew scene. As well as the relatively productive studio NGDEV mentioned earlier in this book, the biggest title to have made its way to SNK’s system recently was Xeno Crisis, the 2019 twin-stick shooter by UK-based developers Bitmap Bureau, which although originally developed for the Mega Drive has since expanded in scope to become a kind of omnihomebrew, and is now available for the PS Vita, Dreamcast and Evercade, as well as contemporary systems like PC and Nintendo Switch.

Neo-Geo Pocket Color

To call this handheld, released in 1999, a failure seems ungenerous. It  never captured a large swathe of the market, competing as it did with Nintendo’s Game Boy Color monopoly, but it turned a profit for manufacturer SNK and has been well regarded by hindsight for its high-quality game library (particularly its collection of fighting games) and its excellent microswitched direction stick in lieu of a traditional D-Pad.

The homebrew scene for the system is curiously quiet relative to its regard within gaming enthusiast communities, especially when compared to that of other contemporary systems like the Dreamcast. The official devkit having fallen out of compatibility with Windows and now requiring a Windows XP machine will be an additional barrier to any further work, although a handful of games, ports, demos and utilities such as a WAV music player have been released online.6

Wonderswan

Often compared to the Neo-Geo Pocket Color on account of the systems’ similar power, cult status and release dates, the Wonderswan nonetheless comes via an interesting pedigree. It was the final system developed by Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi before his death in a car crash in 1997, and featured innovations such as vertical gameplay via turning the system on its side.

Released in 1999, a reasonably strong library of licensed anime games and support from third party developers7 helped it put in a respectable showing in Japan, where it reached 8 per cent of market share at its peak, but its nascent fan base was swallowed up upon the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001.

It is notable in the homebrew scene for being the only example I  can find of a homebrew development scene having been adopted and encouraged by the system’s manufacturers. The Wonderwitch development kit was a third-party kit released in 2000 in Japan, and allowed amateurs to develop games for the Wonderswan and Wonderswan Color using the C programming language now common to homebrew development.

Where Nintendo or most of the major manufacturers would have clamped down hard on such a product, Bandai embraced the creativity it offered. In November 2000, they launched a programming competition entitled WWGP 2001 with a grand prize of ¥500,000 (around £3,200 in today’s money) for the winner.

The contest attracted 148 entries sent in by email, and the winner, Judgment Silversword, by M-KAI, was eventually released as an official Wonderswan game in 2004.8 Contests continued for the following two years, yielding dozens of new games despite the system’s waning popularity.

The cynical answer to why more manufacturers don’t offer contests in this vein is that it clearly did nothing to aid the Wonderswan, which died ignominiously not long afterwards, but it remains a positive example of manufacturer engagement encouraging creativity.

Gizmondo

The Gizmondo is known more for its chaotic car crash of a commercial life than its legacy as a games platform, which deserves a thorough telling. Founded as a merger between a small Swedish electronics supplier and a Florida carpet retailer, Tiger Telematics set out to create a competitor to Nokia’s N-Gage, released in 2003. The result would be the Gizmondo, a handheld console that boasted some fairly innovative features borrowed from the rapidly advancing mobile phone world, including GPS tracking and SD card compatibility. The company became rapidly notable for its heavy marketing spend, including renting a flagship shopfront on London’s Regent Street, and in 2005 hosting a Gizmondo launch party featuring performances from Sting, Jamiroquai and Pharrell, among other expensive stars. According to the company’s press release of the time, the launch sold out of the first weekend’s stock within hours.9

This was essentially the only good press the Gizmondo could buy, and events soon went rapidly downhill. Stefan Erikson, one of the partners in Tiger Telematics, was tied by Swedish media to the ‘Uppsala Mafia’, a loose group of organised criminals.10, 11 Millions of dollars were paid to developers for concept games that would never see the light of day – leading to suspicions that the whole enterprise was either a deliberate fraud, or the delusional business attempts of owners with a history of criminality.

Tiger Telematics declared bankruptcy some ten months after the Gizmondo’s launch, after a breathtaking $300 million in losses over a two-year period  – amounting to approximately $12,000 for every Gizmondo sold.

As might have been expected, the Gizmondo was unremarkable in terms of its hardware, never making use of its more intriguing features like the GPS and GPRS connectivity. With lifetime sales amounting to only a few tens of thousands, as a result only fourteen commercial games were ever released.

Should you for some reason wish to start developing for the Gizmondo, you can make a start with Kingcdr’s KGSDK for developing homebrew.12 You’ll need a patched original Gizmondo13 or a developer unit to run your games, but I  don’t expect you went into this endeavour anticipating any massive hits.

Used Gizmondos can be found on eBay for a surprisingly inexpensive £200 at time of writing – the bad news is that this is because they were built with cheap rubber, which has meant all original units are now beginning to melt and rot. Your options are either to hack the casing away and 3D print a new one, or attack it with some isopropyl alcohol and a soft cloth. But hey, it definitely runs Doom.

Tiger Game com

Not to be confused with Tiger Telematics of Gizmondo infamy, Tiger Electronics are well known for cheap, low-quality LCD games as well as electronic toys like the Furby. Like the Pippin, the Game.com, released in 1997, tried to run ahead of its time, including email compatibility and text-based web browsing (albeit requiring an external modem) alongside a resistive touch screen.

The Nintendo DS this was not – the screen was dark and blurry, the touch screen was inexact and required a chunky stylus, and the game library was limited, although it did punch above its weight for big name franchises, with a Batman and Robin tie-in along with a port of Resident Evil 2 (both are terrible). Versions of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Metal Gear Solid were also planned, but cancelled when it became clear the Game. com couldn’t compete with the juggernaut of the Game Boy.

A budget, backlit version, the Game.com Pocket Pro, was released in 1999 for $30, and despite their low sales, new packaged systems can still be picked up for around $150 today.

The lack of homebrew isn’t for lack of trying. In 2005, a group called Game.commies began work on hacking the system with the intent of creating homebrew, but if anything ever came of the effort, there is no evidence of it online. In 2011, the official emulator and debugger for developers was released online, and is compatible with most of the nineteen officially released games. Finally, in 2018, developer Brandon Beauregard, a Canadian 22-year-old known as tpot, released a homebrew development kit on github.14 To date, he is the only known homebrew developer working on the Game.com, having released a port of Tetris.15

In many ways, he embodies the new horizons for the games industry opened by the internet. When I interviewed him in the summer of 2021, he had been developing games since the age of 10.

‘I got into game development when I was really young, the moment I realized that it was a career path, I knew it was exactly what I wanted to do.

‘I had so many ideas as a child and despite the complexity of game development, the way it can all be done with a computer and the nature of the internet at the time made it a lot more accessible than other mediums.

‘It’s kind of crazy to think about, because I think if I was born even a couple years earlier, I wouldn’t have had the same opportunities, despite the internet always being there for me. Looking further into how games were made prior, I realize the internet has really changed the way games and art as a whole are made.

‘And now I’m very soon releasing a game on Steam that I’ve been working on mostly solo for a couple years now which I’m very excited for.’

He was born in 1999, after the Game.com was released, and stumbled across it online – initially regarding it, as many did, as a punchline.

‘The way I learned about it was odd, I used to be a part of a community of Sonic the Hedgehog fangame developers, and upon researching games within the series I  came across a game. com port of Sonic JAM that had been barely known or documented but looked notoriously bad from what I could tell.

‘After sharing it with a few circles online, I kind of found myself going down a rabbit hole, and bought myself a game.com the moment I realized just how cheap they were online.

‘The lack of documentation, and the strange nature of the game.com itself really made it feel like rediscovering something lost.’

He also reveals an interesting titbit from his own research – that despite the large sums spent on acquiring game licences, the majority of games were farmed out to freelance developers with short deadlines – which would certainly account for their general low quality. These developers were often not even offered full documentation for the console.

‘In the case of Frogger’s development, instead of being offered proper documentation, Tiger just sent the project’s programmer the unfinished source to a still-in-development port of Fighters Megamix, which was commented entirely in Chinese.’

Brandon has largely wrapped up his work on the Game.com, although he and a friend who assisted with the console’s assembler hope that their work lays the path for others to pick it up. When he has finished work on his current, more mainstream project (a Steam game developed in Game Maker Studio, called Teabat!) he hopes to look into the Vectrex, if anything a more interesting system for its departure from traditional methods of creating and displaying graphics.

Vectrex

To the untrained ear, the Vectrex can come across as the sort of console one might make up for a bad joke. With its vertical screen, reliance on coloured overlays, and 1983 launch price of $199 (around $550 in 2021 dollars, more than the launch cost of a PS5), it’s not hard to see why it never made a splash in public consciousness. But it was in many ways a fairly accomplished console, ahead of its time.

Its use of pure white on black vector graphics (drawn with lines and maths, rather than pixels) was unusual and restricted the ability to produce complex art, but it allowed for smooth scrolling and warping effects not possible on raster-based systems of the time, including very impressive into-the-screen driving games like Hyperchase.

Alex Herbert released Protector, a clone of arcade classic Defender, in 2003, coded in the DOS text editor and using a free cross-platform compiler along with a custom cartridge writer then available for Vectrex enthusiasts. It  was notable for being a limited physical release before a time when such things were common in homebrew circles, with a production run of just 100 cartridges, which sold out within weeks.16 Thirty copies a week would bankrupt most professional developers and disappoint even solo hobbyists, but for a two-decade-old long-dead console in an era before social media and crowdfunding, it was a big achievement.

John Dondzila has been going even longer. His Vector Vaders was released in 1996, twelve years after the console’s demise but well before other homebrew scenes had come to any prominence. It was also sold physically with a boxed release going for $20 – more understandable in an era before widespread home internet connections!

In recent years the commercial Vectrex scene has largely found its outlet via online retailer Packrat Games, who offer a wide selection of games for the Atari 2600, Magnavox Odyssey 2 and Vectrex. It’s now among the systems with more informal homebrew releases than formal releases during its lifetime – a testament to the value of an intriguing hardware concept, even if it didn’t benefit the system at the time.

Virtual Boy

The brainchild of Game Boy (and Wonderswan) creator Gunpei Yokoi, it’s possible to argue that the Virtual Boy was a misunderstood and underappreciated system well ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the many drawbacks of this very early VR system  – the need to mount it on a tabletop and sit awkwardly to play it, the limited red and black colour scheme, the tiny game library, the tendency to induce headaches in its players – all conspired to render it a laughing stock and a commercial failure.

Perhaps as a result of this loss of potential, and the intriguing options offered by the console’s capabilities for stereoscopic 3D, a fairly robust scene exists for the Virtual Boy, mostly organised around fansite Planet Virtual Boy. One of the best-run examples of the genre, PVB explicitly states its goal as helping to promote the creation of new games, and serves to demonstrate how supporting infrastructure can help foster an environment of creativity around old consoles.

Editor Christian Radke, alias KR155E, is himself a long-standing VB homebrew developer, having worked on a number of projects including the traditional port of Sokoban, released in 2003.

Homebrew projects have ranged from the basic – an Etch A Sketch tech demo, for example – to the highly sophisticated, such as a port of the open world Amiga game Hunter, one of the earliest home computer games to use polygonal 3D. The console is actually reasonably capable under the bonnet (its limited colour palette and low resolution also helped get more out of it), and as such it has seen more innovation from the homebrew scene than its year on the market in the mid-’90s allowed for – including most recently a new demo of a 3D voxel engine.17

This community has led to the development of some fairly capable tools – specifically VBDE, the Virtual Boy Development Environment, which takes much of the pain of compiling out of what is still a fairly tricky task, requiring knowledge of C to product working games, and also comes with plenty of example code for the ambitious developer to use as a starting point or learning aids.18

Apple Bandai Pippin

Released between 1996 and 1997, the Pippin was, as far as we know, the first home console to include a web browser, which worked via an included 14.4kbps modem. This is roughly the only achievement of the Pippin, which was unpopular (roughly 42,000 of its original manufacturing run of 100,000 were sold), expensive (retailing at $599) and features on many ‘worst tech’ lists. The hardware is essentially a PowerMac 6100 in a console case, and indeed its software can be run on any Mac compatible with Apple’s mid-’90s System 7 operating system. This cross-compatibility rather spoils the fun of the Pippin for homebrew enthusiasts, as developing for it is essentially the same as developing for the Mac, only with the requirement to get around a fairly onerous licensing protection key Apple required to be included on all game discs.19 As a result, there are no known homebrew games for the console – the only system I could find with this dubious distinction.

Philips CD-i

The CD-i has left a deeper mark on the cultural memory than its impact on the art of gaming really warrants, in large part due to its library of licensed Nintendo games, all of them notorious for their poor quality and meme-grade animations and voice acting.

One of a number of early systems that attempted to exploit the capacity for storage using increasingly affordable optical discs, the CD-i was born out of the failed attempt by Nintendo to develop a CD-based add-on for the SNES, with Nintendo partnering with Philips after their agreement with Sony fell apart.

When this agreement also disintegrated, Philips were left with the legal right to develop games using popular Nintendo franchises. Sony went on to produce the PlayStation, while Philips turned their attention to producing three Zelda games and Hotel Mario for the CD-i.

In the homebrew sphere, its small but dedicated scene has tended to land on individual large projects to show off the system’s potential, rather than on many smaller games. Of particular note is Frog Feast, the system’s first commercial homebrew game developed from 2005 onwards for a range of obscure systems including the CDi, FM Towns Marty and the Amiga CD-32. It’s not exactly a huge offer in the game department (you are a frog hopping up from a lily pad to catch flies overhead) but it can be considered a flag planted on the CD-i’s territory, if nothing else.

In 2018–19 developer GameBlaBla (also mentioned in the section on the 3DO) ported his Android game KillMinds to the CD-i, and also worked on Super Quartet, released open source in 2021.

At time of writing the most promising homebrew project is TwBurn’s Nobelia, a Link to the Past-style 2D top-down adventure game featuring fairly accomplished pixel art and most recently a working level editor that has allowed the creator to build at least twenty rooms. Of course, that’s not a hugely impressive achievement at this stage, but it’s about as much as CD-i fans have had to look forward to for approximately the last quarter of a century.

As he told the Interactive Dreams community website: ‘Documentation is quite good, but you have to piece stuff together yourself. The hardware is lacking, so to get very good performance out of it can be a challenge. My demo does not run smoothly all the time. Biggest hurdle is getting a development environment set up; only a 16-bit compiler that’s very old and not always stable.’

Development is largely based on the Green Book, Philips’ standards documentation for the CD-i, which has been leaked online. The ambitious and slightly quirky reader wishing to get started developing for the platform that gave us several early internet memes would be well advised to start there, and with the wealth of information contained on the Interactive Dreams site, which monitors and reports on the CD-i scene, as well as the CD-i Discord server.

Homebrew highlights

Mario Kart Virtual Cup – DogP – Virtual Boy

Originally planned as a real Virtual Boy title, this lost entry in the Mario Kart franchise was cancelled after the system’s poor sales saw it pulled after just a year on the market. Ambitious fans set about attempting to recreate it, and although their efforts only reached the time trial stage with no competitive races, they’ve done a fairly good job, with nice controls, a full range of eight characters, and the classic Mario Kart ‘feel’.

It’s a good demonstration of what the Virtual Boy was actually capable of when used properly – four-colour red and black display notwithstanding, it’s a fully featured Mode 7 game in a handheld system, six years before the Game Boy Advance managed it. Much like Wario Land Virtual Boy, it’s only thanks to the system’s botched marketing and overambitious concept that we have overlooked some serious potential.

It’s probably best if you play with the system muted and the Mario Kart Super Circuit theme playing on headphones instead, however, as the music the game actually contains is not the sort of thing to bring you happy nostalgia for mid-’90s racing, particularly when you’ve heard it loop for the eighteenth time.

Toad and Lakitu showing off the Virtual Boy’s surprising capabilities

The Wonderswan was a very capable device graphically, but like the GBA was hampered by its lack of backlight

Judgement Silversword – M-KAI – Wonderswan Color

The scrolling shoot-’em-up is one of those genres like one-on-one fighters that sit off to the side of gaming doing their own thing and rarely evolving, having found their formula early and now content to merely find new formulations of it. Happily, this is one of the better formulations.

Judgement Silversword is the famous (for a given and very limited value of famous) success story of the Wonderwitch, the development kit for the Bandai Wonderswan and Wonderswan Color released around the turn of the millennium. After winning an inaugural contest for Wonderwitch games in 2001, it was given an official release in 2004, near the very end of the system’s life. As such, it’s one of the rarest published games in existence – with used copies selling for well over $1,500.

As you might expect from a one-person development team, it’s very much a slimmed down version of what a full release would have entailed, consisting of just a single-player campaign mode and a high-score table. Thankfully this and the English-language AI make it quite easy to play for a Japanese-only release.

As you’d expect, you fly sideways (or, since the Wonderswan had controls built around being played vertically for exactly these kinds of games, upwards) into swarms of advancing enemies, armed with just a rapid-fire weapon and a limited shield for dodging smaller forms of incoming fire.

On Medium I was only able to get through the first three ‘levels’, so like the wimp I am I knocked the difficulty down to Easy and made much swifter progress. Weapon hits feel appropriately cathartic and although the difficulty ramps up quickly as you progress, with the usual succession of hulking bosses, it doesn’t devolve into the kind of bullet hell only the distressingly caffeinated can handle until quite a long way in.

The screen you will see far more than any other

I like my games to have a bit more context and narrative than a sign in the ground featuring a finger pointing to an alien in a crosshair, so after a while I  did tire of repeating the same levels over and over following death, but since the game was ‘rewarded’ with a cash prize of £3,000 and a release on a very niche system three years after the fact, masses of content variation aren’t to be expected.

If I have a query it’s about how playable this was on the unlit and very small Wonderswan Color screen – having emulated it on a large monitor probably didn’t bring across the full eye-strain experience, but since a vanishingly small number of people now have the ability to play this on original hardware, it seems like a question hardly likely to trouble all but the most enthusiastic.

Barbarian Invaders – Chris Ahchay – Neo Geo Pocket Color

Never has such a neat idea made me want to swear so loudly. Basically a neat tech demo, this is a medieval-style clone of Space Invaders with a twist – instead of a spaceship’s laser cannon, you’re a catapult crew attempting to see off your attackers while dodging their arrows.

This requires you to not just keep an eye out for attacks, but to plot the arc of your shot to take them down – a much harder proposition with some very unforgiving hitboxes. It’s a neat idea but in half an hour of gameplay I never came close to clearing a level because the lack of cover and the finicky nature of the shooting mechanics make it an exercise in frustration.

The same mechanic redeployed in a more forgiving scenario could be used well, but it’s a good thing I emulated this rather than playing on a real Neo Geo Pocket Colour, which would have been rapidly launched into orbit.

CHAPTER 12

The End of Homebrew (As We Know It)

PS3, Xbox 360, Wii

The developments that changed the nature of homebrew were the same as those that transformed the role of consoles  – the emergence of the internet as a serious force in console gaming, and the creation of a cheaper tier of downloadable console game, with official status but below the level of fanfare required of a boxed release.

As the Xbox 360, PS3 and belatedly the Wii began to walk, then to run into online spaces, the world of console gaming became more open. With the rise of the Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Store and WiiWare, it was possible to release smaller, bite-sized games with lower production overheads, at a lower price point.

The effect of this move upon homebrew is best described as occurring in the shape of a boomerang.

First, it rapidly closed the gap in the market in which homebrew existed – enthusiastic amateurs who would never have been able to get a full PS2 boxed release suddenly had a financially viable outlet through which to attempt to release their games with the blessing of the console manufacturers. There was little point in creating homebrew for these systems when that required running against the grain, and when the market and financial rewards were so much smaller.

The Wiicade logo using ‘Nintendo’s colours’

Second, it widened the number of indie developers considerably, along with concurrent developments on the PC, including the opening up of Steam as a viable platform for smaller studios to publish their games, and the increasing interoperability of game engines to publish across multiple formats.

Third, the boomerang came back. With a wider pool of experienced developers out there came an increased pool of homebrew creators. While not as commonly found in the entry-level ranks of the homebrew scene, many of the more successful pieces of homebrew-focused hardware and crowdfunded games have been created by developers who first cut their professional teeth during that period of late-2000s expansion.

The result is that the seventh generation performs a paradoxical role in the world of homebrew – by cutting down the potential size of its own homebrew scene, it helped develop that for older systems by expanding the pool of talent. In this chapter we’ll examine what scene does exist for those systems, and what the experiences of those involved can tell us about how things developed during those heady days.

Yes Wii Can

In the run-up to the release of the Wii in 2006, it was announced that the console would ship with a web browser based on Opera, which would be capable of running Flash version 7. Then University of Toronto students, David Stubbs and John Eysman worked with developer Aaron Worrell to build Wiicade, a web platform hosting Wii-compatible Flash games, which launched the day of the console’s release.

The site was all but thrown together in a couple of days, according to John Eysman: ‘I think it was David Stubbs’ idea to say: “If you can play flash games, it could play computer-based Flash games, as well.”

‘If we could pick the appropriate ones that would work well with a mouse, and we could map that on to the Wii controller, then that could be quite interesting.

‘This was a Friday, I believe when he came home from work. And the Wii was getting released on Monday. I  just kind of hammered out a website over the weekend. And we obviously tested it out on the computer, not on the Wii.’

Without access to the Wii’s hardware, the three creators were not certain at launch whether the site would work – games were not true Wii homebrew, as they were playable on PC and essentially used the console’s controller as a mouse pointer. A  controller API was later developed and was used, but most games remained either ports of existing mouse-only Flash games.

Boosted by coverage in major gaming publications, including Kotaku, as well as the novelty of being able to access free games through a console’s web browser, WiiCade proved exceedingly popular. Stubbs recalled being recognised in the line chatting about the site while waiting for the Wii’s release: ‘We waited in line that night. And I  remember when we were in line, some people, for whatever reason, noticed that we were working on Wiicade, and they had heard about it, and they let us go to the front together. So I  got a taste of that celebrity life – and it’s never happened again.’

At its peak, it received up to 100,000 concurrent users. This success translated into offers from Cooking Mama publisher Majesco to buy WiiCade in exchange for a lump sum and jobs for the three founders, although this offer fell through.

‘Yeah, they flew us down, took us down in a big fancy car to schmooze us to impress us with how successful they were,’ said Stubbs.

‘Looking back now, they offered us a laughably low amount – $50,000 for the title for the domain. And they offered us all three of us full-time jobs working in Edison, New Jersey, for them. I was in university – I was really not interested in moving to Edison, New Jersey.

‘But I do think it’s interesting that they were a developer for the Wii, making actual games, and they were interested in that. I never really got to the bottom of what exactly they were interested in, like if it was us specifically or if it was the domain or if it was something about the platform.

‘But there was interest from a game publisher which, although it didn’t materialise into anything, was serious enough for them to fly us down and talk to us.’

This rapid and unexpected explosion of success mirrored that of its parent console. But initial enthusiasm for the Wii tapered off as casual audiences failed to keep buying games, so Wiicade’s popularity declined fairly rapidly too, starting with legal threats from Nintendo.

John Eysman told me: ‘I’m about six months into it being up and it was getting a foothold and gaining traffic. We got a cease and desist from Nintendo – because we were using their colours.

‘We were young. So they sent a cease and desist and said, “Hey, you’re using our colours?” And we said “Oh no, we’re using their colours.” In reality, looking back at it, I think we were fine. You can’t trademark colours.

‘But we basically said, well, they’re there. They have lawyers, they’re more senior than us. We have to change the colours on our website. So we did a redesign. It was, I think, a little bit too complicated. And I  think it lost a little bit of its magic and traffic started to go down.’

The site continued on until 2011, eventually under the ownership of a fan who took it over after Eysman and Stubbs stepped away.

Wiicade stands as an example of something quite unique in the homebrew space – a way of publishing homebrew games that did not rely directly on a console’s development kit to run. Flash was a product of its time, and would go on to fall out of widespread use in the 2010s after the rise of HTML5 and other more secure methods for creating interactive web content rendered it obsolete. The Wii was one of few consoles to include a native web browser.1

The remaining Wii homebrew sphere is, like much of the rest of its generation, fairly vestigial, with only a small number of games. It is, however, made marginally more interesting by the Wii’s fairly unique remote-based control system, which is used in a few titles amidst a sea of unremarkable ports of board games, classic arcade titles and the like.

The other development of note is Wire3D, the Wii Independent Rendering Engine, which allows simultaneous 3D development for Wii and Windows and which comes with several tutorials showing off its impressive capabilities. Unfortunately, it has not yet been used to create any projects of note – and while 3D homebrew has just about made it to the Wii, few of these projects have amounted to anything other than half-complete demos.

PS3

Beyond a few programming tutorials released in the early years of the system’s life, the PS3 does not play host to a large homebrew scene. Part of this is that the system is new enough that it attracts little in the way of a nostalgia crowd, and part of it is that it is tricky to develop for.

While that isn’t always a deterrent to the people developing for much more obscure systems, there’s also a severe gap between dreams and possibility from the seventh generation onwards. It’s possible to make a SNES homebrew game that matches or even exceeds the general standard of that console’s official games for graphics, sound, presentation and depth of gameplay or storytelling – but from the time of 3D onwards that possibility has become increasingly narrow, and from the PS3 onwards effectively no longer exists. This was the generation where the number of staff and amount of money spent on the most ambitious games exploded beyond recognition. While admittedly the most extreme example, Grand Theft Auto V, cost around $265 million – that’s an awful lot of successful Kickstarters.

For those who wish to persist anyway, you’ll need a modded PS3 with custom firmware, as well as one of the console’s SDKs – either the official SDK or the PS3dev open source toolchain. If you’ve got a fair knowledge of C or C++ you should find the rest fairly simple, although a lack of resources will hamper your efforts if you’re inexperienced.

Xbox 360

Besides the points about game scope and the ability to realise ambitions mentioned in the preceding section, most of which apply equally to the Xbox 360, the primary obstacle to homebrew on Microsoft’s second console is the total inability to softmod the system to enable homebrew games to be played.

Getting around Microsoft’s system security basically requires use of a soldering iron, and that’s further than most players are willing to go to access the rather paltry collection of games in the system’s homebrew library.

The seventh generation and the end of the road

This generation seems to be where the journey of homebrew starts to come to an end as an organised effort beyond a few hobbyists. Not because efforts to crack open and repurpose the PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch don’t exist – they do – but because at this point there’s increasingly little justification for doing so. Out of the box game creation utilities like Game Maker Studio and Unity allow games to be packaged for modern systems with few restrictions, and while Nintendo still requires developers to register, the requirements are not so onerous that their eShop misses out on tons of small or solo-developed titles.

Under the hood, the Sony and Microsoft systems are increasingly little different from budget PCs running a custom operating system, so there’s none of the restrictions of hardware that give retro games their unique flavour in sound, colour depth or gameplay.

That leaves us in an odd situation where the homebrew spotlight might remain fixed, confined to a thirty-year window between the mid-’80s and mid-2010s. Of course, a concentration on these systems runs the risk of the enthusiasm for them fading – either as those nostalgic for them fade out of the limelight, or everything that people might want to do with the consoles is done. Certainly development for them can become easier  – it wouldn’t be too hard, one assumes, to build an out of the box devkit that could spit out an NES ROM ready-made, in the same style as GB Studio, but that would take out some of the challenge for the enthusiasts. After all, why make a retro-style platformer for the NES on cartridge when you can make something that looks and plays identically for the PC?

The tragedy is that all of these threats to homebrew are born of changes in the industry that are on aggregate positive. The barriers for making the games one wants to play are lower than ever. A  professional-grade development platform can be acquired for free or almost free and do pretty much everything one might want. Distribution platforms like itch.io have hardly any gatekeeping, and it is absolutely possible for a lone nut with a good idea to take the world by storm – look at the success of Minecraft.

Carl Forhan of Songbird Productions is optimistic about the current state of homebrew based on his experiences getting started in the industry over twenty years ago.

‘Most hobbyist-developed games I  published over the years were done by a solo developer. Maybe with a tiny bit of art or music help. Again, nowadays you’re often seeing teams of three to five coders, artists, designers, and musicians all collaborating on a retro release which results in some seriously impressive games for retro fans,’ he told me.

‘Crowdfunding and emulation have really opened things up for some indie developers. I have not tried crowdfunding myself, as I’m not convinced it would help me reach a significantly larger audience for my niche releases. But I have seen a number of retro developers do very well on those platforms.’

But even he sees that it will be hard to keep the flame burning for every console forever, particularly as the homebrew scene enters a new generation and the objects of players’ nostalgia begin to shift: ‘It’s hard to know how long this bubble will last. Personally I  anticipate it will go on for another ten to twenty years, but I  do wonder for example how many people will really be looking for a new Lynx game after 2050?

‘Having said that, I  think there will always be niche developers who want to keep building games on niche systems, regardless of the market size. As with any hobby, there is something intrinsically rewarding about taking something old or abandoned and doing something new with it. If  I  wanted to make more money on video games, I certainly would not have stuck with Atari platforms all these years. I did it more out of a passion for systems that left the market with too few games and a sense of community with other diehard fans which has persisted through multiple eras of Atari launches and failures.’

It is now possible – and indeed, quite easy – for a solo developer to produce games for modern systems and have them published officially, but some boundaries still remain. Guidelines for Nintendo’s eShop publishing process are easily available on their website for those developing for Switch, while Sony and Microsoft also allow self-publishing on their online stores, but in each case there is an approval process, and legal constraints including the need to obtain an age rating.

This will rule out only a few games  – and those it does will be those that are incomplete, grossly offensive, or push the hardware beyond reasonable boundaries. But philosophically, that is still a barrier to entry for some works with artistic merit.

It’s perfectly understandable that Nintendo might not wish to sell a work of hardcore pornography, or which encourages violent extremism. But what about a work of tasteful erotica or a radical but eloquent political tract? That could be a work with artistic merit that still crosses some boundaries of taste. What about a game that requires unauthorised uses of the hardware, but is otherwise unobjectionable in its content? What becomes of a game whose developer simply wishes, for reasons of political repression, personal risk, or simple taste, to remain anonymous?

This is a question without an answer, because it depends on the subjective view of what a console ought to provide. A  curated experience can be had, but only by going through the manufacturers’ approval process. Platforms with few to no barriers to entry have a tendency towards anarchic free-for-alls  – containing gems, but buried amid the detritus of half-baked programming projects, retextured tutorial levels and explicit fan games.

Another reading, more optimistically, is that homebrew has won. It  emerged from a game development scene between the 1990s and 2010s in which solo development was hard to break into, with locked down, proprietary consoles and a dearth of development tools  – and audience – for the PC. Today, the scene has changed utterly. It’s never been easier to come up with an idea and turn it into reality. It’s so simple that game jams, competitions based around creating a game in an absurdly short amount of time, have become a popular pastime. That can be only a good thing for creativity. Android systems and new indie consoles like the Playdate offer relatively open platforms for a more console-like experience, so it’s no longer necessary to go to a mainstream console to find influence.

The truth is that homebrew video game development, free and anarchic space as it likes to consider itself, has taken the same road as the rest of the internet. Curious early experimentation through the mid to late 1990s, flourishing into a vibrant and experimental archipelago of scattered creative communities in the 2000s, and finally restrained and corralled by a corporate culture that has finally worked out how to suborn and license those creative energies, using the stick of copyright protection and the carrot of marketing and curation.

Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is a triumph of solo development

All is not doom and gloom – as many examples in this book show, this has also led to a stabilisation of homebrew, and ultimately will probably lead to more games.

It will not be audiences who suffer most from this change in the structure of the market as games become cheaper and more plentiful, with the strongest examples of independent spirit allowed to rise to the top. Undertale, The Binding of Isaac and Papers, Please could not have risen to the heights they have without it. The top flight of developers who might once have been in the homebrew scene also have new opportunities to flourish.

The unloved and unmourned victims of the change will be the merely curious part-timers; those who are breaking into programming for the first time, tinkering in the digital equivalent of their garden shed to create products only they will ever see for consoles only they remember. Throughout the process of writing this book, I’ve spoken to many of these middle-ranking members of the creative community camping in the foothills of the world’s greatest entertainment industry.

It’s for them that the spirit of homebrew must continue to be nourished and encouraged. Nostalgia run rampant may be a blight, but to the degree that it can drive people to push new boundaries, as many of the titles listed in this book undoubtedly have, it has a place, and a valuable one, in our industry.

Whether for a nostalgic Dreamcast owner enthusiastically backing hybrid PC and homebrew games by real professionals, a bedroom hobbyist of the old school taking their first steps in Game Maker Studio, or a keen archivist who sees no reason that the games industry cannot keep archives the way the film industry always has, I  hope this book has demonstrated that the homebrew experience matters.

So whether or not the seventh generation is where the homebrew spirit ends, I’m optimistic that in whatever modified form it takes, there will continue to be some sort of homebrew content mine, ranging from the very formalised to the anarchic, hacking away under the surface, and just occasionally churning out gems.

CHAPTER 13

The Scene

How the online world created and transformed homebrew gaming

As the preceding chapters have shown, homebrew would be next to impossible without the rise of the consumer internet from the mid-1990s onwards. In the Closed Period from the arrival of the Console Wars until the release of Steam, it kept sparks of interest flaring amidst an unending downpour, kindling and sustaining tiny communities of enthusiasts who by a kind of unspoken cultural osmosis became known as each console’s homebrew scene.

This creation of communities, along with the standardisation of home computing around Windows in the late 1990s, and the availability of commercial-grade emulation software, allowed the first games to find their small audience and for the internal workings of the obsolete systems to be gradually uncovered and built into a lexicon of curated knowledge. A  slow consolidation of expertise built through the 2000s until, as though a switch was flipped around the Great Financial Crisis, in 2008 the growth went from linear to exponential.

The online world, then, cannot be solely responsible for homebrew’s popularity being such that, though a small world in the scheme of the games industry, it can sustain sufficient interest for this book to exist. Something – or, possibly, some things  – happened in the late 2000s to generate a surge in popularity, and this chapter will examine why.

Game Dev Tycoon’s anti-piracy measures kick in

Piracy: The parent of invention

It is quite understandable why the developers of homebrew games are keen to burnish their own legitimacy as creators. The argument that, having purchased a console, it should be their right as customers to modify, upgrade and use their machine to play whatever they desire, is highly persuasive, and it is clear that a strong interest in unofficial games does exist.

It is, however, indisputable that a large chunk of those who install emulators or modchips to make their computers and consoles capable of playing homebrew games are doing so with the express intent of playing commercial games, and that often these games are pirated.

This is a situation with a high degree of ethical leeway – I think it would be hard to argue that the creators of Dolphin, the distributors of ROMs for the Nintendo 64 or the modders who translated Mother 3 when Nintendo refused to do so were doing anything morally wrong. The principle of abandonware – that a product that is no longer sold or maintained by a creator should be fair game – is a long-standing one in computing and gaming circles. It’s also a key basis for filling in gaps in the necessary work of archiving games for posterity. And it’s doubtless true that many of those who come to an appreciation of homebrew do so through these channels.

Where the area becomes more grey is when emulation, modchips and hacks allow for piracy of games that are still current and available for sale, by those who simply wish to save money.

Such piracy has always been easiest on PC; famously, when the developers of Game Dev Tycoon included code that would both identify and report pirated copies of the game, and then enact anti-piracy measures to ruin the experience of those players, they found that 93.6 per cent of players were not playing a legitimate copy.1

However, piracy is widespread on consoles too, though the slow aging of the video games market into working-age demographics with disposable income and the prevalence of online services that can directly punish those running hacked consoles has curbed the incentives somewhat. But the online capability of these consoles has simultaneously opened new avenues for piracy, while online ecommerce systems have fed the availability of modchips, flash carts and other grey market devices that are vital for getting homebrew up and running, particularly for ambitious developers hoping to run their games on real hardware.

Online interest in homebrew games, at least as measured by Google Trends data, sees a sharp spike at the end of 2005, matching the release of the Xbox 360 and the imminent launches of the PlayStation 3 and Wii, the first home systems to make online functionality a core component of their user experience. It was also the first home console generation to see a launch period at a time when home internet connections had moved decisively from a useful extra to a necessity for many users. Only around half of American adults had internet access at the time of the PlayStation 2’s release in 2000, but by 2006 this had risen to around three-quarters, and given the younger demographics of those playing games, this concentration was almost certainly higher for those with access to consoles.

The Wii was, as discussed earlier, notoriously easy to modify, both via its online functionality and its SD card and USB slots, and its primary method for installing homebrew software was via the aptly named Homebrew Channel. This was essentially a file management system for organising other software, but a good and user-friendly one, which helped spur the continued development and life of the Wii scene.

Nintendo’s contemporary handheld console, the DS, was also a hotbed of flash carts, and was perhaps the only system for which ownership of those devices was both widely seen among non-enthusiasts, and not cracked down on by the manufacturer (since the DS’s limited internet connectivity meant it was perhaps the last system for which rollout of firmware updates that patched exploits was not generally possible).

As the popularity and penetration of the Nintendo systems were very high, it’s likely that plenty of users found their way into homebrew development via curiosity about this software and the potential of the Wii and DS hardware. Given the systems’ launch and extreme popularity through the period from 2005 to 2007, it’s quite conceivable the Wii and DS – and secondarily, the Xbox 360 and PS3, which also had reasonably sized hacking scenes – are at least partly behind the 2008–10 spike.

Double Fine’s Kickstarter success with Broken Age was a watershed moment in video game funding models

Crowdfunding: Hacking open publishing

Like most online phenomena, crowdfunding has been around longer than we tend to give it headroom for. The first such site was ArtistShare, launched in 2001, which focused on music and set the precedent for the model  – a declared goal, a promised result, and the ability for people to chip in a desired amount to support projects they’re passionate about. However, it was later players – primarily Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as the now-defunct RocketHub – that set the stage for the outsize role crowdfunding now plays in the games industry.

While crowdfunding has long been associated with independent game development, a few tentpole titles have cemented this trend – while the best known might be the absurdly popular Star Citizen, currently sitting on crowdfunding of over $300 million, the first breakout hit was Double Fine’s Broken Age, which launched its Kickstarter campaign in 2012 and raised $3.3 million from 87,000 backers before being released to mildly positive reviews in 2015.

Double Fine’s success on the platform traded on many of the same instincts that drive interest in homebrew titles  – a belief that a cultural artefact (in this case the point and click adventure game) had been taken from the world before its time, nostalgia for such a product, and the good reputation of a name associated with the project, in this case Tim Schafer, the poster child of LucasArts responsible for the critically acclaimed (though never very financially successful) Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.

In so doing, they established the precedent that Kickstarter was the place to go to activate a small, but highly enthused slice of the market – something that was logistically hard to do in the days before targeted advertising and crowdfunding entered the industry.

This was part of the reason point and click adventure games, the Dreamcast, and many other objects of nostalgic enthusiasm died off in the first place – an enthusiastic market still existed, but the market share was too small to justify the production runs needed to actually reach them via limited store space while still turning a profit.

A quick search through Kickstarter in particular shows it’s become a place for many of the more ambitious homebrew projects to make a go of funding themselves, with those for the NES, SNES and Dreamcast finding particular success. Those who back them appear to be largely in it for the collector value and to support the scene over merely playing the games, judging by the far higher proportion of backers who pick much more expensive boxed physical releases over the cheaper backing options that offer only a digital copy of a game.

NESMaker promises similar easy game creation capabilities to GB Studio

It’s not only individual games that have found success through crowdfunding, but some of the homebrew infrastructure also develops that way. The highly successful NESMaker software package was funded to the tune of $250,000 and fulfils a similar function to GB Studio  – allowing simple, user-friendly game creation for Nintendo’s console, including the ability to export to real cartridges for play on physical systems.

Much like GB Studio, it struggles with the limitation of being boxed into pre-programmed behaviour, and the difficulty of working with non-Assembly languages on the NES due to its limited resources. Still, if you aren’t planning on making your magnum opus, it can be a decent way to get something made, and fills a similar role in homebrew to that played by basic creation engines such as RPG Maker or Adventure Game Studio.

Social media – building communities

For those too young to remember, the primary means of online communication in a public setting before the rise of modern social media platforms were forums (and, in the depths of time, bulletin boards) with a respectable showing for chat rooms that used technologies like IRC. Even relatively small sites had an active forum, as the slow but comparatively permanent nature of threads made them easy to manage with only a small moderation team.

These forums were the birthplace of many homebrew scenes – plenty are still online with threads stretching back decades, and even if many of the links have broken and most are no longer particularly active, they make for an interesting historical record.

While they differed in specifics, what they tended to share was a hierarchical structure. Their boards were ruled by moderators, often with a higher up individual or team of admins running the show. New users were expected to fall in line with established (and often quite arcane) etiquette, and to contribute rarely and only when they had something useful to say. Post count often served as a badge of rank, and thread closures and bans were, in many cases, handed out liberally.

If this sounds authoritarian, it’s because it was, but the many examples of badly run forums (full of meandering, repetitive or childish threads, unending furious arguments and derailment of topics) do suggest the approach had some merit.

Most forums also had a small footprint  – their user bases may have been large, but they tended not to cross-pollinate much with other forums, and often had rivalries based on arcane beefs between moderation teams. They were small nodes of infrastructure, often held up by the hosting accounts of a single admin who maintained the site as a hobby. Any number of changes in outlook, workload or lifestyle could capsize a site in short order.

Forums are now largely out of favour, and it was, to put it simply, social media that killed them.

Facebook’s introduction of Pages in 2007 allowed for fan communities to sprout with far less necessary admin or cost. Twitter’s launch in 2006 also allowed for a more open approach to community building, in this case built around individual users’ followings. Both options made for a more enticing place for a new community member to join than being handed a list of forum rules and then spending six months having every post mercilessly dragged by veterans.

However, while both of these proved a more interesting networking and publicity space than forums, it was Reddit that truly replaced them as the nexus of homebrew activity, and it continues to be the busiest place for the accrual of homebrew knowledge to this day.

Launched in 2005, Reddit is best thought of as a giant omni-forum, made up of thousands of sub-Reddits that focus on a specific topic. Like a forum, each sub-Reddit consists of posts made by users and is overseen by a moderation team, but users have a common identity between subReddits and cross-posting between boards is common.

Its comparatively fixed status (not nearly as reliant on ephemeral content as Twitter, not as based on algorithmic churn in the timeline as Facebook) makes it a strong contender for community building, as users can become known participants in one area, but the system of upvotes brings a focus more on quality of content than on status, allowing new users to break in.

r/homebrew was launched in April 2009, too late for the initial spike in interest, but in line with the peak of interest shown in homebrew for the Wii, which due to its Homebrew Channel software is probably the console most associated with the word by casual players.

In recent years, Discord has taken off as an alternative, more closed environment for community discussions. Usually with users numbering in the dozens or hundreds, it replicated a forum structure with stratified channels for discussion of different topics and the possibility of a moderation team, but the app allows users to easily switch between different Discord groups and the chats being live allows for a fluidity that forums often lacked.

It seems to now be the default option for new communities getting started, and although it lacks the fully public nature of forums or sub-Reddits, does serve a useful role for mutual support and project updates among developers.

However, the Google Trends data shows interest in homebrew declining gradually from the period from 2009 to 2014, after which it has stayed at a steady plateau – so although new social media technologies are expanding the sophistication of homebrew communities, they are not contributing to a growing interest in homebrew among the public more broadly.

While the causes might be multiple, it’s hard to deny that the online era has been a serious boon for homebrew development. Consoles that hadn’t seen new releases for at least a decade now receive regular fresh content, much of it produced to professional standards. So while it might no longer be receiving the surge in fresh interest it once did, and there are challenges on the horizon, homebrew – at least for retro systems – appears to be a healthier state than at any previous point in its history.

CHAPTER 14

So You Want to Make a Homebrew Game?

If you’ve reached this point in the book you probably find the topic of homebrew development sufficiently interesting that you might have considered making your own. Or you’ve already made a game and you’re skimming through to see if I’ve quoted you somewhere. If the former, then that’s step one – congratulations.

Making your own game is rarely a straightforward undertaking, even with recent advancements in the resources available to the solo developer. Homebrew offers additional challenges even on top of that and you’ll need to answer a few questions before you begin. Happily, this chapter should provide some useful tips on how you can get started.

1: Have an idea

This seems obvious, and is in many respects the easy part. However, coming up with an idea that can sustain a full game, is engaging enough to be worth making, isn’t totally derivative of an existing idea, and is within your technical skill to create? That’s something a bit trickier.

If you’re stuck, the best place to start is always with the primary gameplay loop. Consider what the player will be doing second to second in gameplay, and what challenges they will face as part of that. If  everything else in your game is terrible, a strong primary loop can save it. Once you’ve worked that much out, then the secondary loop (what goal the player works towards minute to minute) and the tertiary loop (the player’s developing experience through the whole game) can grow naturally from there.

This is solid game design advice whatever system you’re working on, but with homebrew games, the challenges in designing a primary loop can be in the hardware, which is seldom the case for a solo developer working on a modern console, who would have to work incredibly hard, or write utterly dreadful code, to use up all the available resources of a PS5 or a modern gaming PC. You aren’t going to be able to create a first-person shooter for the NES1 or cram a forty-hour RPG onto a Game Gear cartridge.

But a top-down adventure game for the Game Boy, with the player collecting puzzle items and talking to characters? That might just be possible.

2: Build your skills

As the earlier chapters attest, the homebrew development experience can be wildly different for different systems. In general, you face two barriers  – system complexity and availability of resources (although these are not separate issues). With some exceptions – essentially, those systems recent enough to have export plugins for Game Maker Studio 2 or Unity – you’ll be starting your homebrew journey on a well-documented and popular console made in the 1990s.

If you’re a real novice to programming, a package like GB Studio can be an excellent start, as it requires very little coding knowledge and is largely visual. It can be used to export a working Game Boy ROM with very little fuss, and the lofi visuals will make the sprite design process relatively painful.

If you’re lacking direction or experience, it is almost certainly worth looking into joining a Game Jam. These time-limited challenges are a favourite for new developers because they give you a set of clear parameters to work within, which can be a lot less daunting than starting completely from scratch. There’s a good chance they can direct you towards useful resources, and failing that your fellow participants may be able to help.

If you’re feeling a little more advanced, you can check out some of the systems for which Adventure Game Studio titles are supported. As of 2021, common adventure game emulator ScummVM (ported to many, many systems) will run AGS games created with version 2.5 or later.2

AGS is not quite the straightforward system that GB Studio offers – you will need to learn its scripting language, and it’s an altogether more powerful and flexible package – but it will get you thinking like a game designer, and it’s undeniably pretty cool to be able to run something you made using your DS or PSP.

For anything more complex than that, you’ll need to check out the relevant systems’ homebrew scenes to find SDKs and tutorials (plenty of which are on YouTube if you value a video walkthrough). Fair warning, it’s likely you will need to learn a proper programming language at least to a reasonable level in order to get going.

Happily, tutorials are plentiful online, and once you’ve grasped the basics you should be able to find specialist documentation and advice for your specific platform. A  very common language for homebrew is C, which is probably the best place to start. If  you’re feeling particularly hardcore you can learn how to program in Assembly, as the earliest homebrew developers had to do  – but libraries and compilers for C are happily now available for most systems – with a few others accommodating alternative languages such as Pascal or Lua.

3: Get something made

It definitely will not hurt to keep your ambitions limited and sane. Remember, this game doesn’t have to blow anyone away, particularly if it’s your first. Better to get something finished and out than slave away on a complicated project only you will ever play.

One place to start can be finding existing projects that have published their source code online. Start small, change lines of code and sprites and find out how it all fits together. As you grow in confidence you’ll be able to replace larger bits of game logic and create something more uniquely yours. It  wouldn’t be very respectful to publish it for profit and claim the code as yours, so it never hurts to credit your influences, but this can be a great way to get started and to build your confidence.

You’re likely to need to use an emulator for testing your game as you build it  – otherwise loading and unloading files onto your console is going to get tiresome – although getting your game to run on real hardware is part of the challenge!

4: Get feedback and iterate

Like most creative endeavours, your game isn’t going to be perfect the first time. Ask friends or members of the scene to play and give feedback on what you’ve made. Try and ask people who will be constructive – not just telling you whether or not they liked it, but ideally able to identify what they liked or disliked, and why. It’s exceptionally hard for developers to do QA on their own games, simply because they’re so familiar with the mechanics by the time it’s done that it seems like second nature.

Remember, you may have a good reason for having done something unorthodox, but it’s helpful to be able to explain that if asked. The best-case scenario is to get to the point where it’s so obvious nobody needs to ask!

5: Keep polishing

Once you have a viable game, think about how you can make it shine. There will be all sorts of tweaks, visual, gameplay or otherwise, to take your product from stick men interacting against a blank background to a more finished product. Small touches like screen shaking, particle effects, and quality sound can really make a game feel immersive.

6: Move on

Some creators will tinker for years on a single project, and that can create some impressive results  – think of Toby Fox’s Undertale, Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn, or Eric Barone’s Stardew Valley, all of which took dedicated and ongoing work from single creators. The odds are, though, that you won’t be that lucky. That’s okay!

Ideas are the most common thing in the industry, but making them happen is the hard part. Once you’ve produced one game, it’ll become a lot easier to use the skills and experience you’ve acquired to make more. At some point, you’ll want to draw a line under your game, call it done, and move on to the next project.

CHAPTER 15

The Future of Homebrew

Through the many conversations I’ve had with developers about this book, there’s been a common concern about what the future of homebrew looks like. Eventually components fail and break, and only those for popular systems will be profitable for aftermarket manufacturers to produce.

Pico-8 showcasing its easy level creation utilities

Even if emulation keeps games for old systems playable, eventually nostalgia’s wandering eye will move on. Homebrew has been experiencing years in the sun because the rise of the systems that make it viable have coincided with the twenty-to-thirty-year nostalgia window converging on the mid-’90s consoles whose manufacturers limited creators’ dreams at the time.

The homebrew phenomenon is not going to go quietly back into its box, but it’s clear that if it is to survive, it will have to adapt and change. In this chapter, I’ll look at some of the potential solutions, their advantages and drawbacks, and consider where we go next.

PICO-8 and Voxatron: The fantasy consoles

Whether it’s been from hobbyists creating a Flash game repository for the Wii or the quixotic attempt to breathe new life into the Tiger Game.com, it’s clear there is a common through line of what we might call the Homebrew Mindset. It’s a mode of thinking that rejects conventional channels of creativity, embraces the small and bespoke, and doesn’t strictly care if the thing they want to make reaches a huge audience or entertains a few dozen forum dwellers.

There are few better examples of such a mindset than PICO-8. Described as a ‘Fantasy Console’ by its creator, Tokyo-based developer Joseph White, better known by his internet handle Zep, PICO-8 is a virtual console with all the trappings that make a console unique – a development environment, machine specifications, and a lo-fi, 8-bit ‘feel’ that is instantly recognisable to the initiated. What makes it distinct is that none of it is tangible – it feels too dismissive of what is clearly a labour of love to describe it as not real.

‘Although it was fun to think about what a real PICO-8 might look like, I never felt it would benefit from having an official physical form,’ Zep explained in a feature in the official PICO-8 zine released in 2015.

‘Choosing specs was more about encouraging a certain design culture and development experience rather than being realistic or plausible. This was also true of the choice to limit controls to DPAD and 2 buttons, but a nice side effect is that users might be able to build their own PICO-8s with integrated controllers more easily one day.’

Games are distributed as virtual ‘cartridges’  – encoded into PNG-format image files, including unique cartridge art, which can be loaded as one would slot games into a real NES. There’s a unique and recognisable PICO-8 style, defined by its limited but bright and warm 16-colour palette and the low-resolution 128 × 128 display.

Despite nine years of development work, PICO-8 is still self-consciously small scale and other than hosting the game that grew into 2018 indie hit Celeste, few of its more popular titles would ring a bell for a casual video game fan. It is deliberately backward-looking in its presentation, but there is much about the system that represents the frontiers of digital creative thinking.

In a games industry where the cutting edge of mainstream technology is simply unobtainable for all but teams of thousands with budgets of millions, the way forward for hobbyists seems to be increasingly to drop out and join the new digital underground where homebrew dwells.

Arguably, of course, PICO-8 games are not homebrew – they are endorsed by the console’s creator, and most are hosted officially via the system’s Bulletin Board System – but in their retro style, the conscious harkening back to a perceived lost age of hobbyist development, and their punk rock embrace of the hard road to achieving a creative vision, they certainly share the homebrew mindset.

Certainly this was what Zep had in mind when first nursing the fantasy console concept: ‘The feeling of creating programs for those machines is a visceral childhood memory ranking right up there with the smell of the macrocarpa tree I climbed with my first girlfriend, or the metallic taste of blood after crashing my bike on a gravel path when I was 8,’ he wrote in 2015.

‘There was something about plotting large colourful pixels and punching in programs on a large clunky keyboard that resonated with my 8-year-old brain. The idea of turning on the computer and seeing anything except a prompt inviting the beginning of a new program would have seemed absurd – it was meant to be just you, the program, and the inky black canvas.’

Four decades on, this still adequately sums up the motivation and the draw of hobbyist development for many of those I’ve spoken to in the homebrew scene.

Everything to do with Pico-8 oozes lo-fi charm.

What makes the idea of fantasy consoles intriguing is their potential for expansion as the eyes of nostalgia crowds drift away from real consoles, or the inevitable march of time pushes some systems into rarity. A  fantasy console has the capability of capturing the vibe of an era of gaming defined by the boundaries of contemporary consoles, but without those limitations. At present they’re simple virtual machines like Pico-8, but there’s no inherent reason that a 16-bit, 2.5d or early polygonal environment couldn’t also be created, given enough time.

Evercade

An affordable handheld by Blaze Entertainment, the Evercade became available in May 2020 – not an optimal time for supply chains and incomes as the coronavirus pandemic hit worldwide, but perfect for guaranteeing a captive audience. While unofficial retro handhelds are nothing new, the Evercade has an air of legitimacy to it lent by its games coming on officially sanctioned cartridges, usually in the form of collections of games by specific developers, from Atari to the Oliver Twins of Dizzy the Egg fame. This not only means its games feel ‘proper’ but they also offer a publishing environment (albeit a small one) that generic Android-based systems can’t.

The Analogue Pocket’s bundling with GB Studio opens up new vistas for small-scale developers to realise their ideas

The system has played host to several homebrew titles originally developed for other systems, including a two-pack containing the Mega Drive’s Xeno Crisis and Tanglewood, as well as the Indie Heroes Collection featuring fourteen homebrew titles for a variety of systems.

While it probably lacks some of the charm of hooking up an old CRT television, and is primarily a retro gaming device, the existence of hardware like the Evercade offers a viable alternative route to publication that doesn’t require porting to more advanced systems (as the console runs games through emulation) but still offers a reasonable system of commercialisation without the need for large-scale crowdfunding bids and expensive cartridge production runs.

Analogue Pocket

Superficially, Analogue’s very pleasingly shiny new handhelds might look like they belong in the same category as the Evercade, albeit with nicer housing. However, unlike other handheld retro systems, there’s no emulation involved with the Analogue Pocket – indeed, flash carts won’t run on it, so keen are the manufacturers not to be seen as a device for pirates. Instead, the Pocket runs real Game Boy, Game Boy Color, GBA and Game Gear games using real hardware, with the addition of a lovely backlit screen and modern rechargeable battery.

This might be primarily a system for retro enthusiasts generally, but its partnership with GB Studio is the most interesting angle. Games created with the program can be played on the system with no problem, opening up homebrew further without the funds or inclination to start manufacturing their own cartridges to distribute their games. The itch.io tag for Made with GB Studio already contains over 350 games at time of writing (even if the impressive are mixed with the Starfox slashfic titles) and that total is likely to continue rising if the Analogue Pocket takes off.

For those keeping count, that’s a homebrew library around one third of the number of official games  – a ratio bettered by very few other systems, and then only by those with truly tiny back catalogues. For good or ill, homebrew is going mainstream on the Game Boy, and it seems like only a matter of time until other systems catch up.

The largely unreleased Jim Power: The Lost Dimension.

Unreleased games – a reliable source of funding

In 2017, Homebrew publishers Piko Interactive acquired more than sixty abandoned intellectual properties from the likes of Infogrames, GT Interactive, Ocean, Legend Entertainment, Beam Software, Accolade, Hasbro and Microprose, according to an interview in 2018 in Gamesindustry.biz.1

The publisher first attracted attention in 2013 with their crowdfunding campaign for the Super 4 in 1  Multicart, a collection of four homebrew titles for the SNES, which was a modest success with $15,000 raised  – and cartridges soldered by hand before being sent out to backers. Since then, their attention has primarily been focused on those abandoned titles, which have proved far more popular.

Although generally middling games in their own right, they appeal to the collector’s instinct for completionism – the sense that a console isn’t truly done until even the games that never saw the light of day are out in the wild.

Crucially, because they attract not just homebrew enthusiasts but the broader retro crowd, they’re significantly more potent in crowdfunding terms, and Piko has since completed more ports and re-releases, most recently French-developed SNES game Jim Power, brought to worldwide release alongside a newly developed NES port.

This provides one possible avenue for how homebrew can provide itself with a stable revenue stream to enable new development – channelling the enthusiasm for the truly retro into the ability to take risks with new projects that push at the boundaries of their systems.

As for Piko themselves, they seem to be on board with the effort to release lost games mostly for its admirable archival benefits. Although they are now pivoting towards a focus on unreleased games over homebrew, it’s a model and a motivation that other homebrew publishers could stand to take to heart.

‘We pretty much do what we do because we love these platforms,’ they told GamesIndustry.biz.

‘We grew up with these games, and they left such impact in our lives – and other gamers’ lives – that we believe we don’t need the next best console. We also didn’t have a lot of disposable income back in the day, because we were kids, so I was not able to play about 98 per cent of the games released in the ’80s and ’90s.

‘One big reason why we do what we do is because there are thousands of game titles that did not make it to America, or for one reason or another got cancelled, or just didn’t have the marketing budget to be known on the scene.

‘So we invest our time and money on piling up these unheard of or forgotten titles, and making them available commercially for people curious about the history of gaming. The games industry is weird, it’s not all fun and games like we thought it was when we were kids. It is mostly businessmen and women in suits discussing purchase and sales agreements, or how to squeeze more money out of consumers. We are not really part of that, or entirely part of that; we want to bring cool old games and projects to people, who without our involvement would probably have never seen or heard of these games.’

A Homebrew Manifesto for the 2020s

As the homebrew movement continues to grow – fitfully in places, patchily depending on the system, but grow nevertheless – it’s important to reflect at the close of this book on what it is that the scene seeks to achieve, and what it needs to do it.

There are bright spots and areas of risk, and how we approach both will set the tone for the new generation of homebrew enthusiasts. After researching and writing this volume, I feel more sure than when I started of how we should proceed. Here, in seven short points, is the Homebrew Manifesto:

1. Keep pushing for hardware openness

A huge proportion of the time spent in the homebrew scene is spent on taking systems apart and reverse engineering them to see how they work.

Examples from the history of homebrew, from Wonderswan’s embrace of the Wonderwitch development kit to the explosion of indie game development brought about by AGS and GMS, to the release of the Analogue Pocket and its compatibility with GB Studio, shows us that when people are given access to their own hardware and the ability to make games, they won’t just create, but they’ll create well.

The restrictions on users creating their own work for consoles is an antiquated legacy of the fears of the crash of 1983, but video games have moved on. We no longer have a fragile and cautious user base that would be scared off by the risk of low-quality titles – games are cheap, plentiful, and the audience is huge, enthusiastic, and robust.

Manufacturers should know and understand that they will benefit if they are seen to be pro-consumer, and that it will give their systems a legacy long beyond their lifespan as a flagship console.

2. Make the games you want to play

Indie acclaim is doled out less readily than it once was when indie game development was a novelty in the mid-2000s, but it’s still possible to make a big splash with your game. However, there’s no guaranteed winning formula, as the developers of many unsuccessful roguelike and soulslike games will tell you.

Especially in the homebrew space, fame and riches are a vanishingly small commodity, unless your product is either ground-breaking (as in the case of Pier Solar) or extremely polished and pitched just right (Goodboy Galaxy). Even then, sales will likely be a small fraction of what you could achieve on a modern system.

However, that can’t be your only goal. Fine enough as those ambitions are, if you’re making games you’re passionate about, and which appeal to genres, mechanics, settings and stories that you want to experience, the quality will be higher and you’ll feel more energised to keep creating. And, while the nature of gaming demand can be capricious, there is a tendency for quality to will out – making success more likely in the end.

3. Don’t fall into the nostalgia trap

It’s easy to get headlines and retweets by promising a demake or a tribute to a game you already love – it’s an appreciation for all the games on our old systems that is why we are all here.

But the best homebrew, and ultimately the games with the most sticking power beyond their novelty value, will be the original games that take the original elements we like and build on them, even incorporating innovations in game design that post-date the consoles they appear on.

Homebrew has the potential to be not just a nostalgic curiosity but a serious platform for creative art, and to do that it must continue to be forward looking.

4. Share your work

A huge amount of the difficulty in getting started with homebrew is the lack of documentation relative to other types of programming. Want to learn Unity or Game Maker Studio? Easy – there are hundreds of tutorials and thousands of assets out there to help you along the way. But getting started on the SG-1000? That’s a trickier proposition.

Creating repositories of knowledge to help others get going is a simple but incredibly helpful way you can get new games off the ground – and communities on Discord and forums, public releases of source code and creating your own tutorials are great ways to do so.

If the state of contemporary game development tells us anything, it’s that there’s almost always a way to make a task easier for people attempting it in the future. As several of the homebrew developers in this book have shown, making a tool to help create or interpret your own graphics for a console’s technical whims is an act that can help those who come after you. Every hour that’s saved hacking away in Assembly or working out grid references for pixels is an hour that can be put into writing story, creating new mechanics or designing fantastic new worlds.

5. Push into new scenes

As scenes like the Game Boy or Dreamcast become more popular, their market also becomes more crowded. This isn’t a bad thing, as it raises the bar and earns more recognition, but it also means that other consoles can sit by the wayside.

There’s no inherent reason that systems like the GameCube should be so quiet when recent successes in the indie sphere show there’s a clear pent-up demand for GameCube-style games, for example.

This is the harder path to travel, because these scenes are at an earlier stage of development and often require the early work of reverse engineering the console to be done from scratch, but if the more talented developers can make it work, others will follow.

6. Work across scenes

It’s quite notable that although there are some developers who work across multiple systems and seem to just love the challenge of computer science, it’s common for different consoles’ scenes to be siloed off, with the major players in each only focusing on their own area.

This can be quite self-defeating, since many systems use similar code and have comparable capabilities, and therefore knowledge of one can transfer more easily than might have been assumed.

7. Don’t be a platform elitist

The reality is that most players don’t care about hardware  – they care about the emotions, sensibilities and tropes they associate with an era of gaming, perhaps, but mostly they are agnostic about where they play the games they love.

As such, releasing your game for modern systems too can be a great way to attract attention to your title without requiring players to dig around in their attic or get set up on an emulator. Many of the most successful homebrew games  – Pier Solar, Intrepid Izzy, Infinity – have done this, both as a way to regularise and stabilise their income streams after successful Kickstarter campaigns, and as a marketing exercise to bring attention beyond those impressed by homebrew.

After all, if you’re capable of making a game for a retro system, you’ll almost certainly find it easier to get it running on a more powerful and user-friendly console or on PC, too. GB Studio even makes this super easy by providing an export option for web using HTML5, so you can throw it up on itch.io with no barriers at all.

Glossary

Abandonware: Finished or partially finished software whose copyright holder has either relinquished or no longer enforces their ownership, and for which no official support is offered. Software development kits for extinct consoles are an example of abandonware.

Assembler: Similar to a compiler, but converts an assembly language into machine code.

Assembly: A  programming language for a specific piece of hardware giving direct instructions to the machine. A very direct and inefficient way of coding, but necessary in the early stages of many homebrew scenes.

C: An early but still very popular programming language first created in 1972. Forms the basis for many current homebrew libraries.

Chiptune: Musical genre composed of, or notably integrating, sounds produced by a dedicated sound chip, rather than sampled music or that using a SoundFont, such as MIDI music.

Compiler: Software that makes a user’s code readable as an executable file. In the homebrew community a compiler will often produce a ROM or ISO.

Emulator: A  piece of software that runs code originally intended for a different, non-compatible platform, most often by simulating required hardware components.

FC: Family Computer, or Famicom. Nintendo console released in 1983. Later released in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

Firmware: A console’s operating system. Different versions of console firmware may have different exploits for enabling or accessing homebrew software.

Flash: Vector animation format originally developed by Macromedia and later purchased by Adobe. Its interactive features led to widespread independent game development using the platform, primarily played embedded in web browsers. Discontinued in 2020.

Homebrew: Unlicensed software running on proprietary hardware such as a games console.

IDE: Integrated Development Environment. A software package that combines development tools, such as a code editor, debugger and compiler. Game Maker Studio is an example of a common IDE for game development, while Visual Studio (used by Unity) is another.

ISO: An file containing the image from a CD, DVD or other type of optical disc. Named after the International Organisation for Standardization’s ISO 9660 standard for storing data on CDs.

Modchip: a piece of unofficial external hardware that is connected to the console (typically to the motherboard) to enable additional function, ranging from removing region locking to enabling custom software.

NES: Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo console released in 1985 in the USA, and in 1986 in Europe.

Port: A conversion of a game to work on hardware for which it was not originally designed. Porting a game may involve very little work or extensive redevelopment, depending on the differences in hardware between consoles, and on the extent of access to original source code.

PSX: PlayStation, Sony console released in 1994.

ROM: Read Only Memory. In emulation, a ROM is a game file copied from original media that contains all the code required to run the game in the emulator. Strictly, a ROM refers to data from a cartridge, while an ISO refers to a game ripped from a disc, although ROM is often used as a catch-all term.

ROM Hack/Mods:* A  modification to an existing game created by editing existing code or injecting new code into the existing engine. ROM hacks and mods can range from minor cosmetic tweaks or restoration of removed content to conversions that fundamentally change the graphics, sound, plot or gameplay of the original game. They are usually not considered homebrew games in their own right, as they rely on copyrighted code and assets to work.

SDK: Software Development Kit. Technically refers to any suite of tools used for development, but in homebrew circles can more specifically refer to the official development kits produced by manufacturers, many of which have been leaked or otherwise released to the homebrew community.

SMS: Sega Master System, Sega console released in 1985.

SNES: Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo console released in 1991 in the USA, 1992 in Europe, and in 1990 in Japan as the Super Famicom (SFC).

Softmod: Modifying a console’s firmware without the need for external hardware modification. Examples include installing the Homebrew Channel on the Wii or 3DS. Vaporware: An abandoned software project, in this context usually a game, which was at some stage of development, but which was either unfinished or unreleased.

* In general, ROM hack is used for console games, while mods are the preferred term on PC. This may be because console games do not have freely accessible file structures, so games must be ‘hacked’ to gain access to code; alternatively, it may be because ‘mods’ as applied to consoles often applies to physical hardware modifications.

Endnotes and Bibliography

Foreword and Introduction

1. Wikipedia. ‘List of Most-Watched Television Broadcasts’. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 January 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-watched_television_broadcasts#United_States.

2. Jaroslav Švelch. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 25 December 2018, pp. 158–161.

3. Slovak Design Centre. ‘Playable English Localizations of Slovak Digital Games from the Late 80s Period’. Slovenské Centrum Dizajnu, 23  November 2021, scd.sk/clanky/playable-english-localizations-of-slovak-digital-games-from-the-late-80s-period. Accessed 3 January 2022.

4. Camper, Brett. Homebrew and the Social Construction of Gaming: Community, Creativity, and Legal Context of Amateur Game Boy Advance Development. 2005, dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/42227. Accessed 3 January 2022.

5. Edge Magazine. ‘Life after Death: Meet the People Ensuring That Yesterday’s Systems Will Never Be Forgotten  – Edge Online.’ Web.archive.org, 2  December 2014, web.archive.org/web/20141202205555/www.edge-online.com/features/life-after-death-meet-the-people-ensuring-that-yesterdays-systems-will-never-be-forgotten. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 1

1. Holmberg, Johannes. ‘An Example of Nintendo Source Code – Everything2.com’. Everything2.com, 31 July 2001, everything2.com/title/An+example+of+Nintendo+source+code. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. SMS Power. ‘Homebrew  – SMS Power!’ SMS Power www.smspower.org/Homebrew/Index?action=search&q=%24%3APlatform%3DSMS+order%3D%24%3AReleased&group=Homebrew. Accessed 3 January 2022.

3. A more thorough and technical explanation of the differing sound chips of the Master System, probably outside the scope of this book, can be found here: ‘The Second Sound Chip – the Sega Master System and the YM2413.’ Fatnick Industries, 14 March 2021, mechafatnick.co.uk/2021/03/14/the-second-sound-chip-the-sega-master-system-and-the-ym2413. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 2

1. Ludos, Doctor, and 2019. ‘Making a SEGA Mega Drive Genesis Game in 2019’. Game Developer, 19  October 2019, www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DoctorLudos/20191019/352537/Making_a_SEGA_Mega_Drive__Genesis_game_in_2019.php. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. ‘SNES Central: Miracle (ROM Intro)’. SNES Central, snescentral.com/article.php?id=1059. Accessed 3 January 2022.

3. ‘Aetherbyte – Home’., www.aetherbyte.com. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 3

1. Affinix Software. ‘Affinix Software’. Infinity-Gbc.org,infinity-gbc.org/index2.html. Accessed 3  January 2022.

Chapter 4

1. Skeleton Warriors developer Mick West has written an excellent, if fairly technical, blog post describing the challenges of developing for the Saturn in the mid-1990s: West, Mick. ‘Cowboy Programming» 1995 Programming on the Sega Saturn’. Cowboy Programming, 3 June 2010, cowboyprogramming.com/2010/06/03/1995-programming-on-the-sega-saturn. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. Dezaemon 2 is a Japan-only game released for the Saturn in 1997. It functions as a fairly in-depth creation tool for 2D shoot-’em-up games. While it is a commercial and manufacturer-licensed piece of software, and therefore mostly outside the scope of this book, it does have a fairly impressive library of around 200 games available. Sega Retro. ‘Dezaemon 2’. Sega Retro, 28 July 2021, segaretro.org/Dezaemon_2. Accessed 3 January 2022.

3. SaturnDave. ‘Developer Interview: XL2 on “HellSlave2”’. SHIRO Media Group, 26 April 2021, www.segasaturnshiro.com/2021/04/26/developer-interview-xl2-on-hellslave. Accessed 3 January 2022.

4. Arcade Attack. ‘Carl Forhan (Songbird Productions) – Interview’. Arcade Attack, 22 February 2019, www.arcadeattack.co.uk/songbird-productions-interview. Accessed 3 January 2022.

5. Barnholt, Ray, and 2011. ‘Keeping the Dream Alive: The Men behind Dreamcast Homebrew’. Game Developer, 12  May 2011, www.gamedeveloper.com/business/keeping-the-dream-alive-the-men-behind-dreamcast-homebrew. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 5

1. Wilde, Robin. ‘Dream On: Inside the Dreamcast’s Homebrew Scene’. Wireframe Magazine, Feb. 2019, wireframe.raspberrypi.org/articles/dream-on-inside-the-dreamcasts-homebrew-scene. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. Boob. ‘BOOB! – Interview with Dan Potter!’ www.boob.co.uk, www.boob.co.uk/docs/interviews/DanPotter.html.

3. ‘KallistiOS: Dreamcast(Tm) Scene’. Gamedev.allusion.net, gamedev.allusion.net/softprj/kos/scene.php. Accessed 3 January 2022.

4. Charnock, Tom. ‘A Quick Look at the NeoGeo Pocket Link Cable’. The Dreamcast Junkyard, 17 Nov. 2015, www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2015/11/a-quick-look-at-neogeo-pocket-link-cable.html. Accessed 3 January 2022.

5. At the time, Nintendo used to proudly boast that it sold all its systems at profit anyway – so sales figures were not as vital provided they didn’t crater developer interest. This boast has been quietly dropped in the subsequent decades, so it may be they have had to follow the market and sell systems as loss leaders like their rivals.

6. 8BitBrian. ‘Interview with Senile Team: Rage and Beatings Ensue’. Destructoid, 20 November 2006, www.destructoid.com/interview-with-senile-team-rage-and-beatings-ensue. Accessed 3 January 2022.

7. This isn’t a joke – it’s called Sonic RPG Console and it consisted of a single RPG battle against Shadow the Hedgehog. It  was ported to over a dozen systems. Sadly it appears to have now disappeared from the internet.

Chapter 6

1. Vijn, J. ‘TONC: Contents’. TONC, 24  March 2013, www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 7

1. GameBrew. ‘List of DS Homebrew Applications’. GameBrew, 12 November 2021, www.gamebrew.org/wiki/List_of_DS_homebrew_applications. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. Developing using languages like C++ is often referred to in coding communities as being ‘close to the metal’, because they send commands directly to hardware components.

Chapter 8

1. Yalon, Jonathan. ‘Chris Jones – Adventure Game Studio – Interview – Adventure Classic Gaming – ACG – Adventure Games, Interactive Fiction Games – Reviews, Interviews, Features, Previews, Cheats, Galleries, Forums’. www.adventureclassicgaming.com, 10 Jan. 2008, www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/324. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. Wallace, Chris. ‘GameMaker at 20 – “sometimes, Something Small and Nameless Is Way More Impressive than One of the Big Game Titles.”’ MCV UK, 4  December 2019, www.mcvuk.com/business-news/gamemaker-at-20-sometimes-something-small-and-nameless-is-way-more-impressive-than-one-of-the-big-game-titles. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 9

1. Legal action was brought early in the emulator’s life, with Sony claiming copyright infringement and keen to defend its licence fees. However, despite crushing legal fees, Bleem continued on until November 2001 – after the Dreamcast had itself been discontinued. For more, see: Rhodes, Tom. ‘Best Little Emulator Ever Made!’ The Escapist, 2 October 2007, www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/best-little-emulator-ever-made. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. 2.5D shooters from the 1990s serve as a particular treasure trove of these, from the relatively serious such as Brutal Doom (which has been in constant development for over a decade, piling additional gore and profanity onto Doom’s already unwholesome base game) to the puerile (hdoom, a pornographic total conversion with a confusing amount of effort put into it), to the trolling (Jamie’s Mod, a Half Life mod that replaces all the characters with late-2000s YouTube memes). A particular favourite is The Simpsons: Hit & Run Australia mod, which replaces all textures with the Aussie flag and the soundtrack with a plinky MIDI version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

3. Shamdasani, Pavan. ‘World’s Worst Video Game, Hong Kong 1997, Haunts Its Developer’. South China Morning Post, 20  January 2018, www.scmp.com/culture/arts-entertainment/article/2129690/developer-worlds-worst-video-game-hong-kong-1997-ends. Accessed 3 January 2022.

4. Gault, Matthew. ‘The True, Secret History of the Creepiest Cult Game Ever Made’. www.vice.com, 12  November 2019, www.vice.com/en/article/vb5k7a/the-true-secret-history-of-the-creepiest-cult-game-ever-made. Accessed 3 January 2022.

5. In 1993, a large seismic event and explosion were registered in the vicinity, which have led to some speculation that Aum managed to acquire a nuclear weapon. Due to its remoteness no reliable eyewitness accounts have emerged, and though reports are inconclusive, this appears to have in reality been either the result of a meteor strike or an earthquake.

Chapter 10

1. Simantov, Matthew. ‘Orlando Sentinel – Interview with the Creator of Bob’s Game – (Probably) the Biggest Game Ever Created by 1  Person’. Web.archive.org, 13  April 2009, web.archive.org/web/20090413015802/blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_videogames/2008/09/bobs-game-inter.html. Accessed 3 January 2022.

2. Ng, Keane. ‘Bob’s Game Developer Stages 100 Day Protest to Nintendo’. The Escapist, 22 December 2008, www.escapistmagazine.com/Bobs-Game-Developer-Stages-100-Day-Protest-to-Nintendo. Accessed 3 January 2022.

3. McElroy, Griffin. ‘Jilted Bob’s Game Creator Fights Back by Littering’. Web.archive.org, 12 June 2009, web.archive.org/web/20090612032020/www.joystiq.com/2009/02/01/jilted-bobs-game-creator-fights-back-by-littering. Accessed 3 January 2022.

4. GBATemp. ‘Bob’s Game Demo’. GBAtemp.net – the Independent Video Game Community, 31 March 2009, gbatemp.net/threads/bobs-game-demo.144323/page-2. Accessed 3 January 2022.

5. Thomsen, Michael. ‘Bob’s Game Kickstarter to Be Refunded after Developer Moves On’. Forbes, 24 January 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/michaelthomsen/2015/01/14/bobs-game-kickstarter-tobe-refunded-after-developer-moves-on/?sh=2b6a4e005400. Accessed 3 January 2022.

6. Williams, Samuel. ‘Nintendo’s 10  Most Infamous Shutdowns of Fan Games’. CBR, 16  July 2021, www.cbr.com/most-infamous-nintendo-fan-game-shutdowns. Accessed 3 January 2022.

7. Robertson, Adi. ‘Nintendo Shuts down Super Smash Bros. Tournament for Using Mods to Play Online’. The Verge, 20 November 2020, www.theverge.com/2020/11/20/21579392/nintendo-big-house-super-smash-bros-melee-tournament-slippi-cease-desist.

8. ‘Who Exactly Was Neimod?’ GBAtemp.net – the Independent Video Game Community, 8 Nov. 2015, gbatemp.net/threads/who-exactly-was-neimod.402491. Accessed 3 January 2022.

9. Maxwell, Andy. ‘Nintendo Conducted Invasive Surveillance Operation against Homebrew Hacker’. TorrentFreak, 23  December 2020, torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveillance-operation-against-homebrew-hacker-201223. Accessed 3 January 2022.

10. Nintendo of Europe. ‘Hacker Enforcement Proposal’. April 2013. Accessed from www.docdroid.net/b39lzeo/final-enforcement-proposal-neimod-4-5-13-pdf#page=6

11. Onanuga, Tola. ‘All That’s Wrong with Nintendo’s Heavy-Handed ROM Crackdown’. Wired UK, 18  October 2018, www.wired.co.uk/article/nintendo-roms-emulator-loveroms-loveretro-lawsuit. Accessed 3 January 2022.

12. Orland, Kyle. ‘Console Hackers Are Shocked after DOJ Arrests Prominent Mod-Chip Makers’. Ars Technica, 8 October 2020, arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/console-hackers-are-shocked-after-doj-arrests-prominent-mod-chip-makers. Accessed 3 January 2022.

13. The SNES Jr. was a miniaturised SNES released in Japan and the USA in 1997 and 1998 at a discount price to act as a budget games console.

14. Houghton, D., 2015. ‘The Retro VGS console isn’t bringing back a golden age. It’s stunting the future’. gamesradar. Available at: www.gamesradar.com/retro-vgs-console-isnt-return-golden-ageits-stunting-future. Accessed 12 January 2022.

15. Kemps, H., 2016. ‘Crowdfunded Game Console Is Made Out of Tape, Cardboard, and Fake Circuits’. Vice.com. Available at www.vice.com/en/article/8q8gpx/crowdfunded-coleco-chameleon-game-console-is-a-mess. Accessed 12 January 2022.

Chapter 11

1. Abandonware-Magazines. ‘Le Site Des Anciennes Revues Informatiques  – Www.abandonwareMagazines.org’. www.abandonware-Magazines.org, www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=6&page=presentation.

2. Crawley, Dan. ‘Consoles That Won’t Die: The Atari Jaguar’. VentureBeat, 25 April 2013, venturebeat. com/2013/04/25/consoles-that-wont-die-atari-jaguar.

3. eBay. ‘FIRST RELEASE 2013!! Another World – Atari Jaguar BRAND NEW!! ONLY 200 EVER MADE’’ eBay, 28 December 2020, www.ebay.com/itm/283425000664. Accessed 3 January 2022.

4. Sanglard, Fabien. ‘The Polygons of Another World: Game Boy Advance’. Fabiensanglard.net, 26 January 2020, fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_GBA/index.html. Accessed 3 January 2022.

5. The system was originally released in 1990, but was restricted to rental purchase by businesses such as hotels.

6. PlanetEmulation. ‘ROMs Neo Geo Pocket – SNK – Neo Geo Pocket Color – Public Domain’. Planet Emulation, www.planetemu.net/roms/snk-neo-geo-pocket-color-public-domain.

7. Squaresoft were among those who released games for the Wonderswan, making the console the first to receive handheld ports of Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy IV, several years before they arrived on the Game Boy Advance in 2004.

8. Video Game Kraken. ‘WonderSwan – WonderWitch – the Video Game Kraken’. Video Game Kraken, videogamekraken.com/wondersawn-wonderwitch.

9. PRNewswire. ‘Gizmondo Launch Brings London’s West End to a Standstill’. Web.archive.org, 4 March 2016, web.archive.org/web/20160304203905/www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/gizmondo-launch-brings-londons-west-end-to-a-standstill-154480145.html. Accessed 3 January 2022.

10. Aftonbladet. ‘Direktörerna Har Fått Långa Fängelsestraff’. Aftonbladet, 8 June 2007, web.archive.org/web/20070608100457/www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789,718447,00.html. Accessed 3 January 2022.

11. Erikson also competed in the Le Mans 24 in a Gizmondo-branded car in an attempt to promote the console. He broke down without completing the race. He would later be involved in a much more startling accident involving a 200mph Ferrari crash in Los Angeles, but that’s outside the scope of this book.

12. ten Brink, Wouter. ‘EDGELIB SDK’. GitHub, 26  May 2021, github.com/elementsinteractive/edgelib/blob/master/documentation/getting_started/gettingstarted_gizmondo.md. Accessed 3 January 2022.

13. Try the Gizmondo Homebrew Pack by hamie96, available at https://github.com/hamie96/Gizmondo-Homebrew-Pack

14. Tpot. ‘Game.com HDK’. GitHub, 2 September 2021, github.com/Tpot-SSL/GameComHDK. Accessed 3 January 2022.

15. Tpot. ‘Tetris GameCom’. GitHub, 13  March 2018, https://github.com/Tpot-SSL/Tetris_GameCOM. Accessed 3 January 2022.

16. Fandom Wiki. ‘Alex Herbert’. Vectrex Wiki, vectrex.fandom.com/wiki/Alex_Herbert. Accessed 3 January 2022.

17. Beyman, Alex. ‘Pushing the Virtual Boy to Its Absolute Limit!’ Predict, 15 January 2019, medium.com/predict/pushing-the-virtual-boy-to-its-absolute-limit-ef40bccb2529. Accessed 3 January 2022.

18. Planet Virtual Boy. ‘Development.’ Planet Virtual Boy, www.virtual-boy.com/development. Accessed 3 January 2022.

19. A more in-depth look at the Pippin’s hardware, proprietary licensing scheme and homebrew potential can be found on Keith Kaisershot’s blog: https://blitter.net/blog/2018/06/07/exploring-the-pippin-roms

Chapter 12

1. The PS3 also included a browser capable of running Flash, and WiiCade games were playable by connecting a Bluetooth or USB mouse, although no PS3-dedicated games seem to have exploited this capability.

Chapter 13

1. Sterling, Jim. ‘Game Dev Tycoon Turns Piracy Back on the Pirates’. Destructoid, 29 April 2013, www.destructoid.com/game-dev-tycoon-turns-piracy-back-on-the-pirates/#:~:text=Greenheart%20is%20reporting%2093.6%25%20piracy. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 14

1. The NES scene will now be writing furious letters and I will concede you theoretically could – there’s the obligatory demo of Doom for the NES – but you probably shouldn’t.

2. ScummVM. ‘ScummVM’. www.scummvm.org, 4  April 2021, www.scummvm.org/news/20210404. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Chapter 15

1. Dring, Christopher. ‘Why Release a New N64 Game in 2018?’ GamesIndustry.biz, 22 February 2018, www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-02-22-why-release-a-new-n64-game-in-2018. Accessed 3 January 2022.

Table of Contents

- Dedication
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Breaking the Seal
- Chapter 2 Doing What Nintendon’t
- Chapter 3 On the Move
- Chapter 4 The Turn to 3D
- Chapter 5 The New Millennium
- Chapter 6 Homebrew on the Advance
- Chapter 7 Handhelds Level Up
- Chapter 8 Developments in Development
- Chapter 9 Pushing the Boundaries
- Chapter 10 Brewing Up Trouble
- Chapter 11 Because We Can

- Chapter 12 The End of Homebrew (As We Know It)

- Chapter 13 The Scene

- Chapter 14 So You Want to Make a Homebrew Game?

- Chapter 15 The Future of Homebrew
- Glossary
- Endnotes and Bibliography