Whoa... I didn't even know these existed. This is linked from that page and is a pretty cool example of what it takes to make these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM. It's cool to see the Nintendo games are still being developed! I was 8yo when the NES came out and my mom saved up all her waitress money and bought me one that Christmas.
Basically all 8- and 16-bit consoles, as well as some later ones (such as the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and more recently the N64), have very active homebrew scenes at this point. There are even no-code options for some platforms [1] that have proven to be remarkably popular, to the point even McDonald's promotional game "Grimace's Birthday" was made in GB Studio and released in emulated form. The ease of manufacturing new PCBs and cartridges using modern parts has also led to a market for physical commercial homebrew releases, both through publishers and directly from developers.
Unfortunately, like many other hobby programming niches, most homebrew communities are currently dealing with the recent influx of low-effort vibe coded games that completely defeat the point of learning to work and be creative with limited hardware. Some started adopting strict no-AI stances, which is refreshing to see when seemingly every other community is going the other way; so far my own released work (mainly on the original PlayStation) is completely free of LLM contributions and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as I can.
I love the NES — probably my favorite console! I still enjoy playing the original games today on occasion.
I have a modest (curated) collection of about 60 games, but most are what I would consider some of the best titles for the system: Dragon Warrior 1-4, Mega Man 1-6, SMB 1-3, both Zeldas, Castlevania 1-3, Final Fantasy, Destiny of an Emperor, Guardian Legend, Faxanadu, Duck Tales — just to name a few of my favorites.
Just the other day I was thinking to myself that I should look to see what homebrew/modern third titles are out there an worth playing.
This is awesome! Tooling is often an underappreciated aspect of development. Better tooling allows for higher quality output at lower effort, and the tooling today for developing against older platforms would cause developers past to drool.
If you're curious about making NES games, there's literally never been a better time to start than today. Unless you count tomorrow...
My favourite example of this effect is the large expansion to Morrowind that is Tamriel Rebuilt. Their quality standards in the last few releases have been so high, the base game wouldn't pass them anymore. Yet their release tempo is increasing. Much of this is due to big effort by its loving developers, but some of it also comes down to improved tooling that just didn't exist a couple of decades ago.
There's a similar story around the old PDP computers. People with modern computers as tooling have managed to coax old PDP computers into doing things they always could, but which it was insurmountable to get them to do without the modern tooling.
I guess what I want to say by this diversion is this: if you don't know what project to take on in your spare time, develop tooling for an old platform you like. You'll enable others to make things we couldn't even dream of before.
Back when the NES mini went on sale and it was easy to add ROMs, I added a few homebrew games that were floating around at the time.
'Princess Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom' was the most acclaimed homebrew option, essentially a re-skin and level re-design of SMB3 with SMB2 Peach as the protagonist. So the solid gameplay remained, and the levels were HARD. Great work by the dev, and obviously a labor of love.
I'm thrilled to see that so many new and re-worked titles are out there, and even for sale. Great work by the community!
A hilarious detail in the game Estique is how its English manual is deliberately poorly "translated", and in the game itself, cut scenes are slightly censored in the English version just like Nintendo used to do it in the 1980s.
Back in the 90's, buying such a cartridge was a big decision, since a single one would cost the allowance for several months. And with no Internet and YouTube to run a search for "Haunted Haloween 85 NES", the only criteria for evaluating such a game in the physical flea market was the poster on the cartridge. Which, unlike the OPs which at least seem to pose a resemblance to the actual game, it had almost nothing to do with how the game will look.
Consequently I almost never got the good games and was utter disappointed after trying them. Fortunately there were neighbors who also bought and we exchanged cartridges, and so I found the best game I ever remember playing on such a console, Mighty Final Fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoUPvwCcUo8
Whoa... I didn't even know these existed. This is linked from that page and is a pretty cool example of what it takes to make these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM. It's cool to see the Nintendo games are still being developed! I was 8yo when the NES came out and my mom saved up all her waitress money and bought me one that Christmas.
Basically all 8- and 16-bit consoles, as well as some later ones (such as the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and more recently the N64), have very active homebrew scenes at this point. There are even no-code options for some platforms [1] that have proven to be remarkably popular, to the point even McDonald's promotional game "Grimace's Birthday" was made in GB Studio and released in emulated form. The ease of manufacturing new PCBs and cartridges using modern parts has also led to a market for physical commercial homebrew releases, both through publishers and directly from developers.
Unfortunately, like many other hobby programming niches, most homebrew communities are currently dealing with the recent influx of low-effort vibe coded games that completely defeat the point of learning to work and be creative with limited hardware. Some started adopting strict no-AI stances, which is refreshing to see when seemingly every other community is going the other way; so far my own released work (mainly on the original PlayStation) is completely free of LLM contributions and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as I can.
[1] https://www.gbstudio.dev
Thanks for sharing!
I love the NES — probably my favorite console! I still enjoy playing the original games today on occasion.
I have a modest (curated) collection of about 60 games, but most are what I would consider some of the best titles for the system: Dragon Warrior 1-4, Mega Man 1-6, SMB 1-3, both Zeldas, Castlevania 1-3, Final Fantasy, Destiny of an Emperor, Guardian Legend, Faxanadu, Duck Tales — just to name a few of my favorites.
Just the other day I was thinking to myself that I should look to see what homebrew/modern third titles are out there an worth playing.
So I’d say this post was actually perfect timing!
This is awesome! Tooling is often an underappreciated aspect of development. Better tooling allows for higher quality output at lower effort, and the tooling today for developing against older platforms would cause developers past to drool.
If you're curious about making NES games, there's literally never been a better time to start than today. Unless you count tomorrow...
My favourite example of this effect is the large expansion to Morrowind that is Tamriel Rebuilt. Their quality standards in the last few releases have been so high, the base game wouldn't pass them anymore. Yet their release tempo is increasing. Much of this is due to big effort by its loving developers, but some of it also comes down to improved tooling that just didn't exist a couple of decades ago.
There's a similar story around the old PDP computers. People with modern computers as tooling have managed to coax old PDP computers into doing things they always could, but which it was insurmountable to get them to do without the modern tooling.
I guess what I want to say by this diversion is this: if you don't know what project to take on in your spare time, develop tooling for an old platform you like. You'll enable others to make things we couldn't even dream of before.
Back when the NES mini went on sale and it was easy to add ROMs, I added a few homebrew games that were floating around at the time.
'Princess Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom' was the most acclaimed homebrew option, essentially a re-skin and level re-design of SMB3 with SMB2 Peach as the protagonist. So the solid gameplay remained, and the levels were HARD. Great work by the dev, and obviously a labor of love.
I'm thrilled to see that so many new and re-worked titles are out there, and even for sale. Great work by the community!
Do someone have a similar list for SNES, N64, PS1 or PS2?
A good follow-up to this is Frank Cifaldi’s 2019 talk about the NES’s continued usage as a platform. [1]
Or, if you were making a plug-and-play game device in the 2000s, it was often easy to use a clone NES SoC as a foundation.
[1] https://youtu.be/SHw763qRyJ8
Two modern NES games not on this list that I would also highly recommend:
Little Sisyphus https://youtu.be/to0rkV_SbMA
Böbl https://youtu.be/xBfvMA3tz9k
Agree! Also: What Remains: https://iodinedynamics.itch.io/whatremains
A video game essay rpg with a lot of tongue in cheek references to 80’s culture, gaming, coding etc.
How would I go about playing one of these, say on Mac or linux, or do I need hardware?
You need an emulator like Ares, Nestopia, FCEUX or Mesen.
A hilarious detail in the game Estique is how its English manual is deliberately poorly "translated", and in the game itself, cut scenes are slightly censored in the English version just like Nintendo used to do it in the 1980s.
Nice games. Wish I would have found those back in the day but no such luck.
Back in the 90's, NES clones were all the rage in Eastern Europe:
With ludicrous names like "Gold Leopard King" https://www.reddit.com/r/crappyoffbrands/comments/1ekwzx5/go...
Or mimicking a Sega Genesis package and console look, this is the one that was most popular in Romania and I had one too : https://gadget.ro/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/terminator2.jpg
There's still a ton of old cartridges for it on sale on the flea market: https://www.olx.ro/d/oferta/jocuri-clona-nes-dischete-casete...
Back in the 90's, buying such a cartridge was a big decision, since a single one would cost the allowance for several months. And with no Internet and YouTube to run a search for "Haunted Haloween 85 NES", the only criteria for evaluating such a game in the physical flea market was the poster on the cartridge. Which, unlike the OPs which at least seem to pose a resemblance to the actual game, it had almost nothing to do with how the game will look.
Consequently I almost never got the good games and was utter disappointed after trying them. Fortunately there were neighbors who also bought and we exchanged cartridges, and so I found the best game I ever remember playing on such a console, Mighty Final Fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoUPvwCcUo8