Today, my wife and I visited her dad. In one of his many cabinets, all of them filled with trinkets from every part of his life, were two video game consoles. One of them being a Nintendo SNES, produced years before I was born, in pristine condition, considering its age. The grey color has degraded (to a different kind of grey), the accessories are probably long gone and neither a power brick, nor a controller were in sight. This is what you’d expect from a family keepsake, a piece of technology that has not been used in years.
The other console in that crowded cabinet is also Nintendo SNES, but not an original SNES, but a SNES Classic Mini, a device with the same looks and colors of the original, but slightly smaller and without the iconic opening to slot the game cartridge into. This device, being assembled close to 30 years after its neighbor, could not be more different than its lookalike, sporting modern connectors, and not relying on complicated internal circuits to play games via the cartridges, but rather emulating them on somewhat modern hardware. What Nintendo has done, is building a console in order to play old games, with the aim of emulating not games, but nostalgia in its player base, trying to get people, probably a bit older than I am, to remember what it was like playing games like Star Fox, F-Zero or Super Mario World on their family TV when they were young.
But there is also a completely different set of people. Groups of extremely talented artists, programmers and musicians These people have taken Nintendo’s approach and flipped it on its head. Itch.io, a popular platform for sharing indie games, so games made without a big publisher behind it, has been filled with entries not only trying to emulate the graphics of old Playstation one games (that weirdly enough are mainly horror games), but also games that were developed exclusively for old, classic consoles like the Gameboy (Classic, Color and Advance). These games come in all different shapes and sizes, beginning from little puzzle games, to full scale RPGs and demakes of other, completely different games, all the way to proper tools for producing audio. There seems to be an endless amount of games in every genre, made specifically for consoles you cannot even buy in stores anymore.
And here is why I believe we are being treated to this insane amount of content, because its fun developing these games. The times where programmers had to think in assembly, literally the language that machines talk in, just to develop small features in programs, are long gone. Tools like GB Studio enable taking that step to Gameboy development without reading through 30 years of documentation. The added limitations of the old hardware makes it easy to scope a game and give people the challenge of “how can I make a fun and compelling game on such a limited toolkit?” This small toolset also makes it amazing for game jams, competitions where contestants are given a fixed timeframe, ranging from hours, to days and sometimes even weeks to months. Itch.io makes it incredibly easy to both join and host game jams, fueling the competition and lowering the entry barrier a lot.
Whatever it is, ease of use, room for creativity or nostalgia for old times, these games, made both to imitate the look of oldschool titles and work natively on these classic handhelds, are a delight. Playing these games makes my day a bit better, even if they are usually limited to around an hour of gameplay.
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