Homebrew Game Development and The Extra Lives of Consoles

By Robin Wilde

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 methods, enthusiasm and motivations behind the developers who are defying technical limitations and turning nostalgia into brand new gaming experiences for retro consoles.

Featuring exclusive interviews with developers behind homebrew hits and Kickstarter successes, as well as others working in the industry, the book dives into what makes the homebrew world tick, and explores some of the best, most innovative, and strangest titles gracing long-retired consoles.

As well as providing unique insight into obscure titles, Homebrew Game Development and The Extra Lives of Consoles explores the ongoing developments in this cottage industry, which are opening it up to more and more aspiring developers. Homebrew is an exciting new frontier for game development, and this book opens the door both for readers who were already interested but didn’t know where to start, and gamers who never knew this world existed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399072656

Robin Wilde

Robin Wilde is a freelance writer, graphic designer and independent game developer who has written for a range of gaming publications including Nintendojo, Wireframe and Fanbyte. He grew up as a die-hard GameCube fan in the UK, and now lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. When he's not gaming, he can be found on Twitter at @TheWildeRobin or on his portfolio at robinwilde.me.

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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