It’s 2024, and the entire planet is occupied by modern consoles. All ? No, a handful of irreducible cartridges still resist. Even in the 21st century, developers continue to create games for retro consoles. This practice, the homebrewis taking advantage of the interest in retrogaming to carve out a niche in the sun.
Yann, for example, chosehomebrew for his next game. After having developed several adventure and investigation games alone, he wanted to continue with the same characters and make a prequel to one of his games, Inspector Waffles. A small success which gave him the rather original idea of extending his universe to the Gameboy. “I decided to tell a story in the past on a console from the past,” he summarizes.
Inspector Waffles, The Early Years takes up the codes of the investigation game, a top view reminiscent of Pokémon or Zelda released at the end of the 1990s. Yann used a modern tool, GBStudio, which allows development specifically for this console. “I’m a programmer, so it wasn’t an obstacle for me,” he explains. We must respect the limited possibilities of the console hardware, but thanks to these constraints, we avoid getting lost in development. »
Specialized manufacturers
But it is not Yann who will manufacture the cartridges which will contain his game. For that, he called on Broke Studio. Like others, this French publisher specializes in game publishing homebrew, as well as the logistics linked to the cartridges. The project starts from Antoine Gohin, who developed the game with two friends on NES Twin Dragons for an amateur competition in 2016. He decided to launch crowdfunding to offer his creation a real Nintendo cartridge. “The project was so popular that other developers asked that he publish their games,” describes Julien Boisseau, the other half of Broke Studios.
“We receive a lot of requests, one to three per week,” he continues. But there are only two of us and we focus on quality, so we can’t produce everything. » Same fight for assembly and components. Everything is done by hand, with quality chips – “On Ali Express, you can have voltage problems for example” – and even possibilities that did not exist in the 1990s, such as Wi-Fi compatibility for To play online. “We are aimed at a niche audience of retrogaming lovers, so we try to have the best possible quality for good prices,” says Julien Boisseau.
Today, Broke Studios sells 13 games homebrew for the NES on its own shop, as well as a few games for the Gameboy and the Sega Megadrive. “Besides that, we also support some self-published games that need help with physical cartridges, and we also sell components for those who would like to flash [imprimer sur cartouche] themselves their very small-run game,” adds Julien Boisseau.
Retrogaming as a refuge
For him, the interest in cartridges homebrew from the public joins the nostalgia for old games in general: “Since Covid, there has been more and more retrogaming. People started collecting as a safe haven. In any case, we have a lot more new buyers. »
Despite the craze for retro cartridges, it’s difficult to make a living from them. Like the majority of developers homebrewYann also offers Inspector Waffles, The Early Days on Steam, the distribution platform for digital games on PC. “There are a lot of developers homebrew, but there is a sort of glass ceiling which makes it difficult to live from it, he points out. But I managed to raise 25,000 euros thanks to Kickstarter, so it’s not just confidential either. » In addition to the Gameboy cartridge version, which remains an item for fans, Yann especially hopes to be able to distribute his game on the Nintendo Switch, a very modern console.