Thread by @frankcifaldi

As many of you know, I am fascinated by plug and play and handheld systems that secretly house the guts of the original NES, especially when they have new games written for them. Today a new one was announced: Coleco's Berzerk and Frenzy systems (thread): kickstarter.com/projects/90331…

These are the new systems, modeled after the old Coleco tabletop arcade units from the 80s. This is the current* Coleco's second round of these units, after a successful campaign last year.

*The original Coleco went bankrupt in 1988, "Coleco" today has nothing to do with it.

These ports were done by the extremely talented Bob "PacManPlus" Decrescenzo. Bob also wrote the Rainbow Brite NES game that Coleco is currently selling. He previously ported Frenzy to 7800 - so this new NES version is a port of a port! Proof: atariage.com/forums/topic/2…

There have been new commercial NES games written for the system every year since 1983. I wrote a thread kinda recently about it here. And I'm probably going to keep tweeting about it forever because they keep making more, and I keep finding new old ones!

Again, just...think about how weird this whole market is.

This is a 1982 game ported to a 1983 system.

And they're intentionally covering that up.

Also there's a market for this.

This system has been commercially viable FOR THIRTY SIX YEARS.

The system was so simple that it was cloned way the hell back in the 80s, and that cloned system got cheaper and cheaper to make, to the point where it's the 2000s de facto toy computer.

Now merge that with the NES being popular in homebrew communities and, boom, Coleco arcades.