Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔓) RETRO UNLOCKED: Here it is—free to the public and open to comment from anyone. This research on the thriving NES homebrew scene (tag: #nesdev) took months, scores of hours, and (I'll add) much more money than I expected. I hope you'll share it widely! retrostack.substack.com/p/the-retro-to…

1/ As a cultural theorist as well as someone who teaches video games at the university level and has been a video game journalist for many years, I find the ever-evolving "homebrew" scene—which started in the 2000s but has blown up over the last few years—endlessly enthralling.

2/ Like many reading this, I grew up on games for the original NES.

After the Video Game Crash of 1983, it seemed as though Atari had sunk the concept of "video games" forever. Nintendo changed history with the NES; video games are now the world's largest entertainment industry.

3/ The notion that 25+ years later, indie development studios would be producing new content for a home video game console that *hasn't seen a licensed release in over a quarter-century* is fascinating not just from an industry standpoint but an artistic and cultural-theory one.

4/ Many dissertations could be written on the role of nostalgia, pleasure, the DIY ethos, and indie markets in contemporary art production. But the fact that retro gaming *took off* in a way it hadn't previously during the pandemic era makes this story a particularly rich one.

5/ While the NES "homebrew" scene has been around since the early 2000s, it wasn't until 2021 that it reached the size and scope that an article like this one could be written. And the essay preceding this (free and public) research attempts to frame why all of this matters.

6/ Consider: the world got the PlayStation 2 (and beyond), the XBox 360 (and beyond) and followups to any console that's ever been even marginally successful because a corporation decided it should be so. What we're getting now is "NES 2"—because *gamers* decided it should be so.

7/ This is a story about American (though not exclusively American) ingenuity, "personal economies", aftermarket art, and the unique blend of nostalgia and futurism that we find in metamodernism. The folks making these games in many—most—instances have other jobs in other fields.

8/ I get that we live in a world in which people are interested in what they're interested in, so folks who follow politics but not gaming will see the latter as perpetually irrelevant to them. As an academic, theorist, and journalist, my job is to see the story behind the story.

9/ Whether you like retro gaming or not—and I'm a big believer in the idea that many who *don't* just haven't tried it yet, assuming it won't be for them because of their age or whatever—the NES homebrew explosion is *objectively* interesting for what it tells us about our world.

10/ In any case, I hope—given that this article is free and public and can be commented on by anyone—you'll at least watch a few of the videos at the end of the article and marvel at these 8-bit games that were made by folks in the 21st c. in their spare time. It's quite a story!

PS/ I hope that if you read and enjoy the article you'll not only share it but tag anyone you think might be interested—whether a game studio, a retro gaming YouTuber, or just someone you know who loves retro games. I don't know even a tenth of the folks I should be tagging here!

PS2/ Everyone is free to comment below the article with games you'd like me to play that you don't see in this report—make sure you "Ctrl+F" first to see if they're there, and keep in mind I played *many* games that didn't make the ranking—but you can also do so here if you like!

(UPDATE) I've added some developers to the developer list; edited the "How to Play These Games" section; fixed typos caught by sharp-eyed readers; and begun my "To Play" list for the second edition of the ranking (already *28* games on it!) To suggest more, comment on this tweet!