Seth

The Indie NES Game Hall of Fame is now live! https://retrostack.substack.com/p/the-indie-nes-game-hall-of-fame

No, this one takes most of my free time as is alas

@Scrobins is candidly one of my heroes. I have the utmost respect for those who have toiled in this space for years cataloging and curating and educating. I don’t know where NES homebrewing would be without him—I think he’s that much of a hero for the work he has done, and I’m not just saying that. It’s deeply felt.

It is called exactly what it is: the largest archive of its kind in the world, and an archive that includes all games presently detectable by the only New York Times-bestselling journalist working in the field. It is professional work product being given to you for free so that you can complain about the most significant act of service journalism in the subfield rather than simply enjoy the hundreds and hundreds of homebrews I have found for you that (in fact) you most certainly did not know about previously. If you were in this for the games rather than the drama you would go play some of the games rather than act the way you have acted here, which is fabulously shabbily. My semipro take, as someone who used to work professionally with antisocial people as a public defender, is that you have some sort of oppositional defiance disorder-adjacent or anxiety-group condition that causes you to want to be cantankerous and stir the pot. But again, if you actually cared about homebrews—as your efforts to produce them suggest you in fact do—a better use of your time right now, and specifically in this thread, would be to make a list of what the archive is missing rather than mischaracterize my hundreds and hundreds of hours of free labor as a professional art critic and video game journalist. But you are not going to do that, are you? Because that would be productive and drama-reducing and a service to your peers rather than spiteful and petty and noxious. I do not mind the fact that I am an attorney, journalist, editor, academic, and nonfiction author and that other people are doctors or engineers or homebrewers or fighter pilots. Meanwhile, the fact that I am also a professional art critic and art historian and you are not appears to upset you to the point that you want me to mislabel the product of years of professional research as nothing more than a blog entry. I am not going to do that, anymore than I would pretend that your homebrewing efforts are a Cabbage Patch Kid. I can only take solace in the fact that I have met many people like you before; you are fueled by conflict and drama and the unhappiness of others, a vampiric tendency I realize I have fed here. My own inclination is to work on projects that benefit other people, as I have been in public service in various manifestations for 30 years now. I hope that, having feasted on this drama you have worked so hard to create, and the disrespect for my professional work you have so gleefully spread throughout this thread, you can move on to being toxic in someone else’s perimeter. Your particular act may be extremely lucrative in this subcommunity as a matter of transient cultural capital, but it does not do anything for me or the serious work I am doing in an effort to benefit homebrewers like you.

Hey there all, last chance to vote! I’ve completed the next volume of the archive of every NES homebrew game ever released—the current tally is 1,750—and would like to bring it out soon, so since votes have dried up here I’m planning to wrap up the open voting period early. That said, I’m happy to take any additional votes that come in in the next 24 hours or so. It’s really easy to vote, just give me (in a comment in this thread) 10 NES homebrews you would recommend anyone new to the scene play. The next open voting will be in 2026. Thanks to everyone who has participated in this one, or will participate over the next 24 hours.

Hey there all, last chance to vote! I’ve completed the next volume of the archive of every NES homebrew game ever released—the current tally is 1,750—and would like to bring it out soon, so since votes have dried up here I’m planning to wrap up the open voting period early. That said, I’m happy to take any additional votes that come in in the next 24 hours or so. It’s really easy to vote, just give me (in a comment in this thread) 10 NES homebrews you would recommend anyone new to the scene play. The next open voting will be in 2026. Thanks to everyone who has participated in this one, or will participate over the next 24 hours.

It has to be theoretically playable on a standard NES (I only add the word “theoretically” here because of your second question, the answer to which is that yes, ROM-only homebrews are fine, provided that they could in theory be put on a cart and played in a standard NES).

Great list, thank you! It has been added to the votes. I think people will be very excited to see the Hall when it comes out in May. (And keep those votes coming, all!)

Understood. Thank you for the feedback.

I will just add this: The project I’m working on is about celebrating those who are keeping the NES alive after its lifespan. That includes developers, gamers, collectors, critics, journalists, publishers, composers, archivists, and many other groups of persons working really hard to do a very hard thing: keep a dead console alive. That is an idiosyncratic and surprising and arguably even unprecedented (at least in its present scope) task that they have taken on, and an honorable one, entirely different from the project that small independent NES publishers took on during the lifespan of the NES in the 1980s and 1990s. Anyone who wants to run a completely different project that celebrates unlicensed NES games released during the lifespan of the system is free to do that. Second, under the definition of “homebrews” both hacks and original aftermarket games qualify. We cannot say that the difference is in artistic merit because I have played the very worst indie aftermarket NES games and the very best homebrewed NES hacks and there is infinitely more artistry present in the latter. The difference, and I say this as an attorney, is in the legality of hacks versus aftermarket indie games. But from a cultural standpoint, there is natural crossover between the hacking and hack gamer community and what is somewhat erroneously referred to as the “homebrew” community (erroneously because that term is being used more narrowly than its definition) that is actually not happening because of a soft mutual contempt. Homebrewers of original games view hacks as easy to make, disrespectful of gaming as an enterprise, and generally of lower quality than any decent entirely new game. Meanwhile, because those working on hacks are working with some of the top IPs in the history of digital art, it is easy for them to look down on original games as being inferior by and large in their gameplay, level design, and so on (particularly given that a good hack takes an already incredible game to an entirely new level). What I said here was that there are probably thousands of hacks out there, and that my historical archive has identified 30—such a vanishingly small percentage as to almost be a rounding error—that have added so much custom code to existing code, well beyond mere sprite hacks, that they deserve to be seen as original homebrew *equivalents*. For that to be seen as objectionable in a community that had no problem accepting as “homebrews” all manner of illegal ports like Ultimate Frogger Champion and E.T. and the literally scores of additional ones listed at RETRO is a little rich. I understand that gatekeepers want to pretend that we are not working on a spectrum here but in two entirely different camps. But with respect, I have played more homebrews and hacks and ports and demos and music carts and tech demos and utilities and on and on and on for the NES than anyone here, and there is no question about the fact that what we are discussing is a spectrum and not a binary. And that is a good thing, because by recognizing that we are working with a spectrum we can bring two communities together that have a lot in common. So please understand how little interest I have in the gatekeeping that I think some people are interested in here. Not because I think I am better than that gatekeeping, because gatekeeping is something we all do and find enjoyable when it is appropriate to the task before us. But I’m doing the work I am doing as a historian and journalist and gatekeeping of the particular sort being discussed here is not appropriate or useful for the task before me, especially not when it is predicated on all sorts of historical inaccuracies. I am happy discuss all this at more length in a thread that is not intended for a completely separate purpose. I really hope we can return to people voting because that is going to have much more of a long-term impact on the community. Why? Because it celebrates the work of others rather than our own ability to craft an argument.

There is just too much factually incorrect about this statement, both in terms of changing what I said to you and changing what I said to others and then adding things I never said that I think I am just going to keep my focus on the purpose of this thread, which is compiling votes. If you ever find yourself creating a Hall of Fame that is an attempt to both bring multiple communities together and advocate for those communities and evangelize to those outside those communities about why they should pay attention to those communities, I think you will understand how frustrating it is to have the very careful statements I made about what is or is not allowed and why turned into whatever it was that you just said. But again, given that this is a community service project, and given that the purpose of that community service project is to promote something we all care about to other people, I really would appreciate it if we could focus on what this thread is about in this thread, and then if there are other conversations people want to have have those in a different thread that is dedicated to those conversations. But me repeating things I have already said and explaining why I am being deliberately misquoted and misconstrued is not a good use of my time, particularly in this space.

30 NES games that have often been called hacks—out of the 1,500+ NES hacks out there—have been ruled Original Homebrew Equivalents by RETRO due to their significant code additions. Deadpool and Legend of Link are on that list, but 99%+ of hacks are not.

Any more voting slates for the Indie NES Hall of Fame, gents? Seriously, loving these slates! I am seeing so many games we are not seeing at the other voting sites, so your input is absolutely critical. (For instance, Blade Buster may well make the Hall purely due to input from this group; it’s rarely mentioned elsewhere—I mean on U.S. NES homebrew community chats in 2024—which is truly unfortunate). Also, I can update you all and say that a shocking total of 132 (!) different NES homebrews have now received at least one HoF vote between the first open voting period (2022) and this one! That is such a testament to how incredibly vibrant the NES Renaissance is!

Ah, I see now that I misunderstood your question. It *does* have to be aftermarket (released 1996 or after), so I think at least MC&DH would be ineligible?

You gotta like Nintendo Hard, tho.

Fair enough! I hear you. As I said, I think Blade Buster is great. I have it ranked (would have to check) second or third among all NES homebrew shooters ever. And I personally dislike GunTneR.

A great and too-little recognized game, IMO!

Either!

I like Blade Buster! But there are definitely shooters that are as good or better, from Astro Ninja Man to HaraForce to HaraTyler to Haradius Zero to Over Obj to Star Keeper. And those who like quirky games will say GunTneR or Oratorio.

Gloves, just to be clear, that categorization I gave for VGS related *only* to the part of this site I linked to—the pinned three posts on Homebrewpedia: the marketplace, homebrew almanac for collectors, and alerts on upcoming games to buy(!) I would never have thought to call all of VGS a marketplace. I have been lurking for years, and very much know it is not that! I hope you will click the link to see what I mean, but if you want the link further clarified or narrowed I will do that. I did not limit it exclusively to the marketplace post because I didn't want anyone to sleep on the excellent other work Scrobins is doing to catalogue games that folks can buy.

I love and will take these votes! (But do know that you get ten games per voting slate, if you want!)

Hi all, My publication RETRO has been publishing a free, link-laden archive of all NES homebrews ever made for a few years now (the listing sits at around 1,600 titles in the volume of the series about to be released) and in 2022 I held a vote for the Indie NES Game Hall of Fame that resulted in five NES homebrews—Böbl, Dungeons & Doomknights, Micro Mages, Spacegulls, and Witch n’ Wiz—getting voted into the Hall. The second round of open voting (which allows everyone to repeat or change their votes, the only rules being that you should avoid voting for games already in the Hall, need to vote for ten games, and cannot vote for any game you were involved in making) is happening right now, and the three voting sites are NESmakers (on Facebook), the NESDev Forum, and here. I thought VGS would be a great voting site because I saw that back in 2020 you guys had an amazing thread about the best homebrew games out there. I thought maybe you'd like to have a go at it again? It takes just a few moments to vote—you can literally just list the games in a comment on this thread—and it helps to answer the age-old question: what NES homebrews would I recommend to someone I'm hoping will get into retro-homebrew gaming? The Hall voting (like the homebrew archive it is part of) is very much a community-service project. I really hope you'll consider participating! Just let me know if you have any questions. The free RETRO archive listing all known NES homebrews (minus the 100 or so about to be added in the next volume of the series, and the 25 I've already found so far for the volume after that, which will likely come out this summer) can be found here. All the best to all of you, Seth (PS) I am hoping to wrap up voting by May 15 if enough votes come in, and May 31 if not.

Just dropping in here 21 months later to say that if this game had ever been completed it would have been one of the best NES homebrews ever made. I have played 1,600 homebrews (all listed on my website) and this even as a demo is clearly deserving of being universally played—and even as a demo impresses at a level well beyond the most famous NES homebrew demo ever, Super Bat Puncher (though I suppose Halcyon is up there too; I would say this exceeds Halcyon, also). This is a totally jaw-dropping game, and it is also one of the first times I have ever thought to myself, I would pay a lot of money to support this game being completed.

I am coming to this fascinating conversation almost three months late, so likely almost no one will see this comment, but I did want to throw in my two cents from the standpoint of a consumer, collector, and critic who is not also the fourth "c" (a coder). My sense is that consumers, collectors, and critics do not care about the distinctions between the terms indie, homebrew, and aftermarket—they are more concerned with whether something is wholly original (which in a sense keeps repros and hacks in their own separate categories, as I think we all agree is important). It is coders who, totally understandably, feel some anxiety about how these three terms are deployed. The reasons range from the initial Sole Goose/KHAN complaint—misuse of terms could overshadow or undermine the hard work of certain coders—to from-scratch, solo-artist coders who are for good reasons circumspect about competing with (variously) NESMaker, large-indie, or even corporate projects that could include a large workforce and/or tools that make coding work much easier. The problem, just in my own opinion—take it for what it's worth—is that this particular sort of taxonomic anxiety is a bit ahistorical. Consider: unlicensed games competed with licensed games during the run of the NES; certain licensed games game from huge studios and others from much smaller studios, and as between unlicensed games you had everything from Tengen and Codemasters to games that surely only had two or three people working on them. The bottom line back in the 1980s and 1990s was that anyone writing code for a game on a given system was necessarily competing with everyone else doing the same thing, with the only distinction being Nintendo deciding who to give a Seal of Quality to (a fundamentally esoteric corporate distinction that was based on eldritch Nintendo policies, and cannot resolve an issue like the one you all are discussing here that arises decades later). Any game released after the lifespan of the NES is aftermarket, that's true. And any game released by anyone but Nintendo or (I might argue) any of the publishers that published NES games during the lifespan of the NES is an indie game inasmuch as it is a project to release a game for a system that is no longer on the market by individuals who were not ever participants in that market on the producer side—which marks any such effort as an indie endeavor, even if the endeavor has a lot of resources behind it (i.e., it is indie because it is happening outside any well-constructed, extant market for the hardware in question and being advanced by people who had no cultural capital in that market). As for homebrew, it is honestly (again just IMO) a pretty bad term, even though I use it all the time in my video game journalism and NES collecting and regular gaming practice, because (a) it does, I think, imply things about the quality of and resources behind a game that may or may not be true as to a given title, (b) it technically—by its dictionary definition—a "homebrew" video game would have to include hacks (which I agree it should not) because the term "homebrew" is about where and by whom and to a lesser extent how a game was made and not about whether it is wholly original, and (c) it makes all sorts of assumptions about how many people helped on the project, how widely these makers wanted to sell the game, and so much more. It is, in short, wildly over-prescriptive. But the thing about the term I was surprised no one mentioned here is that it runs afoul of some key variables wrought by the fourth dimension of time. Here's what I mean: are we going to call a well-financed LLC-born game created by two coders in 30 days *not* a homebrew, and a game made by one person over six years a homebrew, just because of an outside funding stream that no gamer or gaming historian does (or should) care about? Because it is the *latter* game that is, paradoxically, almost certainly going to be more polished and seem less like a "homebrew" than the former. Ignoring this turns "homebrew" into merely a financing term, and I hope we can all agree that that would be a bit silly. Money matters, of course, but who wants to foreground financing streams when we're all hoping to talk about games on their own terms? The simple fact is that it is not the number of coders or even the financing that determines whether a game is polished, but how talented the maker(s) are, how long is taken on a given game, and even the aesthetic vision of the maker—as we can all agree that "polish" is a subjective term, some makers actually value a seeming lack of polish as a charming gameplay component, there are plenty of gamers out there who do not attach their enjoyment of a game to the amorphous concept of "polish" to begin with, and as noted above polish can be achieved with time no matter how many people or how many resources have been dedicated to a game. (I think we are all aware of NES developers who take 5+ years on each game, and these games invariably come out quite "polished.") My humble suggestion is that "coder's anxiety" must be put aside because it simply aids no one—not consumers (i.e. "mere" gamers), not collectors, not critics, and not coders. If you make an aftermarket NES game you are, rightly or not, competing with everyone else doing so for the attention of everyone in the 21st c. NES-gaming community. Maybe you will spend less time and money on your game than the Mall Brawl guys did, but people will like your game much more! Or maybe you have a lot of time and money and, strangely enough, despite working alone end up spending *more* time and *more* money on your game than the Mall Brawl guys did and (sadly) people will nevertheless like it less. The market of attention is always based on the enthusiasm with which a game is received, full stop. All this other stuff cannot be the source of any taxonomy, I think, because it is not finally probative of which games people like and talk about and want to share with others or (just as important) lump together in the way they *talk* about such games. In the end, it seems like trivia. Trivia that matters quite understandably to a lot of people, but in the long view of history still trivia. In my NES aftermarket-game review series at Retro I have switched to using the term "indie" as a signifier that a game was released after the lifespan of the NES (which means, yes, I include late-1990s games made in Asia and unfairly called "bootlegs" as a way of elevating the 2000s North American homebrew scene; while I know the NES had an extended lifespan in certain Asian countries, I do not think that should have been used to erase certain Asian developers from the history of wholly original "homebrews"). "Indie" is a term people know, respond to, and do not make presumptions about (in terms of an object's quality) on the basis of, as of course we are in a moment in history when so much amazing art is indie art (e.g., in music). I do not use the term "aftermarket" for three reasons: (i) it is cold-sounding and gets no one anywhere excited (i.e., it does nothing to frame the art, only categorizes it like someone archiving detritus in a dusty warehouse would), (ii) it has a negative connotations that carry over from other fields (e.g., would you rather have a new carburetor or an aftermarket one; the aftermarket one could be amazing, sure, but it could also be dodgy, so "aftermarket" has the ring to some people of "used" or "ad hoc" or "cobbled together [potentially irresponsibly]"), and (iii) it really just doesn't mean anything beside the fact that the NES's lifespan ended decades ago. We already know that, so the term seems like a backward-looking historical footnote rather than a way to pitch a new game as exciting because it has never been seen before by NES gamers. "Indie" signifies new, innovative, and potentially exciting—and the product of someone somewhere's hard work—in a way that "aftermarket" does not and cannot. My two cents, anyway.

OK, going back on the subject of this thread now: I like the idea someone here had of bringing Star Keeper to Famicom, so if the OP would allow that I think it would be great (as long as the branch game permitted can be nearly identical to Star Keeper). I know I would buy that game and I suspect many here would, so perhaps that is a solution to the dilemma posed by this thread.