Helmer on the NES?
What Is It?
We are experimenting with making an actual NES ( Nintendo Entertainment System ) game for Helmer in the Dragon Tomb, inspired by the kickstarter, which hasn’t finished yet.
Sam was giving away a fake NES cartridge just for the nostalgia as a part of one of the events and he also said that some of his favorite games were old NES games.
We were thinking that’d it’d be pretty cool if we could make real life working NES cartridges for Helmer. This is completely unofficial and just a crazy idea, but we started experimenting.
Will This Actually Work?
It can! We can actually make a real, working game that you can put into an authentic NES console.
And we don’t mean a retro-themed game that looks like an NES game, we mean real, honest-to-goodness 8-bit everything: music, artwork, and programming.
There are places like Homebrew Factory that will manufacture the cartridges, and we’ve got tools for programming, music, and artwork.
That said, this is really just an experiment right now. We probably can’t find time to finish it.
What If I Don’t Have a Console?
We can package the game with an emulator so you can play it on a website, or download it and play it on your computer just like a “normal” game.
Play Now!
You can play what terribly little we have of the game so far in your browser right now!
So far we’ve got a little bit of the trailer music adapted to the NES, a title screen, and a screen where you can slide the character around using the arrow keys.
This page and demo will be updated as we make more progress.
Press “Enter” to start and you can use the arrow keys to move the character.
Why Would Do This?
Partially because there’s something kind of romantic almost about being able to have a game that you can hold and own, being able to put it in a device that you can hold and own, and for both of those things to just stay the same and offer the same experience over time.
This is something that has been kind of destroyed by the chronically internet-connected everything.
Game consoles used to be a way to bring formerly quarter-eating, rent-based games into your home as something you could actually own. Now the internet has turned game consoles back into the rent-based arcade but worse. You can’t really own anything, and even if you have a cartridge or game disk, most of the time you need to connect to the internet just to download an update so you can play it!
And while you used to be able to download and play games on your computer, now Steam has dominated the PC game market so that you can’t just buy a game and get a download that is “yours”. You must have an online account and play the game through their app, connected to their store.1
Games just don’t last anymore. Going all the way back to the NES isn’t really necessary to fix that. For instance there is a game shop, GOG ( Good Old Games ), that works with publishers to package their game so that it can be played on normal computers without being tied to platforms like Steam, helping to preserve the game for future generations.
But it’s also cool to go back to simpler things because it isn’t so distracting. Game consoles are nice because the whole idea is that they are supposed to be a portal to another world. You can stick the game in, and playing that game is all that the console is doing from then on. It’s nice that it is physically separate from the “normal” world of whatever else you use your computer for.
Modern game consoles, though, require internet access to keep working, they are always changing, and every year it seems less likely that you’ll be able to just buy a game and have it keep working years later.
We keep saying that one day we’re going to have to make our own game console somehow…
Anyway, making an NES game may not be the most practical or useful thing, but it’s been educational, nostalgic, and fun so far.
Maybe instead of making a full NES game it’d just be cool to have the NES version of all the music from the game?
We’ll see what happens, and even if this doesn’t turn into anything else at all, I think it’s been cool to see the Green Ember on an NES title screen. :)
Footnotes
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That’s not to say that we fault Helmer in the Dragon Tomb for being on Steam. Steam is a good way to get a game for a lot of people, but we do think it’s important to have an alternative if possible. ↩