New for old
This article was provided to TechRadar for PC Gaming Week by Edge magazine. Follow Edge on Twitter here. Click here for Edge subscription offers.
There are many names to describe subcultures, in time subsumed into the public consciousness and dispensed as labels. But there's no label that quite sticks to Falco Girgis and his ilk. What they do is far too under the radar for that.
Girgis is the creator and lead engine architect of Dreamcast game Elysian Shadows. The first thing that makes his work so unusual is that he began it in 2004, three years after Sega discontinued its platform and quit console-hardware production for good. But what started off as homebrew has evolved.
A decade later, Elysian Shadows finally nears release, having been successfully funded on Kickstarter in August this year. It's now a split-run production made by a full team, and is coming to more modern systems such as PC, Android, Ouya and iOS as well as Dreamcast in the winter of 2015.
Elysian Shadows today is a 2D RPG and a paean to the 16-bit era, fusing together elements of classic Final Fantasy and Secret Of Mana, but one with modern physics, audio and lighting. As for what got it started, Girgis recalls that he wanted to make a 2D roleplaying game in the spirit of Chrono Trigger, only with the absolute best that Dreamcast could offer.
He had a lot to learn. "I really grew up in the Dreamcast scene," he recalls, "helping to unlock the secrets of Dreamcast's hardware and learning to render sprites on the platform before I could even do the same on my PC." Girgis also taught himself C, then recruited his younger brother and best friend to help make his passion project.
Adventures In Game Development
The long journey to bring a new Dreamcast RPG to market has been documented in remarkable detail. "Soon after development began," Girgis says, "we began recording our late-night development sessions, so that we could use the footage as unlockable in-game content for players once they beat Elysian Shadows." In October 2007, Girgis and his team decided to put the videos on YouTube instead. They called it Adventures In Game Development.
This video series gained a strong following outside the Dreamcast homebrew scene, eventually convincing Girgis and his evolving cast of team members to re-architect their Elysian Shadows engine to be multiplatform so as to reach a broader audience. The team's vision may have scaled up, but Girgis can't let Sega's console go. That version "has become a personal quest".
Elysian Shadows is intended to push the console, with a custom video driver incorporating features such as hardware bump mapping and dynamic lighting. "We really want to become something of a swan song for Sega's little white box," says Girgis. "[Elysian Shadows is meant to be] a long-standing tribute to the console that innovated so much – online gaming, visual memory cards, beautiful graphics – but wound up burning out and dying young."
Life in the old dog yet
Elysian Shadows might do even more to keep Sega's final console going. When we previously documented the hackers, dreamers and creators making commercial titles for obsolete consoles, in E164, it highlighted how many homebrew games for vintage hardware required either custom assemblers or were rehashes and updates of older ideas and base code.
That's still the case today, but with Elysian Shadows' preorder and Kickstarter sales being Dreamcast dominated, Girgis has decided to release the team's custom-built development tools alongside Elysian Shadows. "We think releasing these tools and allowing you to basically create your own Dreamcast games with them will be something huge that the Dreamcast community doesn't currently have," he says.
Girgis and the Elysian Shadows production team might be at the forefront of tool development for a discontinued system, but they are far from alone in keeping it on life support, nor are they the first to straddle releases across both deceased systems and modern platforms.
Last Hope
In 2007, NG:DEV. TEAM released sidescrolling shooter Last Hope on the console, German developer Duranik put out shoot 'em up Sturmwind last year to a modest reception, and Netherlands studio Senile Team's Rush Rush Rally Racing came to Dreamcast in 2009, before finding a second life on Nintendo hardware via WiiWare in 2012.
For the time being, however, other would-be Dreamcast developers lacking the wherewithal to build their own tools face a conundrum: they can dabble in modding the likes of Doom and Senile Team's freeware Streets Of Rage tribute Beats Of Rage, which respectively allow for easy creation of knockoff firstperson shooters and sidescrolling beat 'em ups, or they can dive deep into code with the KallistiOS development library.
With the Elysian Shadows toolkit, Girgis suggests, it will be possible to create all manner of 2D and pseudo-3D games without necessarily doing a lick of coding – or at least with nothing more than Lua scripting – which could make Dreamcast a hobby development wonderland.
The effect of these tools on the market is impossible to predict, but right now retro homebrew titles find a surprisingly dedicated audience, explains René Hellwig, an artist and developer who was involved in founding both NG:DEV.TEAM and HuCast. (The latter is the developer behind Dux and its sequels). While his fanbase may be largely Dreamcast and Neo Geo die-hards eager to amass complete collections, "they also seem to care about playing our games and not just buying them only for [collecting]".
Dreamcast limits
Like Girgis, the teams have had to compromise on visual fidelity to keep games on a console as old as Dreamcast. "There are limits in RAM for graphics," Hellwig notes, "which means that we sometimes have to cut graphics out of the game to make them fit the system's graphics RAM."
Still, Hellwig manages to crank a little more out of the hardware each time around. His signature series, Dux, for instance, has gone through multiple releases, progressively polishing what came before. "I felt it was about time to fulfil my promise to deliver a more well-balanced and polished Dux game," Hellwig explains. And so Dux 1.0 gave way to Dux 1.1 and then 1.5, and there's also a Redux: Dark Matters remake, all available to buy in professionally printed packaging.
Homebrew development isn't limited to Dreamcast, either. WaterMelon made its name on the scene in 2010 with Mega Drive and Sega CD RPG Pier Solar And The Great Architects, renowned for being the first original Mega Drive title published in the US since 1998. Spurred by Pier Solar's success, first on the dead console and then more recently on Kickstarter (where it raised $231,370 for a HD port to Dreamcast as well as several modern systems), the team has professionalised and grown to the point where it can support other developers working on old tech.
Indeed, the Elysian Shadows team announced in May this year that WaterMelon would be helping to produce physical copies of its game as well as to fund some of the development. "What [WaterMelon] did with Pier Solar on Genesis a few years back is very similar to what we set out to do with Elysian Shadows on Dreamcast," Girgis explains. "So you can imagine how excited we all were when we got an email from Tulio [Adriano], WaterMelon's president, offering us a publishing deal."
No longer a small-time pursuit for lone hobbyists, this scene has become a veritable cottage industry, although it can't sustain full-time incomes for many. Instead, these hackers and dreamers do what they do out of passion. They can't let go of the systems they loved when they were younger, or of the idea that their beloved old hardware has more potential – more life in it – than the play-and-discard cycle that the mainstream has settled into will allow.
They also exhibit an enduring nostalgia for old forms of game, as the many homages, rehashes and remakes of the classics illustrate. And many of them, together with their audiences, feel left behind by the game industry's pursuit of ever bigger productions, of increasing complexity and realism.
The 16-bit era isn't over
Not, at least, for Brandon Cobb, the man behind retro publisher Super Fighter Team. "After 1995, I slowly began to lose interest in where the market was going, preferring to focus on the classics I held, and still hold, so dear," he explains.
Over the past decade, Cobb has published new games on Mega Drive, SNES, Atari Lynx, PC and Symbian series 60 phones. His passion can be traced back to a Taiwanese alternative to Street Fighter II that he bought on PC. Like so many of the scene's developers, it's not merely the hardware of yesteryear he venerates, but game designs too.
"I wanted to produce a new, updated version of Super Fighter," he says, "featuring new graphics, a new soundtrack and so on." But he lacked the funds to pull it off, so he invested in a smaller project instead – localising and updating Taiwanese Mega Drive RPG Xin Qi Gai Wang Zi into Beggar Prince.
It was such a hit that Cobb elected to shelve the idea of a Super Fighter sequel in order to focus on a mix of localisations and abandoned games. So followed the likes of an English translation of Sango Fighter 2 for DOS and run-and-gun shooter Nightmare Busters on SNES.
He did finally get to realise his Super Fighter dream last year, however, when Super Fighter Team put together a special 20th-anniversary edition of the game with the blessing of its original creators. Cobb even got to demo it to them face-to- face in Taiwan. "That moment meant more to me than a million product sales ever could," he says.
Respect not revenue
Ambition and success take on very different connotations for the likes of Cobb. Beggar Prince is Super Fighter Team's biggest hit, selling 1,500 units across three print runs – hardly Activision numbers. Cobb, however, prides himself on quality and on earning the respect of the vintage-gaming community. Profit is ultimately a secondary concern. Every developer putting games out on old systems is in it because of an enduring love of older hardware, and this same sentiment unites the community that feverishly consumes their output and discusses it on forums and fan-run websites.
Aetherbyte founder andrew 'arkhan' darovich found his passion through an unusual route: music. It started in 2000, when he picked up a C64 and fell in love with its sound chip. "I'm also a musician," he explains, "and I am really into synthesisers, so I tend to gravitate towards things that have sounds that I like."
That gateway drug soon led to PC Engine development. Darovich grew up with the cult console, and jumped at the opportunity to make a game for it as a project in a college class. The result was Insanity, a Berzerk-alike action game released in 2009. "People seemed to like it, even though it was kind of rough," Darovich says, "so I kept at it and started making all the other games."
Others soon signed on to help create art for him, and three more full games plus an MSX demo have since followed, with Insanity and Pyramid Plunder – an Indiana Jones-inspired maze game with a touch of Pac-Man – both pressed on CDs. Meanwhile, recent release Atlantean, an underwater shoot 'em up, can claim to be the first PC Engine HuCard release in some 20 years, a move made as a direct result of people at conventions telling Darovich they only have the base PC Engine hardware, not the CD add-on.
His work feeds a passionate community of PC Engine fans. "We're called OBEYers," Darovich explains, an in-joke referencing the film They Live. The console's homebrew development scene is paltry at the moment, but Darovich hopes that Aetherbyte and a chiptune-authoring kit the team made called Squirrel will attract more interest.
The sense that other people get a kick out of his work is what makes the effort worthwhile, though. "I get a lot of enjoyment out of setting up and demoing this stuff at local conventions," he says. "The look on people's faces when they realise they're looking at brand-new games for really old machines is pretty much the greatest thing ever."
Stepping up
And now that he's got some experience under his belt, Darovich is looking further afield. "It makes it a lot easier to figure the machine out and develop a useful library of code if you are making smaller games," he says. And so his next step is to up the ante on originality, stepping away from the safety net of reworking the classics, hoping to court a larger audience.
Aetherbyte won't be abandoning PC Engine, but "it would be nice to have 10,000-plus people playing our games instead of the 300 to 500 that end up playing [them] for PC Engine," Darovich admits. "We're imposing graphics and sound limitations so that [our work] feels like a 25-plus-year-old game, even though it isn't, because the future of games is to stick true to the games from the past that have stood the test of time."
For carl Forhan, the owner of Songbird Productions, that's a huge part of the philosophy, dividing his time between updating cast-off old games and developing his own retro-inspired titles. Where he differs from Darovich is that it's all about Atari for him. He's been a fan since he was ten years old, when his dad bought a 2600. "We played that thing like crazy," he says. "Even singlescreen games like Laser Blast or Space Invaders."
Those memories stuck with him, and his mid-'90s discovery of Jaguar and Lynx sparked something in him. "I was so intrigued that Atari still made hardware that I couldn't resist [digging in]," he says. The spell was completed when he found other hobby developers online.
"In 1998," he told us in E164, "I created a sound tool for Lynx called SFX to help me in my own game development." He asked online if anyone wanted a cart with this tool, and around 100 people signed up in just a few weeks.
Defender on the Jaguar
Forhan then secured the rights to an incomplete Defender clone for Jaguar called Protector, which he published in 1999 after fixing its bugs and adding in extra levels, enemies, songs and effects, including about 30 per cent of his own code.
Protector's still available for purchase today, as are most of the 20-odd titles he's put out.
"The most surprising thing to me is that I continue to sell a steady stream of games each year, even for the games I published in 1999. It's not a huge amount – maybe a couple of dozen carts per title – but it's really cool to think there are enough collectors taking an interest in old Atari systems to keep it going."
This appreciation of old hardware and those who dare to create new games for it is what drives Forhan to stick around. "I did take a few years off from active development to allow me more time with my family," he says, "but I still managed to release Robinson's Requiem in 2011, which feels pretty recent to me." He's just finished putting the final touches on an all-new Jaguar CD game, Protector: Resurgence, which expands upon cartridge release Protector: Special Edition.
"Now that I've got the developing bug again," Forhan confesses, "I'd really like to pursue another Lynx or Jaguar project. There are many half- finished projects I have access to, and many more ideas for original games I'd like to pursue someday."
Both of these avenues are important to him, albeit for different reasons. Forhan describes the likes of Robinson's Requiem and Soccer Kid as "lost pieces of Atari history", which he explains were essentially complete and ready for publication only to be snuffed out of existence when Jaguar sales slowed to a crawl. Songbird allows him to give them the life he feels they deserved.
As for original games, Forhan wants to show his chosen consoles for what they could have been. "I think Jaguar could have lasted longer if Atari had focused on its strengths and especially tapped into more arcade ports," he says by way of example. "It's about supporting fellow Atari fans with new games and seeing old hardware do cool things."
And if those cool things happen to be blatantly similar to the old things, as is often the case across this backwards-looking scene? It's not so strange, Forhan argues. "All games are rehashes of existing games," he says, "so why make anything new? Because we can."
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