Screenshot of the PICO-8 fantasy console on the developer’s website - lexaloffle.com

Retro games are my jam. Anything with at least 8 bits, a sword, and a dungeon to escape can usually keep me occupied for hours days. Lately, I’ve been going through a Metroidvania kick on the Switch, but yesterday I started playing with my R36S handheld for the first time in a few weeks when I discovered something I never saw coming…

All of these portable emulator consoles boast support for tens of thousands of different games; they usually run a custom ARM version of Linux like ArkOS and use EmulationStation for the front end. It’s like UnleashX, or later on, XBMC from back in the OG XBOX modding days.

Virtually every retro console from the Atari 2600 to the PSP and Nintendo DS are supported – that, I already knew. What I didn’t know is that it also supports this fucking awesome fantasy console called PICO-8:

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. It feels like a regular console, but runs on Windows / Mac / Linux. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a commandline, a suite of cartridge creation tools, and an online cartridge browser called SPLORE.

It’s like a modern day NES with an open ecosystem that allows anyone to create and play sick 8-bit games. You can use it on hardware like the R36S or you can play it right in your browser. The ROMs are literally .png files. They’re a goddamn picture with a game inside. How wild is that?

You can browse tons of games on marketplaces like itch.io or get them from the official PICO-8 website linked above the quote here.

So you get all the fun and quirks of playing retro games on an emulator, only there’s no piracy involved. Unless you pirate the PICO-8 runtime itself, but that’s not cool. It’s only $15 to buy it for Mac, Linux, Windows or Raspberry Pi or you can literally just play it in your browser for free.

When I started to go down the rabbit hole of modern retro games, studios like Sabatoge blew my mind with their Metroidvania The Messenger and Sea of Stars - their nod to old school JRPGs like Chrono Trigger and even stuff like Squaresoft’s Super Mario RPG. PICO-8 is a neat little piece of that modern retro movement; enforcing the same limitations as older consoles but with modern, up to date mechanics and tight, responsive gameplay.

I’ve been digging through hundreds of random virtual cartridges for games that feel familiar, but I’ve definitely never heard of or played. It feels like some time around 2005 when a friend from highschool showed me his XBOX loaded up with thousands of SNES and Genesis games I’d never played. You can get lost for hours just looking at the box art and exploring new little 8-bit worlds.