Retrotainment's cartridge revival

[Pikachu]

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-21-retrotainment-interview

 

Quote

There's a resurgent market for retro right now. From indie developers creating 2D pixel art homages to publishers remaking and remastering past hits to console makers releasing plug-and-play compilations of classic catalogs, the past is once again the present.

 

And while it's clear there's a renewed industry-wide interest in things that were once simply antiquated, some people are taking that interest more seriously than others. Take Tim Hartman and Greg Caldwell, for example. They are co-owners of Retrotainment Games, a studio established in 2015 to make new NES games, cartridge and all.

 

OK, that's not entirely accurate. As Hartman described it to GamesIndustry.biz, it would be more accurate to say Retrotainment was established to make new NES cartridges, games and all.

 

"From the outset, we didn't plan on being game developers," Hartman said. "We just wanted to make a Nintendo game."

 

The pair had already been running Cash-In-Culture, a small chain of retro-focused gaming stores in Western Pennsylvania, since 2003. In doing their day-to-day research on the business, they stumbled upon the NES homebrew scene. That lit a fire in them, Hartman said, and gave them the idea that they could produce cartridges of their own. The barriers to game development had come down years earlier, but there was something immensely appealing about the prospect of creating their own tangible NES game that would run on original NES hardware.