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."
