Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit is a brand-new game for an over 40-year-old Nintendo console. Game designer Elie Platt explains why he made it, and the challenges that arose along the way.
So how are games developed for retro consoles with cartridges in this day and age? And why would a developer choose to take on a project with these constraints? Game designer Elie Platt from Mega Cat Studios explains.
What’s the game about? It’s an NES game, but we wanted to do a little more story. The meta is that the Angry Video Game Nerd is pulled into these old games. It follows the parody throughout his career of games he’s had trouble with, but now he’s fighting from within the system.
The limits of the NES system affect the colour palette too. Yeah. That’s why, in old games, you often see that a character’s chin turns a different colour from the rest of their head as their head bobs down. It’s because it’s overlapping into that next colour area. Now, we have modern tools where we can visualise all this, but in the past, they were doing all this in assembly. They didn’t have a visual-level editor necessarily.
Do you still need to use assembly? No, you don’t need to use assembly, but it’s always gonna be your strongest memory management. These days, we do have C compilers and things. These really streamline the process and make something that’d usually take months take half the time.
So do you not use a specific engine? No, we pre-plan the levels using a combination of various tools. There are tile-counting tools. And there’s an engine – not really a game engine for the NES – that can export files in a way that they can be moved over for the C compiler. It can be used to make almost anything out of a rigid NES format as long as you obey the file formats.
It sounds like programming for the NES today is totally different to how it was back in the day? Most of the time, yeah. Today, we can emulate the NES, which shows up 99 per cent of the bugs. We do the actual hardware testing at the very end and clean up loose ends that the emulator handles differently.
It’s interesting to think about what we can do within a set of restrictions.
Young people in the office found the game too difficult, but the older generation thought it was too easy.
In the last level, there’s a glitch creature in there. I started purposefully making the background wrong in places so that it looks like the cartridge is glitching out. As you’re going through the level, it breaks apart more and more. By the end, you’re just walking across a flat ground that you can’t even really see. The entire background is completely glitched and shattered.
As a child, I wasn't allowed to have any consoles. It was only with the arrival of the family's 486 PC that the magical world of gaming opened up to me. Today, I'm overcompensating accordingly. Only a lack of time and money prevents me from trying out every game there is and decorating my shelf with rare retro consoles.
Background information
Interesting facts about products, behind-the-scenes looks at manufacturers and deep-dives on interesting people.
There are plenty of NES games – 1,524 to be precise. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more familiar with them than the Angry Video Game Nerd. James Rolfe – as he’s called in real life – has been humorously reviewing «s****y» retro games for more than 20 years. In collaboration with Mega Cat Studios, he’s now about to launch his third game. What’s different about Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit is that it’ll be released on the NES.
It’s 2025. Why are you developing a game for the NES? Elie Platt, game designer: We’ve been talking to the folks at Screenwave (editor’s note: publisher of AVGN content) about a collaborative project for years. We live in the same state and we’re both part of the retro fan service world, and a joint project has now finally come about. If anyone deserves the work and effort we put into new NES games, it’s James: the original and only AVGN. He’s inspired generations and paved the way for many retro YouTubers.
How involved is James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, in the project? We go back and forth to Screenwave. That back-and-forth is mostly handled by Justin Silverman. He’s the creative director at Retroware, which is co-developing and publishing the game. Sometimes they’ll say, «Oh, the nerd doesn’t do that» or, «That’s outside of his personality profile». James, you know, is doing his Angry Video Game Nerd show and everything at the same time. He can’t necessarily always be hands-on. But I know he’s definitely given feedback and worked on it some.
Did you use any tropes that the Angry Video Game Nerd critiques in his videos? Things like unfair hit feedback or backgrounds that make it difficult to distinguish when to jump? Not deliberately. There are certainly things that come down to the limits of the NES. For example, there are vertical scrolling sections. We use scroll-by-screen, so once you hit the top of the screen, the game scrolls up to the next one. You might hit a screen boundary and it’ll scroll up at an inconvenient moment, making you fall down. A lot of those things – especially back in the day – weren’t necessarily bad design choices. They were more about running into limits.
The game will be available to buy as a physical game cartridge. Source: Retroware
The Angry Video Game Nerd has to fight the games from inside the system. Source: Retroware
Are you bound by the same restrictions as back in the day? Or do new techniques help you produce better graphics or develop bigger games or whatever? In most cases, you have the same limitations – but you also have much more powerful tools. I can see exactly what the level is as I’m working on it. I don’t have to programme an array of tiles, then wait for someone to flash it to a ROM for me to even look at my own level. At the same time, using C compilers and things is less efficient. So, you end up with a lot of cases where, hypothetically, you could fix a problem in assembly if you wanted to take a lot of time for it. In some ways, there are more limits now, but because the tools are more powerful, we can more rapidly adjust to those limits.
Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit looks like it’s come right out of the 80s. Source: Retroware
Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit will be released for both PC and modern consoles at the same time. What’s the lead platform you’re developing it for? In this case, we developed the NES version first. There are a lot of different ways to go about that. You could make a PC version first while keeping the NES in mind, then make a stripped-down version. But if you do it that way, the differences will feel like compromises because they are. Whereas if you start on your weakest platform first, like the NES, you make sure you have the best core game there. And then anything extra you do on other platforms is a bonus.
Do the limitations of the NES platform feel freeing or restrictive? Personally, I like them. Sometimes, you’re like, «Man, if we could only do one more enemy or one more thing.» But for the most part, I think it’s interesting to say, «Okay, we have a set of restrictions, what can we do with them?» Let’s say I’ve got four colours. I’ll play around with dithering (editor’s note: technique that creates the illusion of depth) or something, rather than lamenting the fact I don’t have five colours.
Were there times when you wished the hardware was a little bit more powerful, as the NES couldn’t do what you wanted it to do? When that feeling comes in, it’s usually because of bosses. Boss encounters have got so much larger and more interesting in games in recent decades. So, going back to the NES and trying to make a cool boss that takes up half the screen, you’ll find you can’t make a sprite (editor’s note: a graphical object) that big. If you make it out of background tiles, you can’t use any other background because you’re using up that tile limit. So if you make your boss sprite big enough in the background, you end up sacrificing everything else.
Big bosses are a challenge for the NES. Source: Retroware
So how do you solve those kinds of problems? There’s only so much space on the cartridge. It’s the same with the enemies and everything. If you want to animate them and bob their heads up and down, you might only be able to put two or three enemies in a level because they take up so much of the tile bank. If they just sit still and fire a projectile, the projectile moves but it’s not animated. That way, you can fit eight or nine enemies on the same tile sheet. There are lots of solutions.
What did you learn from old NES games? Were there things you wanted to incorporate into your game? Or were there mistakes you wanted to avoid at all costs? I think one of the most interesting things is finding the right balance when it comes to difficulty. A lot of those older games are much more difficult than people are familiar with today. But we didn’t want to give up on that either. There were some times when the game was brutally difficult. Then there were some times when it was kinda a breeze, and you could run through the game and not die. Eventually we came down to having a bunch of different difficulty modes. We have everything from «I just wanna casually play through this» to «If I get hit, it’s game over and I have to start over again». You’re gonna be able to find a difficulty you like, regardless of which generation of gaming you come from.
There may be life bar, but the game isn’t easy. Source: Retroware
Were there disagreements on the project about how hard or easy the game should be? When I first stepped in, the game was a lot harder than it is now. I moved some things around, put in some platforms, pulled some enemies – I tamped the difficulty down quite a bit to get that mid-difficulty to where it is now. A lot of the people in our office are younger, and when they played it, they were like, «It’s too hard!» But then there were some older people who said it was too easy. Ultimately, we ended up keeping what I came up with in that mid-range, then adding the harder and easier modes later.
I’ve seen several new games made for old consoles. Some of them, I thought, looked too good to have been made back in the day. But I don’t know. Can you really make better retro games today than were created in the past? On the Sega Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo, they have support to put additional acceleration chips on the cartridges. A lot of games used that, including, quite famously, the game Paprium on the Mega Drive. That meant it could do all kinds of things the Mega Drive couldn’t do. At the same time, the sticker price of that game was something like 200 dollars because you’re basically buying a new console inside the cartridge.
Many elements, such as this Top Gun fighter jet, are references to games the Nerd has reviewed. Source: Retroware
Is there anything about the game that you’re personally very proud of? In the Victorian, Sword Quest and System levels, I did a lot of significant work on the backgrounds. When I came into the sky levels, they were basically all one colour and just had brick in the background. I made it like a shattered, flying castle, with all these holes in the walls and clouds. It was also my idea to have the colour palette change as you move through the levels so that it feels like you’re progressing through. It also helps if the path is divided up.
Elie added his own touches to many levels. This cloud level, for instance, now looks much more colourful. Source: Retroware
Are you interested to hear what Angry Video Game Nerd has to say about the game if he decides to review it? It’s funny because, in some sense, he made bad video games into good video games. People go back, because of him, and find these old, bad games. He makes YouTube videos that have hundreds of thousands and often millions of views. These are bad games, but by adding some comedy to them, James has come along and turned them into something fascinating. Some of these bad games probably get played more than certain good games. Let’s see how he likes ours.
