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For me personally, there's a few reasons: 1. It's a kind of code golf - or rather, it's about seeing how much one can squeeze out of a highly limited and fixed platform. Writing this, I think of things like Mahoney's Cubase64 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGkf21UpJ8 ), which uses a combination of skilled coding and creative (mis)use of hardware functionality to perform real-time effects on sampled audio data on the Commodore 64. As the demonstration itself states: "You need 32-bit, 2000MHz, 1GB at least; what if... 8-bit, 1MHz, 64KB is enough?". 2. Creating a game which can stand its own to the platform's contemporaries on an 8-bit ecosystem can be reasonably achieved by a bedroom coder in their spare time. To do so for modern consoles or machines, one typically needs a higher budget and multiple people. For this point alone, though, there are arguably easier ways to accomplish this. PICO-8, the herald of the "fantasy computer" phenomenon, created a system inspired by 8-bit limitations in graphics and sound, but offering a modified Lua interpreter in place of coding assembly by hand, in an attempt to balance the stack more towards creativity and away from complexity. (And, of course, nobody is stopping anyone from simply making a retro-styled game with modern tools. Many indie games do exacly that. There's two separate "notable" Game Boy jams on Itch.io - one enforces games actually targetting the real platform, the other cares more about matching the look/feel.) 3. The ability to reason about every component of the system down to bare metal is a welcome retreat from writing complex, object-oriented code running on top of stacks on top of libraries on top of runtimes... In the end, it's a novelty which tickles a particular part of my brain, I suppose. So long as I enjoy it... |