Langel Bookbinder is a man with a vision. He's looking to bring his low-fi shooter GunTner to the NES in the form of a physical, 24kb cartridge – and he's trying to do it via a crowdfunding campaign.
GunTner's a shmup, but one that's filled with wild and wacky enemies. Here's a brief synopsis:
Get in your interstellar Rudy and span the cosmos against the 4th dimension. Only you and your furious pugilist piloting skills will get the cargo to its destination! You must succeed!! Really important, spoiled people are counting on you.
Bookbinder has already blasted past his initial funding goal of $3,000, and if the project passes $8400, backers will even get a proper box for the game.
Here's some PR:
Langel Bookbinder is presently developing a video game for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. GunTneR, an open-source “shoot-em-up” project, has a simple goal: try to make the biggest gaming experience with the smallest programming space ever available for the console. To help make this endeavour possible, a Kickstarter was launched upon the Earth. The campaign was fully funded within 25 hours and continues to exceed expectations.
Bookbinder, infamous for running chiptune website Battle of the Bits for 16+ years, is applying all their retro gaming and software engineering skills to this project for the next six weeks or “until it feels done.” GunTneR’s Kickstarter campaign has just entered its final week for pledges.
Will you be pledging your support? Let us know with a comment.
[source kickstarter.com]
Comments 21
@Damo you been scrolling through Kickstarter lately?? <--sarcasm
A noble goal indeed
He talks like he's watched too much Rick and Morty, all the stutters and word repeats.
Don't know who this guy is but I like him already
Well that’s one interesting fella.
He looks like he had few too many 1UP-mushrooms.
@UglyCasanova Maybe let’s not bully folk for having speech impediments?
Just for reference, the Super Mario Bros NES cartridge was 31 KB. That's quite an impressive feat!
Hmmm… looks kinda neat.
What did I just watch ..
The game looks bad.
Why do so many indie devs all have the exact same, forced "wacky, quirky, and weird" persona? They all use the same akward humor, use "random epic" humor. It's like they're just clones of each other. Doesn't help that they all seem to be obsessed with the 8-bit era and only make chiptunes and games that look like they're for the NES.
I find it so cringe.
He should make more physical copies available then.
@Dingelhopper Well, a lot of people enjoy the NES/8-bit aesthetic and have an appreciation for the console which more or less rebooted the industry. And the people who are obsessive enough about it to want it to be a living breathing platform tend to have a certain type of personality.
Cringe away if it's not your thing, but I appreciate what these people do, even if some of them get a little overexcited about it.
Why though? I mean, it's genuinely awesome. It's really bloody amazing, it takes a genius to manage to make a fully functioning game with such little cartridge space. He's a genius for sure. But, like, I think it'd be better to try and make the biggest NES game ever. Give a cartridge like 1 gigabyte of space, and Intentionally fill up that entire gigabyte with the game. That'd be a really hard challenge to complete, probably more challenging than trying to make the smallest game ever. So I hope he tries this after he's finished this game. Cos yeah, how on earth do you make a NES game that big? It'd probably end up as something like the biggest metroidvania ever or something
I just really wanna see what the NES can do when you give it modern amounts of cartridge space, and somehow, some way, you have to fill up the entire gigabyte of space. I wanna see that challenge. Could you try and do almost a full motion video thing? You could rotoscope some actual footage of someone doing something, animate every single frame at 60 frames per second, each new frame is a different background texture so it loads quickly enough. It'd be like Prince of Persia with the rotoscoping of actual real footage.
But I'm just imagining instead some full screen rotoscoping, not just the sprites. And make all these big complex cutscenes with rotoscoping, between each level. That'd be a way to help fill up an entire gigabyte of space.
@AnorakJimi interesting idea, but a 1gb NES game would be challenging in a "need a GTA budget for all this content" way, as opposed to in a "let's show off my indie skills" way...
@YANDMAN more physical copies than unlimited physical copies?
Looks like J Mascis.
a man and his hobby
@MarinaKat I’ve got a stutter and was told all my life I’m just “putting it on”, and you know what happened? I never was - just show a little empathy, would you fake a stutter? Why would someone do that?
@jeff_crembor When I last looked all physical copies were sold out.
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