I knew people were still making Game Boy games. Or at least I knew there were a few projects: a new cartridge appearing in a retro-gaming video, an impressive demo, a developer seeing what Nintendo’s old handheld could still do.
What I had not understood was the scale of it.
I opened itch.io’s Game Boy page while researching this article and found myself scrolling through an apparently endless assortment of horror games, platformers, puzzle games, role-playing games, game-jam experiments and tiny personal stories. Some were free. Some cost a few euros. Some could run in the browser. Many included actual .gb or .gbc files that could run on Nintendo hardware.
This was not a handful of novelty projects. It was a scene.
That discovery changed the question I wanted to answer. I was no longer looking for a list of the best homebrew games. I wanted to understand the landscape: who makes these games, why they still choose the Game Boy, how the games reach players and what it feels like to buy a newly made game online, copy it to an SD card and play it on hardware that is several decades old.
So I bought four games and started exploring.
First, what counts as a new Game Boy game?
The label “Game Boy game” has become slightly slippery.
Some modern games merely use a green palette, chunky pixels or a screen shaped like the original handheld. Others are native Game Boy ROMs: software built within the restrictions of the real hardware and capable of running on an original Game Boy, Game Boy Color or compatible device. That distinction matters.
The native scene contains several different kinds of work. There are small original games made for jams, larger commercial releases, unofficial ports and demakes, and cartridges sold with boxes and manuals. There are also unusual projects such as Infinity, which began life during the Game Boy Color’s commercial era but was only completed decades later.
“Homebrew” is the convenient umbrella term, although it can make the whole scene sound like a hobbyist curiosity. That no longer describes everything being released. A free weekend project and a professionally manufactured boxed RPG may use the same file format, but they occupy very different parts of the landscape.
The common ground is more interesting: they all treat the Game Boy as a platform that can still receive new software.
Buying a Game Boy game on itch.io felt strangely uncertain
The first game I chose was Deadeus, a horror adventure made with GB Studio.
Even after arriving on its itch.io page, I hesitated. Was this the real store? Was this actually where you bought a Game Boy game now? Steam has trained me to recognize a particular kind of storefront. Itch.io feels more like a sprawling creative market, where a polished commercial release might sit beside a free prototype or a game made over a weekend.
I wanted the physical edition of Deadeus for the full nostalgic experience, but it was no longer available when I looked. The download, meanwhile, was offered at a price chosen by the buyer. I could have taken the game for free. The special edition had a suggested price of $5, which still felt uncomfortably low, so I paid $8.
After the familiar PayPal checkout, the mystery disappeared. I reached a download page containing the game files and an invitation to create an account so I could keep the purchase in my library. Inside the download was the .gb file I needed.
Getting that file onto original hardware was even simpler. I removed the microSD card from my EverDrive GB X7, copied the ROM onto it and put the card back. That was the entire installation.
My plan was to play on an original grey Game Boy. Neither of the two I own would turn on. I opened one, looked at its insides without knowingly fixing anything, closed it again—and naturally it worked. That felt appropriately retro.
The romance lasted only a short time. I quickly tired of the dim dot-matrix display and moved the cartridge to my modded Game Boy Color with its bright modern screen. The game was new. The hardware was old. The screen was new again. This scene is full of combinations like that.
The tools turned an old console into an accessible platform
One reason so many of these projects exist is that making a Game Boy game no longer requires beginning with assembly language and obscure hardware documentation.
GB Studio provides a visual, drag-and-drop development environment with no programming knowledge required for the basics. It can make top-down games, platformers and shooters, and it exports real ROM files as well as web builds for sites such as itch.io. Its official site says more than 1,000 games have been made with it by a community numbering in the thousands.
For developers who want to work at a lower level, GBDK-2020 offers a C and assembly toolchain, libraries, examples and documentation for Game Boy and Game Boy Color development. These tools do not remove the hardware’s limits. They make those limits approachable.
That distinction helps explain the platform’s appeal. The Game Boy offers a small screen, a limited palette, little memory and a tiny set of controls. Those restrictions can be frustrating, but they also shrink the field of possibilities. A solo creator can make something that feels complete. The machine supplies an aesthetic, a control scheme and a technical boundary before development even begins.
Game jams, tutorials, Discord communities and downloadable example projects make the first steps easier. Itch.io then gives creators a place to publish a browser demo or ROM without needing a conventional publisher. A game can remain a free experiment, become a paid download or attract enough attention to justify a cartridge run.
The result is not one development scene so much as a chain of connected ones: hobbyists, artists, programmers, retro collectors, small publishers and players using everything from emulators to childhood hardware.
Homebrew is not a genre
My first three games could hardly have been more different.
Deadeus is sombre and unsettling. You explore a village after a child dreams that everyone will die in three days, speak to its inhabitants and decide what to investigate. Mechanically it is simple: walking, talking, collecting things and placing them in the right locations. The official page promises 11 endings, but I reached my first in around two hours and tried another soon afterward.
At first, that brevity disappointed me. The story had created real suspense, yet the ending I found remained vague enough that it did not fully click. Mechanically, most of my time was spent walking around, talking to people, picking things up and putting them down. There were few convenience features around that core: no option to run instead of walk, no way to skip familiar text, and saving was limited to one location. A game this short may not need all of those features, but their absence contributed to my impression that Deadeus was technically modest. I wondered whether short, mechanically simple games were simply what I should expect from modern Game Boy development.
Then I played A Cat & His Boy.
It was even shorter, but I responded to its size completely differently. The game is funny, cute and built around a surprisingly mature emotional theme. Some tiny images took a moment to decipher, yet the ambiguity suited the screen rather than getting in the way. Its little minigames were charming, and its story felt like a complete brief experience.
The game began as an entry for a 72-hour jam with an 8-by-8-tile restriction, then received roughly three more months of development. That history is visible in its compact scale. It does not have an in-game save system, but I knew by then that I was sitting down for something closer to a short story than a long adventure. I paid $3.99 against a $2.99 minimum and felt satisfied when it ended.
My EverDrive’s save-state function also softened the absence of native saving. More broadly, this is why I prefer downloadable ROMs on a flash cartridge. One cartridge can hold my library, moving a legally purchased or freely released game onto it is quick, and save states add convenience without changing the original ROM. A physical cartridge is appealing as an object, but I do not need a separate one for every game I want to try.
The third game, OutRun GB, was free. It is an unofficial fan-made port of Sega’s arcade racer, with selectable music and a convincing 1980s atmosphere. I could race and reach checkpoints, but I did not initially understand that the branching journey eventually led to one of five destinations. I kept running out of time before reaching an ending, unsure what the larger structure was asking me to accomplish.
That confusion, combined with the difficulty, made the game less enjoyable for me. Someone who already knows the arcade original may immediately understand its timer, checkpoints and branching route. I did not. This was another useful correction to my assumptions: modern Game Boy development includes fan projects that inherit decades of knowledge as well as self-contained new games designed for first-time players.
Three games had given me horror, an intimate story and a technically ambitious arcade port. “Homebrew” was clearly not telling me anything about genre, length, polish or purpose.
I still wanted to know how large a new Game Boy game could feel
The smaller games explained one part of the scene, but I wanted to try something closer to the adventures I remembered: a substantial world, an extended story and the promise of many hours of play.
Dragonyhm and Chantey both looked like possible answers. When I checked, the versions available to me were physical cartridges costing roughly €49 and €45. Each came as a manufactured product with a cartridge, manual and collectable extras, so the price was understandable. It was still more than I wanted to spend merely to find out whether this kind of game would hold my attention—especially after buying Deadeus for $8.
Digital availability changed that calculation. Incube8 Games sold Infinity as a CA$34 download, around €22 when I bought it. That gave me the large-scale game I was looking for without requiring another boxed object.
After three hours, Infinity already felt different. Its world, story and systems made me want to continue. Outside towns and caves I could save while travelling across the world map, and I found a place to save in the starting town. I initially had trouble understanding how to use the sword and resorted to a YouTube walkthrough, but the game soon opened into something that evoked the scale and intent of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or a Pokémon adventure.
It also looks astonishing on a Game Boy Color—at moments almost like an early Game Boy Advance game. The publisher describes more than 15 hours of play, five characters, over 30 areas and more than 100 items. I have not played far enough to judge the whole game, but after three hours the €22 price already felt justified by what was ahead. I plan to continue it for pleasure, rather than turning the rest of it into research.
Infinity comes with an important qualification. It is not simply a modern developer deciding to make a new retro game. Affinix Software originally developed it from 1999 to 2001, then cancelled it in 2002 as the market moved toward the Game Boy Advance. An unfinished ROM appeared in 2016. Incube8 acquired the rights, ran a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2021 and spent four years completing the game with a mixture of returning and new contributors.
That makes Infinity a bridge between periods: a lost commercial-era project completed inside the modern Game Boy ecosystem. Its existence shows that the scene does more than imitate the past. Sometimes it can recover and finish a piece of it.
A ROM can become a cartridge—and then become a modern console game
Digital storefronts are only half of this world. Publishers such as Incube8 Games sell new games in boxes, on cartridges and as downloads. The physical editions recreate the familiar layers of ownership: printed cover, plastic cartridge, instruction booklet and sometimes maps, charms or collector’s items.
The physical object also serves a desire that a folder of ROMs cannot. Putting a newly manufactured cartridge into an original Game Boy feels like receiving a game from an alternate timeline in which the machine never left the market.
Still, the ROM may be the most flexible form of the game. It can run in a browser or emulator, move to original hardware through a flash cartridge, work on devices such as the Analogue Pocket and form the basis of releases for current platforms.
A Cat & His Boy, for example, later appeared on Steam and Nintendo Switch. Publisher RAWRLAB Games has publicly explained that it uses a wrapper built around the SameBoy emulator to bring Game Boy projects to modern systems. The game remains rooted in its original ROM, while the wrapper provides the environment needed to sell and launch it like a contemporary release.
That path expands the audience beyond people who own retro hardware or understand emulators. It also makes the idea of a “Game Boy game” less dependent on where it is played. The same work can be a file on itch.io, a cartridge in a grey handheld, a browser game, a Windows download and a product in a modern console store.
The Game Boy now exists beyond its commercial lifetime
The most surprising part of this scene is not that old hardware still inspires programmers. Retro computing has always attracted people who enjoy constraints.
It is that all the necessary pieces now connect so easily.
A first-time developer can begin with visual tools. A more technical developer can use a maintained C toolchain. Itch.io can host a free demo or paid ROM. A small publisher can manufacture a box and cartridge. A wrapper can take the same game to Steam or Switch. A player can buy it from a laptop, copy it to an SD card and have it running on an original Game Boy minutes later.
No single company coordinates this ecosystem. Its edges are untidy. Games disappear from physical stock. Prices range from free to collector territory. Documentation may assume knowledge the player does not have. The word “homebrew” places a jam game, a fan port and a commercially produced RPG beside one another even when they have little else in common.
But that untidiness is part of what makes the scene feel alive. The Game Boy is no longer a current Nintendo platform, yet it remains a usable creative format. Developers choose it because the restrictions are legible, the tools are accessible, the audience is enthusiastic and the result can exist as both software and a tangible object.
I began with the impression that a few isolated new Game Boy projects were still appearing. I ended with four new games on one EverDrive, a much longer list of games I want to try and the realization that the platform has developed an afterlife of its own.
The Game Boy’s official era ended long ago. Its library is still being written.
How this article was made
This article was created with AI assistance for research organization, structure, drafting and editing. The final editorial decisions, opinions and conclusions are those of the human author.
The author personally acquired and played Deadeus, A Cat & His Boy, OutRun GB and Infinity. The prices and experiences described in the article reflect those actual purchases and tests; OutRun GB was obtained without payment. The games were played on the author’s own Game Boy hardware using an EverDrive cartridge. Whenever “I” appears in the article, it represents the author’s genuine experience and viewpoint.
All photographs originated from the author’s own photos. AI-assisted tools were used for limited visual editing and editorial presentation; they were not used to fabricate the depicted hardware, purchases or play sessions.
Facts and external claims were checked by the human author against the available sources as carefully as possible before publication. AI can assist the editorial process, but it does not replace human judgment or responsibility.
Read NeonGrade's AI and editorial policy.SHARE THIS STORY