In 1995, when I was 5, my family moved. My parents took me to visit a new daycare center. There, I caught my first glimpse of an NES playing Super Mario Bros 3. I begged my parents to let me stay at that daycare. Every day I played NES games like Super Mario Bros 3, Bible Adventures, and Ghostbusters with my friends. This was the happiest time of my entire life.

Christmas 1996, Santa gave me a Super Nintendo and a handful of games. I was so happy, I almost peed myself. As years fell off the calendar, video game technology advanced, but my taste in games did not. For the next 12 years, I played SNES games almost daily.

Now, I’m an adult, and I still love 8 and 16 bit games. We live in an age of photo-realistic 3D and complicated online games with multi-million dollar budgets and huge complex storylines. Those games can be good sometimes, but most of them feel like they traded gameplay and simplicity for a massive visual effects budget. How many times have you heard of a game that had great graphics, but sucked at everything else? Too many times in my opinion. Retro games are simpler and in my opinion, much more fun. No modern game can make me feel the way Super Mario Bros 3 does. Game feel is an art that seems to be completely lost in modern game production.

This blog is dedicated to the production of retro games using GameMaker Studio, as well as general interest in retro games.