What retro consoles still have the most active game development? The most games still being released physically? The best and most popular time-tested consoles?
I’m excited to start learning programming and had a thought to make a game (having an objective makes it easier to learn). I wrote up an entire plan already for the mechanics and it seems incredibly viable for a fun and full experience. I would like to have it playable on real hardware and am just trying to figure out which system to make it for.
You must log in or # to comment.
So I did a quick search on MobyGames looking for new release since 2020, and:
- Atari 2600: 10 new games
- Atari ST: 7 new games
- DOS: 33 new games
- Commodore 64: 55 new games
- NES: 72 new games
- SNES: 12 new games
- Gameboy: 42 new games
- Gameboy Advanced: 9 new games
- Master System: 6 new games
- Genesis: 49 new games
- Dreamcast: 23 new games
I believe those are the most active
I sorted your list by number of releases:
- NES: 72 new games
- Commodore 64: 55 new games
- Genesis: 49 new games
- Gameboy: 42 new games
- DOS: 33 new games
- Dreamcast: 23 new games
- SNES: 12 new games
- Atari 2600: 10 new games
- Gameboy Advanced: 9 new games
- Atari ST: 7 new games
- Master System: 6 new games
As someone who’s currently interested in Atari 2600 development, I can tell you that MobyGames is way off in their count, even if you limit the count to physically-released games. There were well more than 10 new physical releases in 2025 alone.
It helps that developers do licensing deals with a few companies that produce physical cartridges with boxes and manuals on demand, but there are also still a surprising number of people making physical copies of games for sale in advance.
That’s good to know. However even just the Moby games count I’m pretty surprised that these systems are so active
Commodore 64 and DOS are probably the easiest to actually release your game on physical media for. Especially with the new C64 Ultimate. The list would probably look vastly different if you reduced it to the ones you could play on the real hardware.
There were also a lot of collection packs in the middle but I was too lazy to count and exclude them :P
But even if they released just roms instead of physical media, wouldn’t you still be able to play on the actual hardware using Everdrive or something?Yeah, I forgot Everdrive and stuff existed.
@PiraHxCx @sic_semper_tyrannis There are a lot more Game Boy releases than shown on MobyGames. I don’t know if the site is limited to just physical carts, but even if that is the case then the actual number is more like 269 instead of 42 since 2020
See:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@bbbbbr/115897847228422258Wow that’s awesome and quite shocking that it’s so popular. I wonder if GB is more popular that GBC and GBA
That’s awesome!
MobyGames is a collective database active since 1999. Years ago I was looking for a “letterboxd for games” and others like backloggd and rawg were missing a lot of stuff and had poor info about releases and so (I never checked again, so they might be better now). At the time MobyGames seemed like the best one, there is a lot of very obscure releases there, but I don’t know if other databases are more complete.@PiraHxCx Here’s a brief tour of the Game Boy relevant databases…
DMGPage has some of the most complete data (i think?) for the Game Boy. The format is easier for me to work with.
https://dmgpage.com/homebrew-releases/There is a japanese page that tracks some GB releases:
https://geemuboi.web.fc2.com/misc/new-releases.htmGame Brew Almanac tracking has more platforms. The format is less structured.
https://www.videogamesage.com/forums/topic/1050-vgs-homebrew-almanac/And Homebrews Connexion that also has more platforms:
https://homebrews.retro-gc.fr/
The Sega Mega Drive or Genesis scene is probably the most active as of now with several big commercial titles releasing yearly followed by ton of ROM-only smaller projects and ports released on itch.io. This is largely thanks to the still fairly recent release of the unofficial SGDK development kit making development much more accessible to those not into learning 68k assembler. SGDK itself is still actively developed, releases somewhat regularly and the number of 16-bit Sega game projects keeps growing, as tracked by Pigsy, a developer themself who has taken on porting Castlevania: The Symphony of the Night from the PS1 to the Mega Drive among other things.
Thanks for the info! That’s all really interesting and I’ll look into it
If you’re looking to learn programming, I’d honestly recommend the PICO-8. It’s not got any physical hardware, so I know it wouldn’t be quite the same, but it’s pretty hard to go from nothing to making a game for a console!
I considered that for sure but I do think I want the ability to have more detail in my game world
Picotron is amazing, someday I’m gonna actually sit down and make something other than terrible music.
Ypu can check out itch.io and see a bunch. Its fun to buy/get and throw on real hardware.
That’s a great idea
It works great on an everdrive or eq.
Game Boy Studio looks like a pretty slick IDE to facilitate making GB games, might be a good entry point. Is there something similar for other platforms? Gotta be, right?
But if you are going for a very old platform like that, technical limitations might start to crop up. You’ve planned a game, does the concept scale down well?
I was thinking about that limitations would exist although I don’t know what they are at this point. Just getting options here from other people. I do think I want to create something 16bit or even have more detail with 32bit (still a 2D game). It seems like all my interests are coming together around Python and saw that GoDot has a plugin to allow the use of Python over their in-house scripting language. So with GoDot via Python I could make my game have neat new abilities such as the depth of field and particles from games such as Octopath Traveler and Songs of Conquest. Then I would be limited to New consoles but with a retro pixel art aesthetic and forego retro console releases. This way I can really learn and apply Python knowledge and it would benefit my various interests/hobbies.
