A small crowd mills around a yellowed Nintendo Entertainment System at Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, waiting for their chance to play Star Versus for the first time. The year is 2015, and I'm about to play a brand new game created for a system built in 1983.

Designed and developed by Dustin Long, and manufactured by Andrew Reitano, Star Versus is a competitive one-vs-one shooter made for the NES and available only on actual old-school cartridges. Players choose between four spaceships, each with different stats and abilities. I get in a little practice before a Star Versus tournament begins, and my first thought when picking up the controller is, "Damn, this game is fast."

"I've always been really interested in performance in coding," Long says. "I knew it would be impressive—and catch a lot of attention—if it moved quickly and if the speed of play was hyperactive."

It's not just that Star Versus is fast; there's a surprising amount of tactical depth to this little homebrewed NES title. As Reitano puts it: "That complexity is neat, from the competitive point of view. You pick up skills as you go along. There are a lot of mechanics to discover, and if you play a lot, you can develop a strategy."

Creating a NES cartridge in 2015

Long began working with the NES after getting into the chiptune scene, eventually stumbling upon the idea of creating his own Nintendo game from scratch. The "homebrew" scene, dedicated to making original games for long-dead systems, is a thriving one. But most game developers make their NES games as ROMs—files that can be played on a computer. Not Star Versus, which must be played on a physical Nintendo cartridge.

"I really like that this game feels like an artifact." Long says, "It's something that you have to trace down and physically encounter through happenstance. There's an air of mystery around it."

"I saw people making their own entertainment out of old machines."

Still, why make an NES game at all in 2015? "I saw people making their own entertainment out of old machines." Long answers, "I like the fact that they were just repurposing something that was meant entirely for consumption originally. I come from a history of punk rock music, and there's the philosophy of taking things that weren't meant to be yours and making them yours. That's certainly the neatest aspect of it."

Reitano explains how he cranks out cartridges for a system that saw its last official release in 1994. "At this point we've made almost 300 carts," Reitano says. "It's been an evolving process, and I'm super geeked about the hardware. The cart cases I get from a great guy named Paul Malloy—he laid out a whole lot of money for an injection mold and does all of his manufacturing here in the USA. He's been a godsend for helping the NES homebrew scene get their software on an actual console."

The boards for the game are produced and then shipped in from China. "I'm an electrical engineer by trade, but have been developing NES software as a hobby for some time now. So I'm in a unique situation where I can design the features of the board to meet the exact features I'd want for development."

The last big challenge to designing a new NES game is getting around the console's "lockout chip," which is, as Reitano explains, a "copy protection mechanism that worked with a pair of microcontrollers that would exchange a stream of data when the console was turned on." If that data didn't match between the NES and the game, all you'd get was a flashing light on the screen. Reitano (with the help of the findings of previous modders, hackers, and homebrewers) developed firmware that replicates the data well enough to skirt the lockout.

Sitting there, playing a DIY game on a weathered old system, it felt pretty punk.

New life for the NES

In the tournament, I end up getting trounced by another opponent who flew his ship faster and outmaneuvered me at every turn. Still, it was a thrill playing a new game on this ancient system, remembering the hard angles and creaky plastic of the classic NES control pad.

"I've never found anything worthy of the hardware but Star Versus," Reitano says. "It's like a totally quality game that I would have bought and had a blast to play with my pals back in the day."

Long is on to something. Sitting there, playing a DIY game on a weathered old system, it felt pretty punk. Gleefully geeky, sure, but pretty damn punk, too.

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