RETROID

Retroid - Download

“Retroid” is a Game Boy game based on the classic arcade game that was originally published as “Breakout” by Atari and later brought to perfection as “Arkanoid” by the Japanese software firm Taito. The player controls a paddle at the bottom of the screen that reflects a ball to destroy bricks at the top of the screen. That simple but addictive game principle has probably been copied more often than “Space Invaders”, “Pac-Man” or “Tetris”. For the Game Boy, there are at least two versions, a simplistic knock-off called “Alleyway” and a much more sophisticated interpretation titled “Kirby’s Block Ball”. “So, why then create another clone for an out-dated game console?”, you might ask.

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Well, “Retroid” is not intended to be anything new. It was my very first attempt to create a game for the Game Boy and as the title indicates, it is really very retro in every sense. You will recognize all the ideas from other games and even the soundtrack is based on popular tunes. But while the ideas in “Retroid” may all be “borrowed”, none of the code is. Technically speaking, you are playing a new game that was created more than 25 years after the initial release of the Game Boy.

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The challenge here was not a creative but a technical one: Trying to find out whether a Game Boy game that meets the standards of commercially released titles from the late 1980s or early 1990s could be developed from scratch by a single person – a person, I might emphasize, who has nothing to do with computers professionally and had neither coding experience nor any idea of the Game Boy’s inner workings at the beginning. The result is a game that comes with all the features you would expect of a commercial Game Boy game.

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I hope “Retroid” is as much fun to play as it was to code. So please, scroll back to the top of this page and get your copy now!

“Retroid” features:

  • 20 Levels
  • 5 Level designs
  • 6 Bonus items (plus 1 malus item)
  • 8 Beautiful chiptunes
  • Epic boss battle
  • Secret cheat code
  • Ending sequence / staff roll

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