New cartridge releases take old games to another level

It might be a stretch to call it a comeback, or a comeback, but video game cartridges are having a bit of a moment. There are new consoles designed to play older cartridges, new carts being manufactured for older consoles, and new methods of cartridge formatting that open up new possibilities.

Reviving a fading format

For decades, cartridges have been synonymous with video games. They were first introduced in the mid-1970s with the Fairchild Channel F console and were one of the main reasons the Atari 2600 became so popular, launching the home video game console market as we know it today.

The video game crash of 1983 led to a setback, but they soon came back and became more popular than ever thanks to the likes of Nintendo and Sega, remaining ever-present until the mid-1990s when discs began to take over. .

Optical media was not without drawbacks, but increased storage capacity and dramatically reduced manufacturing costs made the switch from cartridges inevitable. Nintendo remained the big outlier, choosing to stick with cartridges with the Nintendo 64 as Sony and Sega made the jump to discs.

Nintendo still uses carts (of sorts) today with the Switch, although it’s closer to an SD card than a traditional game cartridge.

Although not favored by major video game manufacturers, small companies and individuals have tried to keep traditional cartridges alive over the years. Homebrew game makers and independent developers have long been releasing new games on cartridges, often reusing old game carts in the process.

Recently, companies like A little retro and RUNNING GAMES LIMITED Things have been taken a step further with official releases of new cartridges for a range of older consoles, including deluxe special editions and re-releases of games that had become too expensive or hard to find on the used market.

A new wave of devices

Efforts to breathe new life into the format continue to grow and find an audience, but we’re also seeing new approaches to cartridges that not only meet the needs of those who own older consoles, but create opportunities for entirely new console-based cartridges.

Everkid It’s managed to carve out a niche for itself not just by releasing new hardware that plays old games — of which there’s certainly no shortage — but by focusing on handhelds and consoles that capture the experience of classic video game consoles, complete with cartridges.

Like the Switch, Evercade carts simply rely on flash memory rather than traditional ROM chips, and tend to consist of collections of games rather than individual titles. But they’re chunky carts that look like they came from a forgotten ’90s gaming console, packed into large clamshell boxes containing a full, detailed manual.

Most games released by Evercade can be easily played on other devices (often at a lower cost), but they’re easy to forget or ignore if the game is just another title in your Steam library, or taken out of the home screen of your gaming console.

A cartridge with a case and manual is certainly a way to satisfy the needs of the collectors among us, but it’s also a way to focus your attention, and make your gaming experience closer to what you remember.

A more reactionary approach is the one taken by Atari, which goes back to its roots by releasing new game consoles and a host of new cartridges to go with them. Atari describes its 2,600 and recently announced 7,800+ consoles as “backward and forward compatible.”

This means you can use the old 2600 and 7800 cartridges with the company’s new consoles (albeit through emulation), and Play any of the company’s newly released cartridges on older Atari consoles.

Atari’s offerings may have been a bit slim at first when the 2600+ was released last year, but they have announced at least ten new game cartridges alongside the 7800+. Furthermore, these games include a mix of re-releases of titles and classic games that were never released for the original consoles.

Unlike previous limited edition cartridges released by Atari, they’re also very affordable at $30 apiece, and Atari’s talk of a broader “Atari+” platform seems to indicate that more games, and perhaps more consoles, are on the way.

In addition to companies making new cartridges, we are also seeing new devices like the Analogue Pocket that have caused people to get rid of their old cartridges and start buying new ones, which in turn creates more opportunities to produce new cartridges. Even GameStop is getting back into the cartridge business by converting some of its locations into retro-focused game stores.

Cartridges offer new possibilities

Aside from being more collectible in nature, something Nintendo took advantage of by including a clone NES cart with their recent deluxe edition of Nintendo World Series: NES Edition Game cartridges for Switch have other advantages over other physical media formats.

As far back as Pitfall II for the Atari 2600, and more famously with the SuperFX chip on the Super Nintendo, companies have been using special chips on the cartridges themselves to expand the capabilities of the controller they’re plugged into. Now, developers and small companies can take advantage of technological advances to release games that were not possible before.

These capabilities can be as simple as increasing storage capacity, which would have been impossible or expensive during the console’s original run but are now trivial, or even minor additions like built-in LEDs or custom cartridge casings. But there is potential for more ambitious projects as well.

This is never more evident than in Limited Run Games’ recent announcement of a new cartridge version of Doom for SNES, which uses a custom chip that promises to improve the performance of the original SuperFX processor and deliver an all-new enhanced version of the game. . They even went so far as to add rumble support with a new controller.

If we’re now seeing ambitious releases for a high-profile game like Doom, the possibilities for the future may be more open than we thought even just a few years ago.

Retro twist

Not only have retro games become more popular in recent years, but they’re also getting more respect. We have seen versions like Atari 50: Anniversary Collection Dedicating a new level of appreciation to classic games, mini-consoles from Nintendo, Sega and others have gone some way towards capturing the gaming experience of the original systems.

Cartridges are another way to make that experience more authentic, and now we don’t just have to look back to see what’s possible with the format.