At first I thought it was neat that a local games shop was selling homebrew games. When I started Googling for the names, a lot of them seem to be Japanese only. Are these pirate carts or something?
Vs. The Goonies in a cart is unequivocally someone making unlicensed reproductions of original commercial games.
None of the Vs. System games were ever released by the same name in a cartridge; the original hardware looked like
these.
They are "Reproduction" cartridges, aka Pirate cartridges.
They are most definitely not "Homebrew". Is this why Mike Mattei keeps referring to hacks and reproduction cartridges as Homebrew? Because of crappy game stores that shove the "Homebrew" label on reproduction cartridges?
Goonies and Hello Kitty certainly caught my eye on a second look. Who would risk selling a homebrew game based on somebody else's IP. I wonder if the store realizes what they are selling. It's just a little locally owned game store, so I'm kinda guessing not.
Funny that the label for "sumo wrestling" (Tsuppari Oozumou) looks like it has been in the collection of some careless kid since 1987 but in really it was just a bad job done by some repro pirate this decade.
Dwedit wrote:
They are "Reproduction" cartridges, aka Pirate cartridges.
They are most definitely not "Homebrew". Is this why Mike Mattei keeps referring to hacks and reproduction cartridges as Homebrew? Because of crappy game stores that shove the "Homebrew" label on reproduction cartridges?
I think it may be the other way around. Cinemassacre has proven time and time again to not know much about the games they play / talk about.
Yeah, James Rolfe seems like a nice and respectable guy (Mike less so, but I'm sure he's well meaning), but damn are they champions in spreading misinformation about classic games.
Intentionally or not.
There seems to be a confusion between DIY and homebrew. And of course the lines blur even more when DIY artifacts are put on sale, because then you didn't do it yourself.
Homebrew has caught a second signified which seems to be something to the value of "something someone has madee at home, that ought/is usually to be made at some shop/factory". I'd rather call pirate repros moonshine.
I've seen plenty of unlicensed games at shops before, but never flat-out pirate carts. The fact that they're selling "homebrew" games like these for $20 a piece seems pretty shitty in that they obviously don't have much knowledge / haven't done much research on the products they're selling.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
I'd rather call pirate repros moonshine.
I like this idea.
People calling pirate bootlegs* "homebrews" does a lot to hurt the community in general. Remember Mike calling Streemerz a "Bionic Commando romhack"? This gives our games an aura of illegitimacy, which is something similar to how people associate emulation with piracy. Too bad bootleggers don't care about any of that and they would rather use the term "homebrew" to help sell their garbage.
*(I'm honestly going to stop using the term "reproduction" for those, it IS a bootleg, usually made to get some $$$ with other people's hard work, end of story)
Punch wrote:
*(I'm honestly going to stop using the term "reproduction" for those, it IS a bootleg, usually made to get some $$$ with other people's hard work, end of story)
Thanks <3
I think "reproduction" is actually worse than homebrew. I think the process of creating these is very cool, and legitimate for personal uses, but making money off selling them is 100% the definition of bootlegging. And calling them "reproductions" feels like an attempt to whitewash it, which seems to have gone through with eBay who does nothing to stop these.
Dwedit wrote:
Is this why Mike Mattei keeps referring to hacks and reproduction cartridges as Homebrew?
To be fair, Mike did get a lot of feedback about the terminology after misusing it and since has corrected himself.
Here's a video from today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIc4MO9gCPg#t=1m10s
I've always classified it like this:
Licensed - Game was officially licensed by Nintendo (seal of approval)
Unlicensed - Homebrew that wasn't licensed by Nintendo
Hack - An existing game which was modified by another person different than the person who originally coded it
Reproduction - A reprinting of a game
But there's several unlicensed releases that aren't homebrew. Tengen, wisdom tree, the previously unreleased games the oliver twins found in their attics, and so on.
I think there's a distinction between a reproduction and a reprint. In this context, a reprint is whenever a new batch is required because the first "print" sold out. These may be years apart, sometimes. A reproduction implies that the reproduced material has been out of production for quite a while and has been resumed by someone. Usually by another part that had nothing to do with the original run. Usually this is also unlawful.
(in other contexts, a repro might simply be any copy made from an original such as a photo from negative or a manually or mechanically reproduced painting).
Might homebrew mean non-Chinese unlicensed games dated 1997 or later? It's hard to set a date for famiclone homebrew, as Chinese companies continued to produce originals and fan demakes for famiclones for years after the Famicom and NES were discontinued in Japan and the West.
I'd say anything published by an established game company doesn't count as "homebrew", since homebrew implies some sort of hobby project. It might be more misleading than helpful to introduce such rules, though.
Tengen releases definitely aren't "homebrew", but you could make homebrew releases in the 80s and early 90s why not. I remember when the GBA was coming out and everyone was anxious to start creating homebrew for it right off the bat.
Sumez wrote:
I'd say anything published by an established game company doesn't count as "homebrew", since homebrew implies some sort of hobby project. It might be more misleading than helpful to introduce such rules, though.
The
inclusion criteria of BootlegGames Wiki distinguish unlicensed games, which are in scope, from homebrew games, which are out of scope, as follows:
Homebrew games are technically unlicensed games and some are even sold as carts. The general difference between these and the unlicensed games documented on this wiki is that the former is made as a hobby and usually don't have a full-time development team behind them.
On the surface, this would appear to exclude
Haunted: Halloween '85, its sequel, and their Japanese-language localizations, because I programmed those part-time at home on a 1099 (self-employment) basis alongside my part-time day job in an office. But these were produced by Retrotainment Games, a developer owned by a used video game retailer with
brick-and-mortar locations in Pennsylvania that I assume had been around for years before choosing to branch out into game development.
The "established game company" criterion you mention would be misleading as well, as you recognize. If "established" equals a corporation or LLC, then anything published by RetroUSB or INL is "unlicensed". If, on the other hand, "established" instead means "relevant industry experience and financial stability", as Nintendo of America's developer qualifications prior to July 2016 defined it, then a studio's first published game is "homebrew" if it is on a console and unlicensed. For example,
Baby Boomer would have been considered "homebrew" because it was Color Dreams' 1989 debut.
It's hard to draw a line. But i agree that an element of hobbyism, for example in the form of bedroom coding, or "one/a few people does it all" is a criterium.
That doesn't necessarily exlude paid work, and definitely not exlude that there's work involved, paid or not.
I think it's comparable to an independent musician/artist vs one employed or contracted by the music industry.
We have
1)Independend artists (self managed; self released or coop released)
2)Independent labels (akin to retrotainment)
3)the industry (which presently is solely focusing on immaterial re-releases as far as NES software goes).
Any definition is going to fall short somewhere (I personally agree that retrotainment's games ARE homebrew, and tengen's aren't, but how do you draw that line?)
I think a more important question is: why do need a pure definition? What purpose does this delineation serve?
Separating homebrews from pirates is helpful to make sure people don't get ripped off by pirated work. Beyond that, I'm not sure that finding a perfect definition is useful.
Based on what I know about the project, I honestly wouldn't consider Haunted: Halloween '85 homebrew. It's paid work through and through - conceived and produced as a part of a business venture. Games released via RetroUSB are much more borderline - I'd say most of them are probably created as hobby projects. Proceeding to sell them via a company profile afterwards doesn't change how they were created.
It's all soft definitions anyway.
gauauu wrote:
I think a more important question is: why do need a pure definition? What purpose does this delineation serve?
It at least helps justify creation of a separate wiki alongside BootlegGames Wiki describing those unlicensed noninfringing cart releases that lie outside BootlegGames Wiki's scope. It could also help order releases by their legitimacy to include in a cart collection.
gauauu wrote:
Any definition is going to fall short somewhere (I personally agree that retrotainment's games ARE homebrew, and tengen's aren't, but how do you draw that line?)
Homebrew for me is any project that isn't expected to have enough sales profit to have a sustainable company. Retrotainment paid tepples to do a game, yes, but let's be honest, that was a vanity project for his (Retrotainment guy's) own satisfaction, that's not moving enough mass produced copies for me to consider it a "non-homebrew" game.
But that's not really important, the real important thing for a healthy homebrew community is to have a CRYSTAL CLEAR distinction between a 100% new game vs. commercial game hacks vs. plain old bootlegs. Don't call those garbage "reproductions" please, we should admonish any
BOOTLEGS, they're often very low effort and only done to make some cheap $$$. If we keep on using softer words to describe them (much like people use "replica" when dealing with bootleg watches and handbags) this will only hurt our legitimacy in the eyes of most casual gamers.
A little while ago I was interested in doing Colecovision programming, imagine my disappointment when 99% of the Coleco homebrews were basically illegal ports of MSX games into a peripheral they called "Super Game Module", which is simply something that makes the Coleco msx-ready. Even the scant few non-MSX games are fan ports of commercial arcade games! This turned me off immediately, I mean, why bother? Same with the NES, I don't want my games getting mixed up with pirated copies of famicom fantranslations and OMG R4R3$$$ bootlegs.
Good luck having your vanilla, original Coleco game getting noticed when literally all of those are listed for sale as "homebrew" and no one minds.
Punch wrote:
But that's not really important, the real important thing for a healthy homebrew community is to have a CRYSTAL CLEAR distinction between a 100% new game vs. commercial game hacks vs. plain old bootlegs.
I agree with this completely.
Do we need a new seal of... honest homebrew? Or even a guild?
And ought NA separate its homebrew subforum? A lot of romhacks etc end up there.
Punch wrote:
Homebrew for me is any project that isn't expected to have enough sales profit to have a sustainable company. Retrotainment paid tepples to do a game, yes, but let's be honest, that was a vanity project for his (Retrotainment guy's) own satisfaction, that's not moving enough mass produced copies for me to consider it a "non-homebrew" game.
From watching on the sidelines, I very much belive HH and its ports to other platforms are quite profitable.
I don't recall if anyone mentioned the "Pirate Originals" like Somari or Street Fighter II-## for the NES. These are games that contain original code but graphics and audio assets unashamedly pilfered from original IP rights holders.
I find the "Reproduction" label rather curious. "Reproduction" has been used to describe releases of prototypes of unreleased games, beta versions of a retail game and localizations of games never released for a particular region or in a particular language.
In my definitions, when it comes to unlicensed games I make a distinction between commercial games made during the system's lifetime and homebrew games. The first has benefit of a finite number, the latter can be infinite. The unlicensed NES producers included players comparatively large (Tengen, an Atari Games label, Codemasters) and small (Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree, Active Enterprises). Their products had, or tried to have a real retail presence in the big box retailers and mom & pop stores of the time. These ventures were for-profit and could support cartridge runs into the 100,000 units. When the NES was discontinued, most of these companies had folded or moved on to newer systems.
The Super Game Module was originally intended to support MSX-conversions to the ColecoVision, but there may be more recent original releases for the peripheral. It adds 32KB of RAM and an AY-3-8910 chip to the system.
Great Hierophant wrote:
I don't recall if anyone mentioned the "Pirate Originals" like Somari or Street Fighter II-## for the NES. These are games that contain original code but graphics and audio assets unashamedly pilfered from original IP rights holders.
Tetяis by Tengen would arguably fall into this category, as the arcade rights that Tengen's parent Atari Games had licensed from Elorg through Andromeda and Mirrorsoft turned out not to apply to consoles. So might
Uniracers/
Unirally, as a Disney subsidiary appears to own copyright in the concept of a CGI autonomous unicycle. So might
Ryoga's Game Boy block game project, as well as a bunch of
Mega Man fan games that I hear about fairly often in the FamiTracker users' Discord server.
Great Hierophant wrote:
In my definitions, when it comes to unlicensed games I make a distinction between commercial games made during the system's lifetime and homebrew games.
For this, I have used terms to the effect "pre-1997". But I was trying to avoid this because the commercial famiclone market continued longer in less-developed countries.
Quote:
"Reproduction" has been used to describe releases of prototypes of unreleased games, beta versions of a retail game and localizations of games never released for a particular region or in a particular language.
I think this stems from a simpler time when all a repro was was just about any copy made from an original source. Such as sending your painstakingly hand-glued layout original for a magazine to a repro company somewhere around the globe, or from a master tape to a copy or backup tape. Any print shop or factory sample based on your original might be called a repro. So i guess that meaning would be carried over to any test carts and the like.
tepples wrote:
Tetяis by Tengen would arguably fall into this category, as the arcade rights that Tengen's parent Atari Games had licensed from Elorg through Andromeda and Mirrorsoft turned out not to apply to consoles. So might
Uniracers/
Unirally, as a Disney subsidiary appears to own copyright in the concept of a CGI autonomous unicycle. So might
Ryoga's Game Boy block game project, as well as a bunch of
Mega Man fan games that I hear about fairly often in the FamiTracker users' Discord server.
With Tengen Tetris and Uniracers/Unirally, the developers had an apparently legitimate claim to the property that did not hold up in court. At least for Uniracers and modern Tetris clones, another court could have or could make a different decision. Your pirate original developer or game hacker has not even a hint of legitimacy in the use of their original property.
Great Hierophant wrote:
tepples wrote:
Tetяis by Tengen would arguably fall into this category, as the arcade rights that Tengen's parent Atari Games had licensed from Elorg through Andromeda and Mirrorsoft turned out not to apply to consoles. So might
Uniracers/
Unirally, as a Disney subsidiary appears to own copyright in the concept of a CGI autonomous unicycle. So might
Ryoga's Game Boy block game project, as well as a bunch of
Mega Man fan games that I hear about fairly often in the FamiTracker users' Discord server.
With Tengen Tetris and Uniracers/Unirally, the developers had an apparently legitimate claim to the property that did not hold up in court. At least for Uniracers and modern Tetris clones, another court could have or could make a different decision. Your pirate original developer or game hacker has not even a hint of legitimacy in the use of their original property.
Exactly. These are two completely different situations, an shouldn't be conflated. I could make a new homebrew game with a character that looks too much like Mario. Nintendo could sue and possibly win, but that doesn't make it any less a homebrew game, or any more a pirate reproduction.
So what is Mystic Searches?
Is it a homebrew? Is it an unlicensed game? Both?
So when a team of people make a game is it unlicensed and when a single person does most of the work its a homebrew?
Is a homebrew really just a hobbyist project, what if someone makes a really popular homebrew and it sells many carts?
A hobbyist beer brewer is making homebrew even if it's really popular and people buy it from him. I think the comparison to the origin of the term is pretty direct.
By analogy, what defines
microbrew games?
I guess in this analogy, you could call Cash-In Culture a brewpub because it sells (among other things) games developed by its subsidiary.
I think it's safe to say that small teams of 2-4 people are very common regardless of the development year, homebrew, licensed, hack, Chinese, whatever. If the number of people on the dev team exceeds one, it doesn't glean much about what category the game falls in.
I would also argue that there has yet to be a NES game developed post 1995 that provided a living wage to any of it's contributors. Perhaps Chinese developments are an exception though, its hard for us to speak intelligibly on post-1995-Chinese-commercial-brew. Outside of China, post-1995, can you name one game that was developed as a day job with an office and paid salary that comes with a commercial operation? I certainly can't, reguardless of how many hundreds of copies sell anything developed post-1995 is likely someone developing at home, in their free time, because they're having fun doing it. They're not doing it to pay the bills and put food on the table unless except perhaps some sort of starving artist scenario (which still isn't a commercial situation).
My point is to date, nearly every NES game you can think developed from scratch in recent history is widely considered homebrew. If you look at video games as a whole, I would also argue that all NES homebrew could also be classified as an 'indie game' which happens to have targeted a retro console. To date, there hasn't been an option to license NES games for publishing by Nintendo since the early 1990s. So using the terms licensed/unlicensed to describe post 1995 work doesn't make much sense. Of course it wasn't licensed by Nintendo, *nothing* was, so why do you need to specify that..?
"Unlicensed" because it's easier to find reliable sourcing for the existence of a particular licensed game than for the existence of a particular unlicensed game. Nintendo's website, for example, lists all licensed NES games, and
Wikipedia's list of NES games can use it as a source. But the list won't include unlicensed NES games; other
reliable sources must nontrivially vouch for those. Wikipedia lists only eighteen post-1996 releases that meet the
guideline for inclusion:
If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.
If you have a CNET account, you can start by
submitting your commercially released game's product page for review.
tepples wrote:
"Unlicensed" because it's easier to find reliable sourcing for the existence of a particular licensed game than for the existence of a particular unlicensed game.
You're right, I guess what I mean to say is the idea of putting a game into a single category of "homebrew" or "unlicensed" is nonsensical. Post 1995 homebrew games are a subset of unlicensed games.
infiniteneslives wrote:
To date, there hasn't been an option to license NES games for publishing by Nintendo since the early 1990s. So using the terms licensed/unlicensed to describe post 1995 work doesn't make much sense.
.... I wonder if it would be realistic for something like that to ever actually happen.
Since this statement is coming from you in the first place (albeit on the NES topic), I'm guessing the Street Fighter II re-issue isn't licensed by Nintendo? It's just a pointless formality, but it would actually be cool if it had the seal of quality.
Gauntlet by Tengen was licensed (
NES-GL-USA), then it was rereleased unlicensed (
TGN-004-GL). Likewise
RBI Baseball by Tengen (
NES-RS-USA;
TGN-001-RB). Likewise, apparently,
Street Fighter II by Capcom, as
the label carries a "Legacy Cartridge Collection" logo in lieu of "Super Nintendo Entertainment System", "four ovals", and "Official Nintendo Seal" logos.
Obviously they don't need it, but it would be kind of interesting if Nintendo would greenlight retro development by reinstating the seal of quality for discontinued consoles. They already seem to be doing a lot at the moment to ride on the nostalgia wave simply for brand building (the NES and SNES classic), so the idea isn't actually far off.
I'm guessing if that were to ever happen though, you'd have to get your game rated by ESRB/Pega/etc., and that's a nightmare.
All homebrew games are unlicensed games, but not all unlicensed games are homebrew. But unlicensed companies sometimes did pay individual programmers on an independent contractor basis, and many unlicensed games were solely developed by 1-2 people (and often showed it).
But if you want licensed/unlicensed screwiness, look to Tengen's/Namco's Pac-Man. First Tengen released it as an licensed cartridge, then quickly re-released as an unlicensed cartridge when it burnt its bridges with Nintendo. Finally Namco re-released it toward the end of the NES's life as a licensed cartridge. There is a difference between the Tengen releases and the Namco releases beyond title screen copyright/licensing text. Anyone else notice it?
Great Hierophant wrote:
There is a difference between the Tengen releases and the Namco releases beyond title screen copyright/licensing text. Anyone else notice it?
What is the difference? They published it on a different kind of cartridge with a different artwork, but is there any differnce in the game itself (apart from the title screen texts that you mentioned)?
DRW wrote:
Great Hierophant wrote:
There is a difference between the Tengen releases and the Namco releases beyond title screen copyright/licensing text. Anyone else notice it?
What is the difference? They published it on a different kind of cartridge with a different artwork, but is there any differnce in the game itself (apart from the title screen texts that you mentioned)?
Namco's Release :
http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l ... uction.pngTengen's Releases :
http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l ... elease.png