NES homebrew: not just nostalgia

Growing up in the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System, I always wanted to create my own NES game. I scribbled ideas in notebooks, mapped out levels on graph paper and spent countless hours composing my own MIDI-based soundtracks to games that didn't exist. These ideas were lost to time until 2018, until I watched Joe Granato's documentary, The New 8-bit Heroes, about his quest to create the game of his childhood dreams. Now, with the successfully funded Kickstarter for his NESMaker software, the project may help to simplify the creation of homebrew NES games. Joe isn't the first one to do this, however, as homebrew has a long and storied history. Today's Tedium seeks to explore this corner of NES history and the creation of NES games over 20 years after the end of the system's commercial life.