Meet the Australians making new video games for the Game Boy console in 2026

Orlando Mee didn’t begin out aiming to be a sport developer.

The multimedia artist, who lives on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, began toying round with interactivity as a part of his artwork observe shopping for low-cost electronics from low cost shops for an exhibition known as Draining The Ocean.

“I work with lots of different weird technology and I was looking for a way to program interactive objects that I made using pieces of kind of plastic junk that you might buy at a two-dollar shop,” Mee says.

Removing the present electronics Mee would add a small laptop with a display and buttons. 

“The easiest way for me to program lights, sounds, interactivity was to put a very small game on that computer and Game Boy was sort of the medium that I chose for that.”

Using a free piece of software program known as GB Studio designed for making Game Boy video games, Mee would construct his tiny video games, and embed them inside artworks. 

Mee is now growing a model new technique sport for the 28-year-old Game Boy Color console , which includes board video games and his Anglo-Indian heritage. 

“Before it was even a video game, I thought of it as part of my arts practice where I was trying to explore my Indian heritage, and paying tribute to the often forgotten contribution of India to the world of tabletop games,” Mee says.

“A lot of classic family games, most people don’t know originated in India, like Snakes and Ladders [and] Parcheesi. Before chess became chess in Persia (Iran), the precursor to that was a game called Chaturanga.

“It’s simply type of superior to know that folks have been enjoying them for hundreds of years.”

Technical limits construct creativity

The Game Boy, which was originally released in 1989, had a simple monochromatic screen, with a screen just 160 by 140 pixels in resolution and just 16 kilobytes of memory, a set of specs that would be absolutely overshadowed now by most smart watches.

Along with its more powerful but backwards-compatible successor the Game Boy Color, which was released in 1998, Nintendo sold approximately 118million devices globally. 

The console wasn’t a powerhouse by any means, but its relatively cheap cost and portability meant it quickly became a favourite of players across the world, and remains a key part of the thriving retro games scene. 

The resale of retro games and consoles skyrocketed during COVID lockdowns, meaning players were discovering or rediscovering the now-vintage devices.

Melbourne’s Tom Lockwood, who creates games under the pseudonym Gumpy Function, is another Australian developer building new games for the vintage console and says the limits allow for interesting creative compromises. 

“The first console I had was the Nintendo and the unique Game Boy and I’ve all the time type of been drawn to the extra pick-up-and-play; retro video games have all the time been very arcadey or gameplay-dense,” Lockwood says.

Lockwood started making games during COVID, and doesn’t come from a game development background, having previously worked as a carpenter, an auctioneer and valuer, but it was becoming a stay-at-home dad that allowed him the time to start developing. 

He says the simpler designs of games designed for Game Boy mean they are quicker to iterate on and complete. 

“I used to be simply type of drawn to this course of, I can solely match a lot info on this scene, on condition that it is Game Boy RAM,” he says.

“I requested myself ‘How am I going to do this? How am I going to get extra element out of this artwork asset? Can I attempt to do some type of palette trick right here or use a sprite in a sure means that type of makes it appear like one thing’s extra detailed when actually it is only a Game Boy sport?'”

Lockwood, who has ADHD, says the quick design and growth cycles of Game Boy video games are perfect for him.

“I feel the rationale why, particularly, Game Boy growth has been so good for me is as a result of it is fast turnover, you can also make video games type of shortly.

Lockwood has grow to be one of the vital prolific Game Boy builders, releasing a number of titles together with the viral Grimace’s Birthday which was a part of a advertising and marketing marketing campaign for restaurant chain McDonald’s. 

New video games are sometimes launched as a downloadable ROM file, that may be performed on specialised cartridges on the bodily Game Boy {hardware}, or in an software program emulator. 

New artwork from nostalgia

Mee is utilizing the nostalgic designs of the principally Japanese-made Game Boy video games and remixing for his sport Yakshini Lokam, asking the hypothetical query ‘what if the cultural hub of a era of video games was set some place else?’.

“Because [Indian culture] hasn’t seen much play on the Game Boy, I really wanted to experiment with rules that had been established by countries that were making Game Boy games in that era: Japan, some European countries, and the USA, a couple from Australia as well,” Mee says.

He says easy design modifications, like utilizing a distinct color palette, imply the sport feels totally different for gamers accustomed to the business titles.

“A lot of the colour choice in the game, it feels quite unusual to a Western audience that’s maybe more familiar with like, knights and dragons type fantasy.”

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“This is still very much fantasy, but there’s a lot of colour schemes that you see in Indian art, in history, and in sort of like temples, statues, that sort of thing, very bright colours, bold pinks and turquoises.