Reading through the 2001-era blog posts, it looks like they ran out of time. Not necessarily money or arbitrary publisher deadlines, but the viability of the Game Boy Color as a platform with the freshly-released Game Boy Advance.
Major props to whatever lawyer or artist or whoever had to sign off to get this ROM dump to happen; it's nice to see art like this not get lost to the ether.
Time, but we were also told that RPGs don't sell very well either, nor do non-franchise games. Our mistake was not thinking to secure a publisher prior to development, though that may have affected the game direction (one publisher told us to replace the hero with a Disney character...).
Can I assume these issues meant a GBA port wasn't feasible?
(Also, as someone who spends a lot of time with fan works often considered second-fiddle to original creations, I find the idea of you being explicitly told to use an established character... frustrating.)
We considered a port, but it would have been a ton of work (half the game is written in assembly language, plus we'd need to redo assets, rework it for different screen resolution, etc) and we'd still need a publisher. We were pretty burned out by the end of it.
Very understandable. I just wanted to say that the screenshots and the gameplay videos of this game struck a chord with me. That's some beautiful sprite work. I particularly like the overworld.
Thanks, we tried to make it look as good as it could on the GBC hardware. In fact, until videos of the game were posted, some people even thought we faked the screenshots.
And now you don't just have to look at it. Go play. :)
Looking at the source code, it's actually licensed under the GPLv3 as well, so the software seems to be free, just the resources and game content aren't.
It's a shame though, since the GBA is backwards compatible with Gameboy Color. And eventually we saw PS3 owners continuing to buy new PS2 releases. Too bad nobody took a chance on releasing this.
Lots of great games didn't sell because they were non-franchise titles released at the end of their platform's life. Shantae, Drill Dozer... It sucks, but it was probably the right business decision.
I recently downloaded "My OldBoy Free" a gameboy color emulator for Android phones, and am really impressed with it. With only a D-pad and two buttons, its still easy enough to control with a touch screen, and the 2x speed feature lets you avoid the often-slow pace of these classic games when you wish to. Supposedly you can also use a wireless 'link cable', which sounds cool but I haven't tried it yet - might only be the paid version.
Pokemon Blue was a favorite game in grade school, and playing it again is a lot of fun.
Nintendo could double their revenue if they released an official emulator in the mobile app store. I hardly ever spend money for mobile games, but would happily drop $5 per title. The quality and depth of these old titles puts almost every modern mobile game to shame.
I think it's a real shame that Nintendo is running the Virtual Console almost the same way Disney runs their vault. They're clearly quite capable of writing viable emulation software and tweaking it (and the original games) to work around issues with the tech. That market is just huge, but it's fragmented between three devices, all with different libraries for arbitrary reasons, and I don't understand it.
I would pay so much money for access to Nintendo's retro library. I think such a system would work particularly well as a subscription, but I wouldn't mind paying for games individually if they were all or mostly available. There's no real technical limitation, and since Nintendo is the publisher / licenser, I can't imagine there's a huge amount of legal limitations either. It seems like they're just dragging their feet on what could essentially be free money from a passionate fanbase.
I've been playing with an USB NES Controller; they cost less than $5 nowadays and using a OTG cable and the My Boy emulator, it was literally plug-n-play.
Congrats Justin and team! I love seeing this game finally get released. A lot of hard work went in to putting it together. Plus, it's great to see a former TI Calculator hacker bringing back the nostalgia of old games. Long live Joltima! :)
Thanks Harper! It has been a long time. Speaking of calculators, the build instructions even link to ticalc.org (only place I could find the right version of TASM... :P)
Major props to whatever lawyer or artist or whoever had to sign off to get this ROM dump to happen; it's nice to see art like this not get lost to the ether.