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Handheld Game Competition Winners Announced
Kojote writes "The results have just been announced for the PDRoms Coding Competition, a 'homebrew' demo/game challenge for handhelds. The 19 freely downloadable submissions were created for GameBoy Classic, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance and GP32, and the maximum allowed filesize for the binary was 256k, which added some challenge into the competition." Highlights include Battle Picross (screenshot) for GameBoy Advance and ToyToy (screenshot) for GameBoy Color.
...in user-only generated content? Developers could just create (or license) and engine, toss in some templates and whatnot, then release it to the public and have a good half dozen marketable games within a year or two. :P
And then... PROFIT!!
Ok, not really.
But seriously, it's an interesting idea. That Second Life (www.secondlife.com) game is pretty damn close to making that formula a reality. Who woulda thunk that the 'infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typwriters' idea would really work one day?!
these games are entirely legal, they were developed without using the official development kits (esp without pirated devkits). there are no lockouts for homebrew carts on any gameboy system (as far as I know). there should be no problem with making your own carts and selling them. I know of a few trackers that ppl sell on the net for making gb music... homemade carts and everything... no legal probs.
some homebrew games eventually get published... esp for gameboy systems. Genetic Fantasia's PD version of Yar's Revenge (an updated clone/remake of the 2600 classic) was later revamped and got published by Telegames. Maybe Genetic Fantasia = Digital Eclipse? not sure...
Check this guy's story out:
"In the spring of 2000 I released a freeware Gameboy Color ROM, that was an identical clone of the old Q*bert arcade game. You can read the story behind its creation and obtain the game below. Shortly after I put the ROM on my website something amazing happened...someone in the Gameboy developer community came across my version of the game and passed it on to Majesco Sales. Majesco had the rights to do the Gameboy Color version of Q*bert, and they contacted me to see if I'd be interested in enhancing what I'd done and making it a commercial product."
And the guy who cloned Ultima 3 by reverse engineering the original talked a bit with the original company. But they said it wasn't commercially viable =(
All of those instances DID violate copyright tho, so they're not good examples. BUT, they didn't get into legal trouble.
Drymouth ALMOST got published... clone of Picross... no legal probs there.
I'm sure the list could go on.
Everyone knows that Battle Picross is a rip-off of Mario no Picross right? I'm assuming that the games didn't need to be original, but Mario's Picross was released for the original Gameboy way back when, so I doubt the 256k limit was too much of a problem.