From Texas Public Radio:
For the past three years, Eli Galindo has been creating new games for old systems like the Sega Genesis the Original Nintendo, and this game called ‘Dork And Ymp’ on Super Nintendo.
His company Piko Interactive takes old games, ones that were previously unreleased or sometimes unfinished games and releases them.
To date they have released more than 20 games. That means his full-time job is playing games for hours to make sure they don’t have glitches, soldering coded cards into the new cartridges. He tries to keep packaging as authentic as possible. For instance using a cardboard insert for Super Nintendo boxes while Sega gets the old plastic “Blockbuster video like” cases.
“And then the NES one, this is NES, they do even the styrofoam one,” he says pulling out a length of styrofoam whose only function is to fill out the bottom of the box.
“You know collectors love this stuff.”
Eli doesn’t code these console games though. In his research he found very few developers who know how to code these games. And ‘Dork and Ymp’ – the game we are playing – needed about half the game to be written after he got the rights from a Swedish company. He says he only knows a handful of people who can write this old code.
“Like my main guy, he’s from Russia. Not everyone can write games for these consoles. You don’t have tools. You don’t have support. You don’t find a lot of people who know how to write in that language.”
