alt Hacker NewsHow to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026
Comments
Great work! I didn't even know it was still possible to publish new games for old consoles like the N64.
I'm disappointed that he chose to use ModRetro as a publisher. They're largely funded by money from Anduril, Palmer Luckey's other company that makes autonomous military attack drones. Most of the staff at ModRetro formerly worked at Anduril, and one of ModRetro's other products includes a Game Boy clone made of drone parts: https://retrododo.com/modretro-reveals-limited-edition-handh... It looks like a neat game but I would prefer the toys I buy to not be subsidized by war criminals.
Tried to see if it was possible to buy the Rom itself. But it seems like you would need to buy a physical copy at this point:
Great writeup. Thanks author!
Obligatory link to an interview with three of the Goldeneye developers about the development of the game. I found it very fascinating.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bNN9XhGZ3Yw
(Also The Centre for Computing History YouTube channel is seriously underrated)
Super interesting article - thanks for sharing your journey. As AI slop takes over the internet, well written and original technical content like these will be important.
Also,
2026 web dev: 4MB of JavaScript to render a button. 2026 N64 dev: entire FPS in 1MB
I am in the process of using Claude Opus 5 to build an N64 game, and it really works. I've written no code and it is able to build a fully functional game.
I got it to write a skill for driving the Ares emulator via GDB Remote Serial Protocol and it uses that for its feedback loop.
At some point I reallly gotta sit down and play around with Pyrite64, it looks super cool
if I am not wrong, the game described in this article, is presented in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gOJUEcKYRk, from Palmer Luckey[1]. Wild this guy find time and energy for this side quest. That's passion.
References: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey
[dead]
[flagged]
I'm tinkering with a PlayStation homebrew (voxel space renderer) and development for fifth generation consoles has never been easier.
Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded work.