Pico-8: Gaming’s Fantasy Console
WE REPLICATING SPEAK TO CREATOR RETRO AND HARDWARE COMMUNITY LIMITATIONS TO FIND IS OUT GIVING HOW A BIRTH ‘CONSOLE’ TO GREAT ENVIRONMENT GAMES, SPARKING LOVED CREATIVITY BY VETERANS AND AND PROVIDING HOBBYISTS A DEVELOPMENT ALIKE
Paul Walker-emig quizzes the coders behind the cool virtual retro console
If you’ve never heard of the Pico-8 before, you may find yourself stepping into something of a conceptual quagmire. It is a console that doesn’t exist. Its games look and sound like undiscovered Eighties retro titles, but most are less that five years old. Its creator, Joseph White, better known in the Pico8 scene as ‘Zep’, describes it as “impossible to place at any particular moment in time, like a machine that exists in a parallel world where the history of hardware development drifted in a different direction for a decade or two”. So, what, exactly, is this manifestation of alternate history? This ‘retro’ machine that’s younger than the PS4? This ‘console’ that doesn’t exist as a physical object? In what will become a theme as we explore the Pico-8, it’s really quite simple.
The Pico-8 is a ‘fantasy console’. That is to say, it is a program you can download on your PC or Mac that is designed to emulate the feel of a retro machine. Anyone who develops games for it must work within its harsh limitations, closer to the machines of the Eighties than they are the powerhouse consoles of today. It comes with built-in editing tools that allow users to create and share their ‘cartridges’ online, or via a built-in cartridge browser called Splore.
The console is probably most famous as the birthplace of the critically-acclaimed platformer Celeste, originally developed on the Pico-8 during a game jam before being expanded into a full PC and console release. The Pico-8 is so famous for its relationship to Celeste, in fact, that this is almost the only context in which it ever gets mentioned. But the Pico-8 deserves to be far more than a footnote in the story of one well-known title. It is not only a piece of software where you can find a host of great games and fascinating experiments that you wouldn’t come across elsewhere, it is also a community. Through the Pico-8 forum, its Discord server, Twitter and elsewhere, Pico enthusiasts, from veteran developers, to young amateurs, share projects, help each other out with problems, build ray-tracing experiments, make 3D modellers and other such tools, create music, teach coding and more.
“Pico-8 started as LEX500: a BASIC programming environment that felt something like a BBC Micro with a built-in sprite editor and a fixed-display format,” says Joseph on its origins, though the Commodore 64’s colour palette, the graphical style associated with IBM’S EGA graphics and the succinct design of Atari 2600 games would all have an influence as the tool evolved. “I had started out in the early Noughties by working on in-house tools, and was naturally thinking about workflows and how to make development a more focused and enjoyable process. I didn’t want to get too caught up in making tools though, so shelved it to work on some puzzle games.” Joseph later returned to LEX 500 while working on
a game called Voxatron, which he wanted to contain bespoke editing tools for players to create their own voxel-based games. “I added a music tracker and map editor to LEX500 and renamed it to Pico-8. I initially considered Pico-8 to be a sort of minimal playground to support Voxatron development, but it quickly grew into its own thing.”
Joseph tells us that he had difficulty conceptualising exactly what Voxatron
and Pico-8 were. “An important turning point was realising that the different types of content included in Voxatron:
arcade and adventure game modes, minigames, future DLC and user-made levels, could best be presented as one unified type of thing: cartridges. It followed that the system itself, as well as Pico-8, would be consoles. As well as helping to present the two projects to users in a tidy unified way, this framing also made it easier to design many details about the systems, as I could weigh potential ideas by how congruent they were with the console analogy.”
Out of this, the Pico-8 as it is now known was born, released officially in 2015. But obvious questions present themselves: why would you create an artificial console with artificial limits? And what is the appeal for developers of working within those limits?
Joseph points firstly to an artistic choice. He says that in setting limitations for the Pico-8, he was conscious that “specifications can be chosen for their aesthetic contribution rather than for being technologically impressive or cost-effective”. Naturally, this aesthetic has a particular appeal for fans of retro games and everyone we spoke to about the Pico-8 acknowledged nostalgia as part of its appeal, but its not only retro fans that are attracted to it. “There are certainly users who appreciate minimal systems because they grew up with