The Professor and the Game Boy
push to talk #16 // ft. the man behind 2024's hottest original Game Boy game
Approximately 8 million games released on Steam last week. Tragically, 7.9 million of them were roguelikes. (The remaining 0.1 milli were roguelites.)
That’s PC gaming for you, folks.
Meanwhile, on another platform, only one game released, and it’s a banger Zelda-like about fighting sentient plants. It’s called Kudzu, and the platform is the original Game Boy. Not the Game Boy Color, mind you. The Game Boy.
At least one man is still making games—like physical games with a cartridge—for the OG GB. So bust out your nearest (completely legal!) emulator. This week I interviewed Chris Totten, the tenured prof. at Kent State who created Kudzu.
I had to know: In the year of our lord, 2024, how do you even begin to go about making a game for the Game Boy? His answer, and his story, is below.
Before we jump into the story, I want to say thank you to all the readers who wrote in with positive reactions to last week’s essay, How to Talk to People on the Internet. Part Two of the series is coming next week.
The Professor and the Game Boy
When I connect with Professor Chris Totten over a Google Meet call, he’s in between classes.
Totten leads the Animation Game Design (AGD) program at Kent State, and his students in the program’s “senior capstone” class are hard at work on their final project: fully playable demos of original games.
“They’re all looking really good this year,” Totten says with pride.
In past years, Kent State student games like Reed the Robotanist have released on Steam and been included in indie showcases like the Super Rare Games Mixtape.
But this month, the professor is showing the kids how it’s done.
Totten’s Kudzu, has just released on the Game Boy, complete with a real-deal physical cartridge edition produced by retro game publishers Mega Cat Studios.
Thanks to some clutch port work by the the team at 8 Bit Legit, it’s also available on a more modern Nintendo platform: the Switch eShop.
The Origins of the Plant War
Kudzu began as a sort of “inside joke” between Totten and his wife, he says.
Years ago, as an architecture student, Totten encountered a field choked with kudzu and—not realizing that the plant’s considered an invasive species—designed one of his student projects around the “big field of weird ivy.” When he realized the real nature of the plant, he and his wife half-jokingly cooked up a concept for a game based around fighting off “evil murder plants.”
It was just an idea, not taken too seriously. But in 2020, when the pandemic hit, Totten found himself (like all of us) with a lot of extra time on his hands. When he came across GB Studio—a visual programming application that allows you to create functioning Game Boy games—the idea for the plant-fighting game re-emerged.
The Game Boy is a limited platform in many ways. The number of sprites you can have on screen is low, the color palette is non-existent, and even basic features like animated health bars are hard to pull off without making sacrifices.
But in these restrictions, Totten saw an opportunity: “I didn't have to make really detailed art, or complex mechanics. So it actually kind of put me into a nice little box. I felt like I could finish this.”
Totten doesn’t consider himself a programmer, but as “more of an artist and designer and animator.” GB Studio’s visual scripting interface and the platform’s limited technical capabilities allowed him to focus on perfecting Kudzu’s aesthetic and design elements within those well-defined limits.
Totten piddled along on the project for a few years, alternating work on it with his teaching duties and his work on more modern games like Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends, an upcoming metroidvania game.
By 2023, Totten had made enough progress on Kudzu to launch a Kickstarter for it. Over 800 backers pitched in the support the project, raising $46,195 to bring the game to life with a physical edition, courtesy of publisher Mega Cat Studios, which specializes in producing new, functional game cartridges for retro platforms like the NES, SEGA Genesis, and Game Boy.
Arrested (Game) Development
I’m drawn to projects like Kudzu on a couple of different levels.
First as my inner child—that kid that once owned Game Boy and who still loves games as an art form. It tickles my brain to imagine the possibility that game platforms might actually never die, that creative works can continue to be produced for them decades after official support ended.
But I also can’t help but look at things like this as a marketing professional in the games industry. What’s the market size for something like this?
“I think the market’s bigger than one would assume,” says Totten, “especially with reproduction Game Boys like the Analog Pocket coming out. Then the effect of GB Studio is huge. I cannot emphasize this enough.”
“I haven’t seen anything like this since Twine,” Totten says, referencing the narrative game software toolset that drove a wave of new text adventure games in the 2010s.
“Chris Maltby [the creator of GB Studio] has put in even more tricks and features since the version that I used for Kudzu,” Totten says. “It’s really impressive.”
In other words, the Game Boy—which was originally released in 1989—lives on because of new technologies that are being built right now.
Is this the start of a bright future for old consoles? How many N64 games will we see released next year? Maybe we’ll finally get Banjo-Threeie as a .z64 rip.
A (game) boy can dream, anyway.
Kudzu is out now on Switch ($4.99) and Game Boy ($49.99).
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
Steam’s Most Wishlisted Game Tries to Set Expectations - Manor Lords is the most wishlisted game on Steam, and it’s being created by one guy named Grzegorz. With the game’s Early Access release coming next week, Grzegorz took to his Steam community page to try to set expectations with a post that I found quite charming. I genuinely hope he’s able to meet players’ lofty expectations. The game does look great. (Steam)
Take Two Lays Off Over 500 - Take Two, the alliterative parent company of Rockstar Games and 2K, announced plans to cut “around 5%” of their workforce and scrap some in-development titles. Details were sparse, and no specific axed projects were identified, but given that the company currently employs over 11,500 people, the 5% figure works out to be somewhere around ~579 layoffs. (The Verge)
Uncapped Games Comes Out Swinging - I’ve never seen anything like this from a new studio: a half-hour long documentary introducing a dev team and their new RTS game, featuring narration from Noclip’s Danny O’Dwyer. The video is super well-produced, though light on actual images of the game. It’s a bold way to build a studio brand, and I enjoyed the vid. (YouTube)
What Happened to Omega Strikers? - My team and I were interviewed for this mini-doc! It’s a very fair and well-told story tracking the GTM approach and ultimate end-state of Omega Strikers, a game that we’re extremely proud to have launched last year. Watch if you’d like to see me sitting—in the dark, in my house—ranting about how hard making games is. (Akshon Esports)
That’s it for this week. I’m going to very legally play Kudzu on an (again, entirely legal) Game Boy emulator on my iPhone. Please don’t tell the government.
See you next Friday.