Field Notes

Game history, creator interviews, and retro culture — published from CRTPlay.

8 articles · 1 coming soon

LATEST

The CRT Effect: The Display Technology Your Retro Games Were Designed For
Retro Culture··15 min read

The CRT Effect: The Display Technology Your Retro Games Were Designed For

CRT displays weren't just a delivery mechanism — they were the final rendering step in the pixel art pipeline. Scanlines, phosphor bloom, and color bleeding were features, not bugs. This is the physics, history, and engineering behind why retro games look 'wrong' on modern displays.

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How We Picked 31 Games (and Rejected 6 More)
Dev Story··12 min read

How We Picked 31 Games (and Rejected 6 More)

Eleven GBA candidates, two survivors, nine rejections. NES was a breeze. PICO-8 was a marathon. The truth about how CRTPlay's library actually got built — including the games we made ourselves, the copyright casualties, and the technical dead ends nobody talks about.

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NES Emulator in 50KB of JavaScript: No WebAssembly Required
Dev Story··12 min read

NES Emulator in 50KB of JavaScript: No WebAssembly Required

jsnes is 50KB of pure JavaScript — no WebAssembly, no SharedArrayBuffer, no cross-origin isolation. Ten NES ROMs (1.3MB raw) compress to 660KB with Brotli. The hardest engineering problem we solved was a 44KB Flappy NES crashing at the fifth level because of an unhandled 6502 opcode.

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How We Put a GBA in Your Browser: 256MB SharedArrayBuffer and the Limits of WebAssembly
Dev Story··9 min read

How We Put a GBA in Your Browser: 256MB SharedArrayBuffer and the Limits of WebAssembly

NES emulation fits in 50KB of JavaScript with no special headers. GBA emulation needs 1.9MB of WebAssembly, 256MB of shared memory, cross-origin isolation headers, and a Service Worker. We shipped two games and removed six. Cold 4G users wait 65–135 seconds; desktop waits 6–13.

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Pixel Art Is Not 'Old Graphics': The 16×16 Storytelling That Beats HD
Retro Culture··22 min read

Pixel Art Is Not 'Old Graphics': The 16×16 Storytelling That Beats HD

Pixel art isn't a relic of hardware limitations — it's a design language that turns constraints into clarity. From Mario's 16×16 sprite to Stardew Valley's 41 million players, the most powerful visual storytelling in gaming often fits in fewer pixels than a modern desktop icon.

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Sound Design on a 4-Channel Chip: PICO-8 vs Game Boy vs NES
Retro Culture··20 min read

Sound Design on a 4-Channel Chip: PICO-8 vs Game Boy vs NES

NES, Game Boy, and PICO-8 all converged on four audio channels by coincidence, not design — and each platform answered that constraint in a completely different way.

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Open-Source Games: 30 Years of Free Cartridges
Retro Culture··18 min read

Open-Source Games: 30 Years of Free Cartridges

Wolfenstein 3D's source code went public on July 21, 1995. Thirty years later, you can play 31 open-source games in your browser without installing anything.

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The History of PICO-8: How a Fantasy Console Built a Global Community
Retro Culture··18 min read

The History of PICO-8: How a Fantasy Console Built a Global Community

PICO-8 is a fantasy console with 128×128 canvas, 16 colors, 32k cartridges — and the constraints that built a global indie community and launched Celeste.

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Why Retro Games Still Hit in 2026
Retro Culture··16 min read

Why Retro Games Still Hit in 2026

The data shows 70% of new retro players aren't chasing nostalgia — they're reacting against 80-hour bloated AAA slogs.

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A 13-Year-Old Made a 222KB Game in 1990. In 2022, AI Learned to Play It.
Retro Culture··15 min read

A 13-Year-Old Made a 222KB Game in 1990. In 2022, AI Learned to Play It.

The strange 30-year journey of NS-SHAFT — from a 13-year-old's magazine source code to an AI research benchmark...

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