Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

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Goose2k
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Goose2k »

Seal I used for my 2 shipped games (From Below, Witch n' Wiz) is available here if anyone wants it.

https://www.matthughson.com/2022/05/17/ ... quality-2/
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Last edited by Goose2k on Tue May 17, 2022 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Drag »

The whole point of a seal is that it's proof of verification on something.

Nintendo's seal meant that the pak wouldn't damage your console, and that the contents of the software were 'acceptable' based on some arbitrary rules, and that the pak and software adhered to some forward-thinking guidelines to ensure that it would continue to work on later revisions of the console (such as the backwards compatibility the SNES was originally supposed to have). And don't laugh at that third point, because the Gameboy is a good example of it. :P

For a homebrew seal to be useful, it has to indicate something, and we have to think about it from the perspective of 2022+, not 1985. Who's obtaining a modern homebrew game for the NES, and what kinds of concerns might they have?

For something specific to NesDev, we could consider some kind of verification system to determine whether a homebrew game will run on actual hardware, and make a badge available for developers who passed the verification. For example, verification that the game runs on NTSC consoles, PAL consoles, certain (common) clones, or adapts itself for multiple systems, etc.

Or we can also do some badges to indicate certain features, like support for plugging in a 3rd party controller on the Famicom, or support for expansion audio, support for the light gun, support for 2 players, etc (just like Nintendo did on their black box games).

Another seal to consider would be one which proves that physical cartridges actually come from trusted manufacturers, where the proceeds go where promised, the cart is produced with the dev's permission, etc.

Though, I won't stop anyone from slapping one of these on :D :
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Goose2k
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Goose2k »

Drag wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 2:01 pm For a homebrew seal to be useful, it has to indicate something, and we have to think about it from the perspective of 2022+, not 1985. Who's obtaining a modern homebrew game for the NES, and what kinds of concerns might they have?
I touched on this early, but my goals were:
I would like to create one that:
* Triggers some nostalgia.
* Communicates this is modern homebrew (not a retro-looking Steam game, and not an actual 80's NES game).
* Is Public Domain.
So I'm thinking less about a literal "seal of quality", and more about the nostalgia + separating homebrew from other games.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by DRW »

In how far would a seal that is not the official Nintendo Seal of Quality trigger any kind of nostalgia? I mean, it's not that every NES game had a different seal, so that a new one could be imagined to be part of the bunch. Actual licensed NES games had the one Seal of Quality and nothing else.

Use the original one or a lookalike for homebrews and you're in the realm of copyright infringement.
Use a seal that looks totally different and there's no nostalgia at all because, as I said, games didn't use "a seal", they used the Seal.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Goose2k »

DRW wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 3:59 pm Use the original one or a lookalike for homebrews and you're in the realm of copyright infringement.
Use a seal that looks totally different and there's no nostalgia at all because, as I said, games didn't use "a seal", they used the Seal.
I can imagine a middle ground between "exactly like the original" and "totally different". I think the Morphcat seal is pretty close to what I had originally imagined (obviously with something more generic than "morphcat game" on it :D ). I'd probably mix this look with the Lizard "seal" text and have the text read something like "For Original NES Hardware" or something like that.
morph_seal.jpg
I got a number of people asking if they can use the seal I used on my games (hence me uploading it here), so it seems like there is some demand for something like this, even if its not something every game wants to use (such as m-tee mentioning wanting to move away from copy-cat like looks, which I totally get).
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Drag »

Oh I see, if we were striving to make cartridges which look authentic to commercial releases, having some kind of badge to indicate that it's a modern post-life homebrew game might be nice. I could see that being relevant to other communites too, and not just us. :D
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by SethAbramson »

I know I don't really get a say on any of this because I am a gamer, collector, journalist and academic rather than a game dev or game publisher, but FWIW I think the most important thing a seal can do is something Matt mentioned: confirm that this is an aftermarket NES game rather than an original NES game. What I refer to as the "NES2" phenomenon is a real thing—and a historic thing—in video game history. What post-1995 NES devs across the world have done is created the largest aftermarket video game ecosystem in the history of the art form, with 1,310 NES2 titles counted so far and (based on my research) about 700 left to catalogue. And dozens more arrive each month. Could a seal be used to crystallize this phenomenon?

NES2 games were created after the lifespan of the NES; it's a simple designation. I find "homebrew" and "aftermarket" and "unlicensed" far more problematic terms as a journalist and academic because (a) some NES2 games are made by large development studios or sizable transnational dev teams and therefore the term "homebrew" is inapt because it suggests an ad hoc DIY one-dev/single-author project; (b) "aftermarket" has a denigrative tonal quality and falsely implies (even though this is not what the word means) that the market for original NES games ended at some point, when one of the striking things is that it never did end and that the NES and NES-adjacent market is the longest-lasting, farthest-ranging, and most vibrant video game market ever created; and (c) "unlicensed" is a useless term because everything after 1995 was definitionally unlicensed but also many, many games pre-1995 were too.

Anyway, this is just my pitch to find a term—whether it is "NES2" (Nintendo's original name for the generation of Nintendo games it intended to bring out after the NES, before deciding to go with "SNES") or a different term—that tells gamers, collectors, and (yes) journalists and historians that the game you're looking at post-dates the lifespan of the original NES and is, in effect, a "second-generation NES game." (Which is actually true, as NES gamers today use many non-NES means to play NES games, and many NES2 games are informed by tools and sensibilities that didn't exist during the first era of NES).

I think a seal that focuses on the hardware a game can play on is too much "inside baseball" for non-dev gamers to digest and anyway would become obsolete quickly, as there are so many "NES2 consoles" (AVS, Retron, RasPi, and on and on) that no one seal can cover which games will work on what.

PS: I meant to add that both "homebrew" and "aftermarket" are also terms that are disappointingly non-specific, as they could apply to homebrew or aftermarket games for any of the 150 video game consoles that have existed since 1970. Wouldn't it be ideal for this seal, which already echoes the NES seal in a nostalgic way as others have noted, to then have words on it that... well... are special to this particular dev and video game community, rather than equally applicable to communities far-flung from this one? I feel like this community deserves a term or shorthand all its own, not a generic moniker.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Goose2k »

Yeah, exactly @drag!

@seth: The only hang up I have on "NES2" is that the term seems to need to be explained to people who don't already know what you're talking about (and that's true for a lot of the other terms like "aftermarket" etc). It sounds a bit like it could be a whole new system (PS1 -> PS2 type thing). I don't have any suggestions though... :lol:
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by SethAbramson »

I hear you, though what I would say (realizing here that I sound like an academic, but admittedly that is part of my background) is that once terms are popularized within the subcommunities that create them, they shortly thereafter get crystallized in the broader culture.

This is a good thing rather than a bad thing, as it gives subcommunities ownership over their messaging. Whereas "homebrew" is a term already used not just by every aftermarket video game console subcommunity (Atari 2600, Intellivision, Odyssey, Sega Genesis, et. al.) but also by non-video game subcommunities (e.g., microbrewing and indie software development), and whereas it denotes a certain dodgy fly-by-night homespun quality that many of the very best NES games coming out now don't actually have—which is a good thing— whatever term this community creates, whether NES2 or anything else, will, if widely adopted in the community, in short order crystallize within the broader culture because... well, the culture has no choice but to accept the terms of a hobby as set by those at its core.

I guess I'm saying that whatever you all decide, don't worry—you won't have to explain it to folks for long. If you all use it (and the whole point of the seal, I imagine, is to encourage community-wide adoption of whatever word/words are on the seal) it will crystallize outside the community in well under 12 months. Journalists will use it in their stories; academics will use it in their articles; gamers and collectors will use it when buying and selling games on eBay; devs will use it when pitching projects to publishers; publishers will use it in marketing; and so on. That's just how digital culture works now.

It's also why this seal conversation is so important. This is the moment the community announces itself as a community.

Last thought (apologies for always being so verbose): My research suggests that not only does this generation of NES gameplay involve *many* consoles that didn't exist before—not just Retron and RasPi and AVS but a dozen other retro gaming systems and literally scores of emulators—but NES devs are approaching game development with new tools (e.g., Nesmaker and the gloriously advanced mapper Something Nerdy Studios is building for Former Dawn) and a new understanding of what a video game *is* that is very different from what we saw in the third generation of video gaming.

I guess what I'm saying is... I think NES2 *is* a different "system", as it is a distinct generation of NES gaming. I hope in time today's NES devs will embrace that, because from the outside looking in I would say you are building your own gaming ecosystem—and it deserves its own history and culture and devotees in the same way that the PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, and PS5 all had their own subcommunities and years in the sun. And personally, I think the era of NES2 can be longer and broader and greater than any individual PS console has ever had.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by gauauu »

SethAbramson wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 8:40 pm
NES2 games were created after the lifespan of the NES; it's a simple designation. I find "homebrew" and "aftermarket" and "unlicensed" far more problematic terms as a journalist and academic because (a) some NES2 games are made by large development studios or sizable transnational dev teams and therefore the term "homebrew" is inapt because it suggests an ad hoc DIY one-dev/single-author project; (b) "aftermarket" has a denigrative tonal quality and falsely implies (even though this is not what the word means) that the market for original NES games ended at some point, when one of the striking things is that it never did end and that the NES and NES-adjacent market is the longest-lasting, farthest-ranging, and most vibrant video game market ever created; and (c) "unlicensed" is a useless term because everything after 1995 was definitionally unlicensed but also many, many games pre-1995 were too.
I completely agree with the problems with all these terms. Each one falls short in its own way, and there are way too many categories of new NES games that don't fall cleanly into these labels. But "NES homebrew" has taken root and is going to be hard to overtake at this point.
I think a seal that focuses on the hardware a game can play on is too much "inside baseball" for non-dev gamers to digest and anyway would become obsolete quickly, as there are so many "NES2 consoles" (AVS, Retron, RasPi, and on and on) that no one seal can cover which games will work on what.
I understand what you're getting at here, but I think this view misses something important. For MOST of us (maybe all?), the primary target is the original NES itself. Any of these other clone/emulation platforms are gravy and a convenience, and are beyond the main point. Our shared culture is "plays on original NES hardware." For reasons I'll get into more below, getting any sort of unified opinion from the community beyond this is going to be really difficult.

I guess what I'm saying is... I think NES2 *is* a different "system", as it is a distinct generation of NES gaming.
This I completely disagree with. As I said above, the one thing that unites all of us is targeting the original NES. Yes, it's a different generation, different culture, community, and different mindset, but it's ABSOLUTELY the same "system", the original NES. We can celebrate the cultural and community changes, but that doesn't change the fact that the "product" -- the games themselves -- are NES games.
It's also why this seal conversation is so important. This is the moment the community announces itself as a community.
Here's where the crux of the problem is. Your idea hinges on there being a single community with a shared vision. But the NES homebrew community (for lack of a better term) is really a bunch of intersecting and overlapping subcommunities and ideas, with quite a few different visions. That's why there's tension between some old-school assembly programmers and the NESDev communities. There used to be a lot of tension between the "everything must be free" and the "sell your game" people (this one has mostly fizzled into the background). People love to debate about whether Something Nerdy's project "counts" (whatever that means), and whether they're doing the same thing as other developers. Some people consider projects by actual established game studios to be a different sort of "thing" than hobby projects.

There's nothing wrong with having this diversity of community (assuming people are respectful, which sadly isn't always the case), but I think trying to standardize and articulate any sort of shared "seal" or new term that communicates a shared united vision is going to be doomed to failure. It will either unnecessarily alienate people who fall outside of that vision, or end up being so vague that it only means "this plays on the NES." And neither of those outcomes will accomplish "the community announcing itself as a community" any more than all the work that's already been done in the past.

I guess all this is to say, it's fine to discuss this from an academic perspective, (I do think it's an interesting topic) but I can't fathom that you'll have a lot of success uniting all these subcommunities into a convenient new label or seal.

That also doesn't mean I'm opposed to seals and labels. Having a cute seal that says "this is NES homebrew as opposed to some retro-looking game" doesn't bother me. But it's the declaration of community-wide intent that I think will be problematic.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by SethAbramson »

I appreciate this comment so much!

And yes, I very early on—as only a recent newcomer to all this—saw some of the divisions you mentioned: NESMaker vs. 6502, development studio vs. DIY devs, immediate public ROM dumps vs. commercial releases, those willing to release their games only as ROMs and those willing to release their games only as cartridges, and so on. I actually think these divisions will widen over time; you say that "NES homebrew" has stuck for now, and it has, but as a researcher I see signs that more and more devs will be taking issue with the term "homebrew" being attached to NES games that are made in 2022 (and after this year) by teams of professionals. The main reason I thought a temporal distinction—games published after 1995—might be better than a qualitative one ("homebrew") is that no one can argue with Time. I think we will find a lot of people can argue over what deserves to be called a "homebrew" and many already do. Was Jay & Silent Bob: Mall Brawl a "homebrew"? Will Amazon's Training Road be? Are hacks? Ports? Music carts? Some of this hasn't come up because folks aren't thinking about it; eventually, I think more folks will.

In any case, I hear you on the "system" issue and in retrospect I really think I misspoke. I meant to say that (in my own head) "NES2" is a different *era* of NES, not a different system altogether (which is why the root of the term "NES2" is still "NES" rather than some other made-up word disconnected from NES). I think what makes this a different era is actually much of what you have mentioned: the debates between/among devs are the sort of debates that 1980s/1990s devs would never have had because the available technology was different then; the frustration some devs feel with ROM-only devs or games that have been optimized for systems other than the NES is a frustration only possible because many retro gamers no longer play retro games on the original hardware; some games (e.g. Former Dawn) don't feel like NES to certain people precisely because devs' distance from the first era of NES allows some devs to have solidified in their minds, in hindsight, "what NES is"; and so on. Yes, the NES is still at the root of all of this, but the NES in 2022 rather than the NES in 1988—which is simply a way of saying that the context in which the NES exists has changed, not that the system has.

The one thing I would say, having now played 1,300 NES games published after 1995 for my research at RETRO, is that I think you would be surprised how many of your fellow devs are not putting their games on carts and have no expectation their games will be played on the NES itself. They are programming games that *could* be put on a cart and played on the NES, certainly, but they are taking no affirmative steps to produce that result as opposed to, say, someone using an emulator or an Everdrive or buying a repro cart and using an AVS. I recently came across some games from the early 2010s that wouldn't play on the AVS and I was stunned—not because there's anything wrong with that, as devs should do whatever they like in my view, but because we are already at a time when most devs are not making games that can *only* play on the NES, so this was the first time I'd ever encountered that scenario. So I think even on the question of "are devs writing for the NES qua hardware rather than merely as a series of technical programming limitations"... your community is actually quite split. Which *could* make the whole seal debate a nonstarter, as you imply is a possibility.

I think "homebrew" worked fine for the first era of post-1995 NES development in the U.S., which began in the mid-2000s and lasted until around 2017 or 2018 (keeping in mind that the first era of post-1995 NES development worldwide was in Taiwan and China and other Asian countries in the late 1990s and very early 2000s, and at the time they used "unlicensed" the way we now use "homebrew"; lexicons evolve, one way or another). But my research suggests that around 2018 or 2019, a level of sophistication, professionalization, commercialization, commodification, and subcultural bifurcation arose in NES development that could make the word "homebrew" less efficacious in the 10 to 15 years to come. But we'll see! I will root energetically for this community either way! :D
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by gauauu »

Ok, with those clarifications, I agree more with what you're saying. And yeah, even though I'm saying it will be hard to dislodge, I do fully agree that "homebrew" is becoming a worse label for reasons you mention (I was just arguing with a friend this week that I didn't consider Jay & Silent Bob, or the new Alwa game to technically be "homebrew" by the definition that I would usually use). I just think you'd have a heck of a time finding a term that sticks more broadly, even if it would be useful to have one. (I'm sorry to say that I find NES2 to feel really awkward and non-descriptive, so I won't be rooting for that term, although a different term with similar goals might agree with me more).
I think you would be surprised how many of your fellow devs are not putting their games on carts and have no expectation their games will be played on the NES itself. They are programming games that *could* be put on a cart and played on the NES, certainly,


I don't think I'd be surprised by that -- there's always been tons of projects like that for NES and other old systems. There's been a near-daily stream of that sort of release on pdroms for years and years now. But I DO think the vast majority of folks making them think "I'm making a game that targets the NES" (even if it never gets puts on a cart), as opposed to "I'm making a game to target an emulator." The difference in motivation is subtle, but I think* it's still usually about the NES itself as a platform. Many of those projects were probably tested on a flash cart like the Powerpak or Everdirve, because every NES developer that I know feels an incredible joy seeing their game run on hardware the first time. But once you get that far, it's a whole lot easier just to hand out a rom than to figure out a cartridge distribution, particularly if it's a small toy/demo game that isn't going to be worth physical production costs.

* I have no real data for this, but I'm extrapolating based on my own experience of releasing some projects like that, along with the experiences of other developers that I know personally. I realize we don't represent a full cross-section of all developers though.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Goose2k »

Sorry to inject myself in here, I just wanted to clarify one this in this regard:
SethAbramson wrote: Wed May 18, 2022 8:00 am It's also why this seal conversation is so important. This is the moment the community announces itself as a community.
My intent with this thread is not to create a seal that all/most NES homebrew devs would adopt, but rather create a professional looking, public domain "Nintendo Seal"-like image that any dev, who lacks the skill to create their own, can use. That's all. :D

What you're suggesting might be cool Seth, but obviously a much larger undertaking, which I think there will be a lot of resistance to.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by SethAbramson »

Ah, I misunderstood. I did think this was aiming for more general use (not in a mandatory sense, of course, as how would that even work or why would anyone want that, but in the sense of organically building a culture in which most devs will want to identify their work as being part of a community of projects via some external signifier).

With this clarification—which really was just my own misunderstanding, and no one else's fault—I guess I would simply add this: I think that when a seal gets created and people start to use it, the use of it invariably becomes a source of community discussion and debate. IOW, I'm not convinced the conversation doesn't come back around to the point it was at above regardless of what the original intent of any seal was.

If the seal says "homebrew" and a Jay & Silent Bob-like NES game uses it, there will be debate; if the 6502 folks adopt it en masse they may object to the NESMaker folks adopting it; if many people use it, any group of devs who choose not to will be making a "statement." In a way, I think the best one can hope for with a seal that is not targeted for a particular purpose and the product of community discussion on the front end is that it will be only sporadically used; otherwise, it will spark a sudden conversation in mid-use that's significantly heightened in intensity because it's happening so late in the game.

In any case, I appreciate you all letting me weigh in on this, especially as I know it's finally for devs to decide. These are your games, and just as journalists or critics or academics or even collectors will use whatever terms of assignation they ultimately light upon—or perhaps many different terms, depending on the person and the moment and the game—devs do always (and certainly should!) have full control over how they frame their own art.
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Re: Official NES Homebrew Seal of Quality

Post by Drag »

I see "homebrew" as "for enthusiasts by enthusiasts". I think the gatekeeping being discussed is referring to things made for sale to enthusiasts by non-enthusiasts, but I'm not sure this actually exists right now, or if it even can exist at this point, because the target is a platform only enthusiasts have, not the general public. To produce something for this platform at this point implies a level of enthusiasm for it. :P

What about clone consoles like the VT-series? Think about what they physically are, who made them, and who they were made for, and you'll have your answer why we wouldn't consider them to be homebrew.

This is why I think the word "homebrew" is fine for describing new games made for our community, and why it'd be appropriate for a seal as discussed in this thread.
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