What retro consoles still have the most active game development? The most games still being released physically? The best and most popular time-tested consoles?
I’m excited to start learning programming and had a thought to make a game (having an objective makes it easier to learn). I wrote up an entire plan already for the mechanics and it seems incredibly viable for a fun and full experience. I would like to have it playable on real hardware and am just trying to figure out which system to make it for.
So I did a quick search on MobyGames looking for new release since 2020, and:
I believe those are the most active
I sorted your list by number of releases:
As someone who’s currently interested in Atari 2600 development, I can tell you that MobyGames is way off in their count, even if you limit the count to physically-released games. There were well more than 10 new physical releases in 2025 alone.
It helps that developers do licensing deals with a few companies that produce physical cartridges with boxes and manuals on demand, but there are also still a surprising number of people making physical copies of games for sale in advance.
That’s good to know. However even just the Moby games count I’m pretty surprised that these systems are so active
Commodore 64 and DOS are probably the easiest to actually release your game on physical media for. Especially with the new C64 Ultimate. The list would probably look vastly different if you reduced it to the ones you could play on the real hardware.
There were also a lot of collection packs in the middle but I was too lazy to count and exclude them :P
But even if they released just roms instead of physical media, wouldn’t you still be able to play on the actual hardware using Everdrive or something?
Yeah, I forgot Everdrive and stuff existed.
@PiraHxCx @sic_semper_tyrannis There are a lot more Game Boy releases than shown on MobyGames. I don’t know if the site is limited to just physical carts, but even if that is the case then the actual number is more like 269 instead of 42 since 2020
See:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@bbbbbr/115897847228422258
Wow that’s awesome and quite shocking that it’s so popular. I wonder if GB is more popular that GBC and GBA
@sic_semper_tyrannis Oh yeah, at least in terms of homebrew being made GB is likely 10x GBA (whether cart or rom)
That’s awesome!
MobyGames is a collective database active since 1999. Years ago I was looking for a “letterboxd for games” and others like backloggd and rawg were missing a lot of stuff and had poor info about releases and so (I never checked again, so they might be better now). At the time MobyGames seemed like the best one, there is a lot of very obscure releases there, but I don’t know if other databases are more complete.
@PiraHxCx Here’s a brief tour of the Game Boy relevant databases…
DMGPage has some of the most complete data (i think?) for the Game Boy. The format is easier for me to work with.
https://dmgpage.com/homebrew-releases/
There is a japanese page that tracks some GB releases:
https://geemuboi.web.fc2.com/misc/new-releases.htm
Game Brew Almanac tracking has more platforms. The format is less structured.
https://www.videogamesage.com/forums/topic/1050-vgs-homebrew-almanac/
And Homebrews Connexion that also has more platforms:
https://homebrews.retro-gc.fr/