TLDR: Check out the project homepage here or play it on Itch.io right now!!

Average play session is 5 minutes, headphones are recommended, and a controller is highly recommended :)

Or check out the trailer if you haven't seen it!

Hi everyone, I posted earlier this year about this project, and earlier about my secret identity.

Demake86 is the Legally Distinct Action Adventure Platforming Game set on a METEOROID.

This game is a legally-distinct remake fangame homage to the original NES Metroid, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of its release on August 6th, 1986.

Metroid is very near and dear to me, and I've been in the community under different usernames for decades now. Super Metroid was one of the first things to fascinate me as a child, and so much of my artistic output throughout my life has been guided by thinking "Samus Aran is cool". It's what got me into programming when I was young, it's what got me into digital art.

Sometime around Metroid's 35th birthday I started kicking around an idea: What if you took the original NES Metroid, and you condensed it into a tiny tiny space? Remove every bit of unused space you could?

That idea is what became Demake86. It's a tiny, unforgiving, and legally distinct homage to the original NES Metroid. Demake86 is not really a remake, because there is a lot which differs from the original. But it also isn't really a demake, because it's far outside the scope of what a proper demake is. I'm a game developer, not a name developer, sue me!

The conceit is this: Fit the game into the space of 8^6 pixels. 8x8 pixels per tile, 8x8 tiles per room, 8x8 rooms inside the Meteoroid.

I've worked on a number of games during TheFempire days which I never released. ButteRPG, NepetaQuest 9000, Marumaria, and Environmental Station Gamma to name a few. I never released them because making a videogame, turns out, to be very hard. I've always wanted to make a Metroid fangame though, so I decided to just do it.

I've worked very very hard on this, and it is free, and you can even play it in your browser! (In-browser performance isn't great though...)

Btw, I've also opted not to use or reference most of the music. This is an intentional auditory design decision around the interplay of sound and silence. It is also because Nintendo's lawyers are very, very scary, and I am very, very bad at music.

BTW, I've made this using absolutely no AI for any part of the development process. I've been working on these ideas since 2016, this game in some form since 2021, and on this game in its current form since 2024. Learning resources, like other peoples "I need help" posts on StackOverflow or Reddit, have really dried up in the past few years. Even simple things like figuring out how to make an outline shader have had me scrambling for informational scraps.

This has also been a labor of blood, sweat, and tears. Those are the primary bodily fluids I would associate with this game. Except my eyes have dried up and I have had to replace the tears with artificial tears.

Again, you can read more about Demake86 on its homepage, or you can play Demake86 for free in your browser on Itch.io.

Please let me know what you think :)