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Even today, in the age of 4K screens wider than living room walls and (theoretically) mainstream VR headsets, Nintendo's Gameboy exerts a peculiar fascination. The hardware itself may have long since ceased production, but it continues to bewitch developers - take a tour of the indie storefront Itch.io and you'll soon be up to your nose in tributes, from first-person horror games coated in LCD fuzz to borderline copyright-unfriendly riffs on The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. How to explain this enduring appeal, the draw of nostalgia and Nintendo's peerless first-party licenses aside? For Daniel Linssen, an independent based in Sydney whose games are among the wittiest and most elegant I've played, it's a question of limitation."When you're working with only four colours and tiny sprites, it seems possible to find the perfect sprite for a particular object," he says. "There are only so many possible combinations, after all. And as the number of possibilities increases I find myself agonising over details that become less and less significant. So even though a higher resolution or more colours would make the game look 'nicer', there's a certain satisfaction to finding the best solution in a very limited space, rather than a good solution in a much more open space."
The idea of doing the most you can with a little is integral to game jams, which invite developers to cook up fully playable projects in days based on a (typically eccentric) theme. Much of the indie community's most pioneering work can be found among the submissions to competitions like the 14-year-old Ludum Dare event, and Linssen's own contributions - which draw heavily on classic 8- or 16-bit platformers and RPGs - are captivating efforts indeed.
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