The retro homebrew scene is full of magic, but I've rarely seen anything like this: a solo dev simultaneously building an original game for six different retro platforms. This 3D platformer, called Noah and the Poohloudies, is filled with creature collecting and raising elements, and it's in development for PS1, N64, Saturn, Dreamcast, 3DO, and N-Gage. Yes, really. That N-Gage.
In a 2021 interview, developer Walfrido Abejón described the game as "Super Mario 64 meets Pokemon meets Tamagochi." You're charged with rescuing a bunch of robots, which have been driven mad by an impending meteor crash. So you've got to defeat them, capture them, and store them in your backpack to make use of their special abilities – all the while making sure they've got the food, water, and medicine they need to survive.
That'd be a pretty fun pitch regardless of what platform it's on, but Noah and the Poohloudies gets way more intriguing because of the wide array of retro consoles it's being made for. These days a game is pretty much the same wherever you end up playing it – Switch 2, PS5, Xbox, and PC editions of a title might have resolution and frame rate differences, but they're all offering pretty much the same experience. That was not the case in the '90s, when contemporary 3D consoles were all vastly different, and ports of the same game between those platforms were sometimes barely recognizable from each other.
To Abejón, it's a challenge – but not a particularly remarkable one. "I'm no one special, if I can do it everyone can," the dev says in a Reddit comment. "Just have to have a lot of patience because development is way slower for these platforms."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Abejón reckons that the Dreamcast is easiest to work with, since it is the most modern thing on the platform list. "But every console of that generation is very picky with how they want the information to be processed, so they are all challenging for different reasons."
The 3DO, an ill-fated console headed up by EA founder Trip Hawkins, is "probably the toughest platform I'm facing at the moment," according to Abejón. "Hope I can squeeze a few more fps out of the system before having to resort to reducing draw distance or similar actions."
And why port it to the infamous N-Gage? The hybrid cell phone and game console might've been considered ahead of its time if it hadn't been such an infamous failure, turning into the butt of many a retro gaming YouTuber's off-hand jokes. "Well, I had one at home and I was curious what would happen," Abejón says.
For me, the greatest gaming community stories are those that begin and end with a thought along the lines of 'I wanted to know if I could do it.' The fact that Noah and the Poohloudies seems to be coalescing into an actually cool video game is just icing on the cake.
