ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a complex array of historical, social, political, industrial and economic concerns that coalesce around the practice of contemporary nintendo entertainment system (NES) homebrew game development. It explores NES and other forms of retro homebrew as existing within the greater economy of the retro-gaming industry, it also proposes that retro homebrew differs considerably from industry interests in that it insists on the continued value of aging technology in the face of rapid innovation, preserves historical development practices, and encourages a model of game development and consumption that indirectly challenges the larger cultural myth of the technological sublime and opposes the consumer electronics industry practice of manufactured obsolescence. The retro-gaming industry effectively exploits peoples' intimate memories of older gaming technology, transforming it into a continual stream of revenue derived from nostalgic consumer products. In the dominant philosophical narrative of human progress supported by the gaming and consumer technology industries, NES homebrew production and consumption represent an anomaly.
