What Brandon said about how “anything can run SNES games, since they’re just graphics on a screen,” made me have the realization that if you want your game to be playable for decades/centuries, making it for the NES/SNES/Genesis/TurboGrafx is probably a much safer option than making it for modern Windows systems. Playing Windows games from the early 2000s often requires a bunch of extra work/patches, so I can only imagine how annoying playing 2020s games 200 years from now might be. On the other hand, it feels pretty certain to me that computers 200 years from now (or whatever we use instead of computers) will still have NES emulators, which will run any NES game, regardless of whether it’s made in 1988, 2022, or 2100, without any real problem. Of course, this assumes that you’re making a game that could actually run on one of these old consoles – but a lot of indie games definitely could, or at least could be satisfactorily adapted without losing their “essential spirit.” As the tools for making games on these old platforms get better and better, I wonder if they’re going to become an increasingly attractive target platform for devs who want their games to effortlessly run on anything – similar to how Unity became the default engine for all sorts of games, even before it had built-in 2D support, simply because it exported to everything.
(sorry if I’m rehashing a line of thought that others have had before. this seems like something frank would say lol. it’s just something i thought about while listening to the podcast)