August 6, 2026
Cartridge chaos is back
How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026
A retro shooter hits Nintendo 64 and the comments instantly become a time-warp circus
TLDR: A developer turned his hobby engine into a brand-new Nintendo 64 shooter getting a real physical release, which is incredibly rare for a console this old. The comments stole the show with nostalgia, jokes about bloated modern apps, and a spicy debate over using AI to make retro games.
A developer casually announced he made a brand-new Nintendo 64 game in 2026, and the internet reacted like someone had opened a secret portal to 1998. Dominic Szablewski took a game engine he originally rewrote in C “for no reason” and turned it into Xibalba 64, a new first-person shooter coming as a real physical cartridge for the N64-style M64 console. That alone was enough to get retro fans yelling some version of: wait, we’re making new N64 carts now? The crowd was especially stunned by the sheer improbability of it all, with one commenter basically calling it a wild side quest after spotting the game in a Palmer Luckey video.
But the real popcorn came from the replies. One camp was pure nostalgia-fueled hype, cheering that old-school console development has somehow become easier thanks to modern community tools. Another camp went straight for the meme killshot: “2026 web dev: 4MB of JavaScript to render a button. 2026 N64 dev: entire FPS in 1MB.” Ouch. That line landed like a roast aimed at the whole modern software world. And then came the most chaotic twist of all: one commenter claimed they’re using Claude Opus 5 to build an N64 game without writing code, which turned the thread into a mini culture-war about whether this is a miracle, a flex, or the opening scene of our robot-made-retro future. In short: retro fans are thrilled, modern devs are getting dragged, and everyone suddenly wants to make a cartridge game.
Key Points
- •Dominic Szablewski used his C port of the Impact engine to create Xibalba 64, a new Nintendo 64 first-person shooter.
- •Modretro is publishing Xibalba 64 as a physical launch title for the M64, a modern N64 clone.
- •The article says Xibalba 64 is likely only the second physical release of a new N64 game since the console’s commercial era ended, after Xeno Crisis in 2023.
- •The engine used for the project, high_impact, has modular platform and rendering backends, including SDL2, Sokol, OpenGL, and Metal.
- •Szablewski built an N64 platform backend using Libdragon rather than Nintendo’s libultra, citing libultra copyright risk and Libdragon’s capabilities for homebrew development.