THE BEST NES HOMEBREW GAMES
The NES turned 40 and refuses to act its age. Decades after Nintendo stopped making cartridges, hobbyists, demosceners and even a few professional studios keep writing brand-new games in 6502 assembly for hardware released in the 1980s. Homebrew is the result: legally distributable games — freeware, Creative Commons, or open source — built for a console that was never supposed to get a second act. Every game on this list runs right here in your browser, no cartridge or flash cart required.
What makes a great NES homebrew game is not nostalgia; it is discipline. The hardware is brutally constrained, so the best entries are the ones that pick one idea and execute it cleanly: a tight control scheme, a puzzle that respects your time, or a technical trick that makes the chip do something it was never promised it could do. We have ranked every NES title in the cabinet below — best first — using only what we actually know about each one.
24 GAMES · RANKED & SCORED BY THE MACHINE · ALL FREE & LEGAL
Nova the Squirrel
A full-length, open-source action-platformer starring a squirrel with a deep ability list, written from scratch in 6502 assembly by NovaSquirrel and released in 2018 under the GPLv3. It is the most ambitious game on this wall — a complete modern NES title rather than a jam entry or a tech demo — and the fact that a single determined developer shipped something this large in hand-written assembly is reason enough to start here.
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Alter Ego
A puzzle-platformer (Shiru and Denis Grachev, freeware, 2011) in which you control yourself and a mirror-image phantom at the same time — every move you make, your double makes too. It is one of the most acclaimed homebrew NES games ever made and was popular enough to be ported widely beyond the NES, which tells you the central mechanic genuinely works.
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Blade Buster
A caravan-style score-attack shoot-'em-up (High Level Challenge, freeware, 2010) with timed 2- and 5-minute runs, dense sprite swarms and oversized bosses. It is a showcase for how much the NES can be pushed to throw on screen at once, and the short fixed-length runs make it ideal for a quick score chase in the browser.
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Streemerz
A precision platformer (Faux Game Company, freeware, 2012) where you grapple from platform to platform on a streamer while dodging killer clowns. It famously began as a single entry in a parody collection of fake games and turned out sharper and more demanding than many genuine releases — a cult favourite for players who enjoy exacting, momentum-based jumps.
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Twin Dragons
A colourful run-and-jump platformer (Garydos, 2018) notable for being written in the high-level Millfork language rather than raw assembly. The version here is the free open-source build distributed by the author under zlib/CC-BY; a fancier boxed edition exists elsewhere, but this is the full game and a genuinely complete platforming experience.
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Driar
A tidy puzzle-platformer (Stefan Adolfsson and David Eriksson, freeware, 2009) guiding the wizard Driar through 60-plus single-screen levels of careful, deliberate jumps. With that many hand-built rooms it offers real substance, and each screen plays like a small self-contained puzzle to solve rather than a reflex test.
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From Below
A falling-block puzzler with a hook (Matt Hughson, MIT open source, 2020): clear lines to fend off a Kraken whose tentacles rise from the bottom of the well. It is one of the more polished modern NES releases on this list, written in 2020 for 1983 hardware, and the open MIT license makes it a clean example of contemporary homebrew done right.
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Sir Ababol
A Spanish-flavoured action-platformer (The Mojon Twins, freeware, 2013) in which a knight collects 24 ababol flowers across the Monegrian fields, keys in hand. It is one of the better-known entries from the prolific Mojon Twins and a good, breezy introduction to their style of tight single-screen platforming.
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Thwaite
A Missile Command–style defense game (Damian Yerrick, GPL, 2011) where you protect a tiny village from falling fireworks gone wrong. It is a clean, focused take on a classic arcade formula from a developer with a real knack for tight little state machines, and it reads instantly to anyone who has played Missile Command.
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Lan Master
A connection puzzler (Shiru, freeware, 2011) where you rotate network nodes to route a signal across every screen of a steadily growing campaign. It is a calm, methodical puzzle game in the Net-Walk tradition, with enough screens to keep the difficulty climbing well past the tutorial stage.
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Tiger Jenny
A short, punchy action quest (Ludosity, freeware, 2014) starring the warrior Jenny Tiger on a mission to defeat the Lichious Turnip. It is notable for being made and given away free by a studio that ships commercial games, and that professional polish shows in a compact, well-made little adventure.
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2048
A native NES port of 2048, the sliding number-merge puzzle (tsone, open source, 2014). It is a faithful conversion of the viral browser game onto real cartridge hardware — nothing reinvented, but a clean, instantly familiar implementation that wears the downgrade to 1980s tech surprisingly well.
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Chase
A one-button pursuit arcade game (Shiru, freeware, 2012): outrun the chaser, grab the loot, never stop moving. It is tiny — around 24 kilobytes — and built around a single panicky idea executed with no fat on it, which is exactly the kind of focused design the hardware rewards.
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Lawn Mower
A time-attack arcade game (Shiru, freeware, 2011) where you mow every blade of grass before the clock runs out, grabbing gas cans to keep going. It takes a mundane chore and turns it into a tight score-and-survival loop — simple, honest, and quick to pick up.
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Zooming Secretary
A frantic office-management arcade game (Shiru and PinWizz, freeware, 2011) where you answer phones, fetch files and out-hustle the workday. It is a busy, multitasking time-management game in miniature, and its escalating phone-juggling pressure makes for a good short-session score chase.
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Jet Paco
A jetpack arcade game (The Mojon Twins, CC BY-NC-SA, 2018) in which you steer a hero through patrolled single-screen stages, collecting every energy cell to unlock the way forward. It is pure thrust-management arcade design — no lore, no padding — and a representative slice of the Mojon Twins' single-screen template.
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Espitene
A bite-sized flip-screen action-platformer (The Mojon Twins, LGPL/CC BY-NC-SA, 2018): run, jump and dodge through tight single-screen rooms, grabbing what you need to reach the exit. It is small and economical by design, with tidy rules and no wasted space — a good quick play if you like the Mojon Twins' compact style.
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Cadàveriön
A spooky flip-screen platformer (The Mojon Twins, LGPL/CC BY-NC-SA, 2018) set among the restless dead, hopping through haunted single-screen rooms while the graveyard works against you. It is a themed companion to the studio's other 2018 platformers, trading the usual fields for a moving-corpse hazard layout.
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Cheril the Goddess
A flying action-platformer (The Mojon Twins, CC BY-NC-SA, 2018) in which a newly deified Cheril hovers and dives through hazard-lined caverns. The hover mechanic gives it a different feel from the studio's ground-based platformers, set in the same Sir Ababol universe, though it remains firmly in their single-screen comfort zone.
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Sgt. Helmet: Training Day
A run-and-gun platformer (The Mojon Twins, CC BY-NC-SA, 2018) across a robot-infested military base: shoot everything in sight and recover the secret documents. It swaps the studio's usual collect-'em-up loop for straightforward shooting action, and is a solid pick if you want a Mojon Twins game with a trigger.
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RHDE: Furniture Fight
A two-player neighbourhood war (Damian Yerrick / tepples, GPL, 2014) where you blow holes in the rival house, steal their furniture and arrange your own for points. It is an inventive local-multiplayer party game with an unusual interior-decorating victory condition — best with a second player, which is the main thing keeping it from ranking higher for solo browser play.
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Concentration Room
A pairs-matching memory game for one or two players (Damian Yerrick / tepples, GPL, 2010), framed as a biochemical quarantine incident. It is a competent, well-themed take on the classic concentration card game; the concept is simple by nature, which is exactly why it sits this far down the list.
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Robotfindskitten
A two-player Zen simulation (Damian Yerrick, open source, 2015) adapting the classic robotfindskitten: wander a field of mystery items until the robot finally finds kitten. There is no score, no enemy and no fail state — it is a deliberate novelty more than a game, which is the whole point, but also why it ranks near the bottom of a 'best games' list.
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Russian Roulette
A talking-cartridge parlour game (Damian Yerrick / tepples, GPL, 2014) with sampled speech: load one chamber, spin the cylinder, pull the trigger. The technical novelty of audible sampled speech on the NES is genuinely impressive, but underneath it is a randomized coin flip with almost no gameplay — a curiosity worth a look rather than a game worth playing for long.
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