PLAY BLASTAH FREE
A small, fast vertical shoot-'em-up built for an early Game Boy coding competition. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — A tiny shmup banged out in three days for a turn-of-the-century compo. Older than most of the people who will play it on this site, and faster than several of them too.
CARTRIDGE: Blastah — Black Box — freeware (2000). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH GAME BOY CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
A vertical shmup banged out in three days for a turn-of-the-century compo — fast, tiny, and very much a relic of its constraints.
Blastah (Game Boy, 2000) by Black Box is, by its own account, a small fast vertical shoot-'em-up assembled in three days for an early Game Boy coding competition — and you can feel every one of those three days. As a historical artifact it's genuinely interesting: this is what the homebrew scene looked like at the turn of the century, before modern toolchains, banged out against a deadline on a monochrome handheld. As a game in 2026, it's thin. It's quick, it's brisk, and it's over almost before it registers, with the rough edges a 72-hour compo entry naturally carries. There's no shame in that — it was never built to be more. Play it for the same reason you'd read a dated zine: to see where this scene came from. Just don't expect it to hold you. A curio, not a keeper.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 4.5/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Blastah is a shmup game built by Black Box and released in 2000 under freeware — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. A small, fast vertical shoot-'em-up built for an early Game Boy coding competition. A tiny shmup banged out in three days for a turn-of-the-century compo. Older than most of the people who will play it on this site, and faster than several of them too. It targets the original Game Boy, whose current homebrew wave — powered by the gbdev community, GBDK and GB Studio — is the most active in retro gaming. Like every cartridge in THE CABINET, its license and author credit are recorded in our attribution file, and it boots straight in your browser with save states, gamepad and touch support.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
NO-NONSENSE ANSWERS
- Why is Blastah free — what's the catch?
- No catch: the developer chose to release it free. That's the homebrew tradition on the Game Boy, and the license that allows it is documented per-title in our attribution file. We add nothing — no ads in the game, no account wall.
- Does Blastah work on mobile devices?
- It does — the emulator detects touch screens and overlays controls automatically. Controllers work too, on every platform.
- Can I save mid-game?
- Yes — open the emulator menu and use save states. They persist in your browser, so you can close the tab and resume later.
