PLAY DRAGON'S CASTLE FREE
Merlina the young witch storms a dragon's castle, mixing melee, magic, and careful platforming. 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 witch invades a dragon's home to fix a monster problem the hard way. Open-sourced as a teaching engine — the author gave away both the game and the blueprints. Show-offs. The good kind.
CARTRIDGE: Dragon's Castle — Sik (Javier Degirolmo) — open source (2016). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH SEGA GENESIS CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
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THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
Melee, magic, and careful platforming — generously open-sourced as both a game and a blueprint.
Dragon's Castle is open-source Sega Genesis homebrew from Sik (Javier Degirolmo), released in 2016, in which Merlina the young witch storms a dragon's castle using a mix of melee, magic, and careful platforming. The standout fact here isn't just the game — it's that Sik open-sourced it as a teaching engine, giving away both the cartridge and the blueprints. That generosity has arguably done more for the Mega Drive scene than the game itself, which is a competent, decent-looking action-platformer rather than a genre-bender. The combat-plus-platforming blend is solid and the presentation is clean, but it plays it fairly safe, and as an instructional codebase some of its design choices serve the lesson as much as the player. Worth your time if you like Genesis action-platformers — and essential reading if you're an aspiring homebrew developer. A quietly important little cartridge.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Dragon's Castle is a platformer game built by Sik (Javier Degirolmo) and released in 2016 under open source — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. Merlina the young witch storms a dragon's castle, mixing melee, magic, and careful platforming. A witch invades a dragon's home to fix a monster problem the hard way. Open-sourced as a teaching engine — the author gave away both the game and the blueprints. Show-offs. The good kind. It is native Sega Genesis / Mega Drive code — a smaller scene than Nintendo's, but home to some of homebrew's most ambitious technical work, much of it built with the open-source SGDK toolkit. 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
- Am I allowed to play Dragon's Castle in the browser like this?
- Yes — and so are we. The author published Dragon's Castle under a license that allows free redistribution, which is the standard this whole site is built on. Credit and license live in the attribution file.
- Will it run on a phone or tablet?
- Yes. The Sega Genesis core runs in any modern browser; touch controls appear on mobile and gamepads are detected the moment you press a button.
- How do I keep my progress?
- Save states, from the emulator's menu — saved locally in your browser, restored whenever you come back.
