PLAY OLD TOWERS FREE
Sprint a little explorer through trap-filled towers, racing for the exit past spikes and skulls. 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 speed-puzzle about surviving towers that actively want you dead. Built in C with SGDK by the same mind behind Alter Ego — clearly a person who enjoys watching me sweat over collision boxes.
CARTRIDGE: Old Towers — Denis Grachev / RetroSouls — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (2019). 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.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
A merciless speed-puzzle for the Genesis, built in C with SGDK by a homebrew heavyweight.
Old Towers is native Sega Genesis code from Denis Grachev / RetroSouls, the mind behind Alter Ego, released in 2019 under CC BY-NC-SA. You sprint a little explorer through trap-filled towers — spikes, skulls, a layout that actively wants you dead — racing for the exit. It's part speed-runner, part panic-puzzle, and it's punishing in the precise, fair way the best arcade games are: every death is yours. What lifts it above the pack is pedigree and execution. Built in C with the open-source SGDK toolkit by someone who clearly knows the hardware cold, it's a polished, ambitious piece of Mega Drive homebrew rather than a tech sketch. The catch is the difficulty curve, which is unapologetically steep and will turn off the patient. For action-puzzle fans who want a real Genesis cartridge to sweat over, this is one of the shelf's standouts.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 8/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Old Towers is a action game built by Denis Grachev / RetroSouls and released in 2019 under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. Sprint a little explorer through trap-filled towers, racing for the exit past spikes and skulls. A speed-puzzle about surviving towers that actively want you dead. Built in C with SGDK by the same mind behind Alter Ego — clearly a person who enjoys watching me sweat over collision boxes. 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.
ASKED AND ANSWERED
- Why is Old Towers free — what's the catch?
- No catch: the developer chose to release it free. That's the homebrew tradition on the Sega Genesis, 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 Old Towers 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.
