A solo developer is building an original 3D platformer for six different retro consoles at the same time. The game is called Noah and the Poohloudies, and developer Walfrido Abejón is targeting the PS1, N64, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, 3DO, and the Nokia N-Gage, all at once.
Abejón described the concept in a 2021 interview as "Super Mario 64 meets Pokemon meets Tamagochi." The premise has you rescuing a collection of robots that have been sent into a frenzy by an incoming meteor. You defeat them, capture them, stuff them in your backpack, and put their unique abilities to work, all while keeping them fed, watered, and medicated. Think of it as the creature-collecting loop you know from Pokemon, wrapped in the freeform 3D movement that made Super Mario 64 such a landmark title.
Why porting to six platforms from the 90s is genuinely hard
Here's the thing: in the current generation, a multiplatform release is mostly a question of resolution and frame rate targets. The underlying game is the same. That was absolutely not true in the 1990s. The PS1, N64, Saturn, and Dreamcast all processed 3D geometry in fundamentally different ways, used different audio chips, and had wildly different memory constraints. Ports between those systems back in the day were sometimes unrecognizable from each other.
Abejón is navigating all of that simultaneously, which is either an act of passion or an act of madness. Probably both.
The developer says the Dreamcast is the easiest of the bunch to work with, given that it is the most modern hardware on the list. But even that comes with friction: "every console of that generation is very picky with how they want the information to be processed, so they are all challenging for different reasons," Abejón noted in a Reddit thread.
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The 3DO was a console launched in 1993 under a licensing model championed by EA founder Trip Hawkins. It sold poorly due to its high price and is one of the more obscure development targets in the homebrew scene today.
The 3DO is giving Abejón the most trouble right now. "Hope I can squeeze a few more fps out of the system before having to resort to reducing draw distance or similar actions," the developer wrote. The 3DO was already a commercial failure when it launched, and its architecture is notoriously awkward to work with.
The N-Gage port nobody asked for but everyone should appreciate
Then there is the Nokia N-Gage. The hybrid phone-and-handheld that became a punchline before it even had a chance to find an audience. So why port to it?
"Well, I had one at home and I was curious what would happen," Abejón said.
That answer is perfect. No grand vision, no calculated strategy. Just a developer with an old device sitting around and a question that needed answering. The key here is that this is exactly the spirit that makes the retro homebrew scene worth paying attention to.
Abejón is not positioning this as some heroic feat either. In a Reddit comment, the developer said: "I'm no one special, if I can do it everyone can. Just have to have a lot of patience because development is way slower for these platforms."
Patience is probably an understatement when you are writing code that has to run acceptably on hardware ranging from a 33 MHz RISC processor to a phone that Nokia sold as a gaming device and nobody believed.
What this means for homebrew fans
Noah and the Poohloudies is not a tech demo or a proof of concept. It is shaping up to be an actual game with a creature-collecting hook, 3D platforming, and a full overworld structure. The fact that it is being built to run on six platforms from the 1990s and early 2000s is a bonus for retro collectors and homebrew enthusiasts who want something genuinely new to put on old hardware.
The project does not have a confirmed release window yet, but Abejón has been sharing progress updates across Reddit and other channels. You can follow the development across the homebrew community threads where the dev is most active.
For more on what is happening in the retro and indie space, browse our gaming news or check out the latest reviews for a sense of what else is worth your time right now.
