These video game engines are powering today’s retro revival

digitaltrends.com:

Retro games are back in fashion. Over the past several years, many developers have made a name for themselves by releasing high-quality remasters, collections, or ports of gaming classics. These retro revivals go above and beyond, adding quality-of-life visual and gameplay enhancements and featuring museums full of information on the games’ creation. These rereleases do a net good for the video game industry, but there’s a catch for developers: They require proprietary technology.

Many of the studios behind these retro revivals have created emulation engines of their own to make the work they do possible. Nightdive Studios’ KEX Engine and Limited Run Games’ Carbon Engine might be the most famous, but the Eclipse Engine from Digital Eclipse and Implicit Conversions’ Syrup Engine are also doing good work. Without these game engines, recent releases like Doom + Doom II, Micro Mages, Llamasoft: The Jeft Minter Story, and Tomba: Special Edition would not be possible.

I spoke to these developers to gain more insight into why they are creating these game engines and frameworks to bring retro games back. I found commonalities in their responses. They all had a penchant for creating more easily accessible, modern frameworks that could make retro games feel at home on modern platforms.

KEX Engine – Nightdive Studios

Nightdive Studios has made a name for itself over the past several years with remasters of first-person shooter classics. Its most recent release is Killing Time Remastered. In an interview following the release of Doom + Doom II, Larry Kuperman, Nightdive’s director of business development, explained that the studio’s vision for its remasters is that they “should look and feel the way you remember the original game looking and feeling.” I think that a main goal any developers working on these retro rereleases can get behind.

To achieve this vision, Nightdive created the proprietary KEX Engine. Nightdive’s Xaser Acheron calls KEX an “incredibly