Many retro video games flood the market, but not many of them actually come out on old hardware. Developer Retrotainment is doing just that with Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike and the Quest for Stale Gum, which is a new game coming out on NES in Q1 2023. However, it’s also releasing on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC on October 25.
The digital release on modern hardware will work like any other downloadable game and will feature a bunch of quality-of-life features like rewinding, a “watch mode,” and save states. Digital Eclipse, the team behind other big retro collections, has also curated a slew of bonus content like an exclusive cut of the stop-motion short film Mad Mike: Fury Load, a documentary trailer, concept art, archival card scans, various filters, and a music player. It’ll be $9.99 on those platforms.
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The physical cartridge shopping in Q1 2023 will see quite a markup at $79.99. The increased price means it comes with more stuff, as it includes an instruction booklet with a foreword by Adam F. Goldberg (the game’s writer), pixel art cards of its playable characters, and a retro box. Those who pre-order the cartridge will get a download code for any platform, too. Needless to say, the NES version won’t have the quality-of-life features from the other versions, but will have a bunch of sampled burps and farts.
The game is a throwback platformer where players control four unique kids across six levels. Each kid can be swapped to at any time has their own disgusting attack. There are also minigames like porta potty fishing. As noted by Game Informer, players can also collect cards in the game and will be rewarded with a “special surprise” for nabbing all 39.
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Premium video game company and new publisher iam8bit released a trailer about the game, detailing a “lost” Garbage Pail Kids video game. However, it seems to be a mockumentary as there’s not much proof the game did exist.
Retrotainment started the project after developing NES-style games on its own before catching the eye of iam8bit. This allowed the team to approach Topps to get the license and “right a wrong,” which was a project iam8bit was eager to publish according to the aforementioned Game Informer feature.
