Somewhere in an alternate 1998, Nintendo shipped F-Zero on the Game Boy Color. We didn’t get that timeline — but Canadian developer Shane McCafferty just built the next best thing. ZERO, a futuristic antigravity racer from Rocketship Park and UK publisher Thalamus Digital, launched November 5 on itch.io for $1.99 USD (about $2.80 CAD), and it’s the closest the little handheld has ever come to Mode 7.
The Game Boy Color has no scaling or rotation hardware at all — that’s the trick worth talking about. As Pants Pants Revolution explains, McCafferty faked it with techniques straight out of the retro demoscene: the road is built from pre-rendered 2×2 grid tiles cached in video RAM, then shifted line by line with timed scanline interrupts. He called it “an old demo scene trick” to Time Extension, adding that “scan line interrupts are your best friend on Game Boy.”
But a neat rendering trick alone doesn’t make a racer, and McCafferty clearly knows it. ZERO is a full game: nine tracks split across three cups — Bronze, Silver, and Gold — each unlocking once you’ve placed well enough. The hook is the boost gauge. You start every race with 11 power units, a boost burns three at once, and the only way to top the tank back up is to overtake a rival, which earns you one unit back. Burn through your reserve and your craft crashes and burns. Passing isn’t just how you win — it’s your fuel.
Making it feel fast mattered as much as making it look fast. McCafferty told Time Extension the real challenge was making the game “fast, frantic, and tough” while staying fair — the craft bobs, sparks fly off its undercarriage like Ridge Racer, and the HUD speed readout is comically oversized. He’s honest about the limits, too: long straights exist partly so you have “too long to think/realize he/she is only moving at 15 fps.” Fifteen frames a second, and it still looks like it’s doing a hundred.
This isn’t McCafferty’s first time bending the Game Boy Color into shapes it was never meant to hold. His earlier handheld work includes WOLF, a Wolfenstein-style shooter, an 8-bit OutRun demake, and the racers Nitro and Hero GP. Games Asylum quotes him saying, “I’ve wanted to push the beloved Game Boy Color to an approximation of Mode 7 for a while now,” and that “the technique was, like all cool things, stolen from the demo scene.”
ZERO ships as a standard Game Boy Color ROM, so it’ll run on the mGBA emulator, an FPGA handheld like the Analogue Pocket, or original 1998 hardware with a flash cart. No boxed cartridge release has been announced, but at about $2.80 CAD the download is an easy yes for anyone with an EverDrive in a drawer. Check out the trailer below:
I’ve got nine tracks to learn. Think you can beat Gold cup first try? Be honest about how many times you crashed and burned.
Sources: Time Extension, Pants Pants Revolution, Games Asylum, Thalamus Digital on itch.io