PICO-8

PICO-8 is a fantasy video game console and game engine made by Lexaloffle Games. It is styled after 8-bit hardware from the 1980s.

Code (in Lua), music, sound effects, sprites and maps can be made in PICO-8 directly.

Games can be exported to "cartridges" (P8 for text-based or P8.PNG for a PNG image), HTML5 (an HTML file or to Lexaloffle's official "BBS" (bulletin board system), which can be found on a web browser or in PICO-8 using its splore mode), or, as of v0.1.11, a Windows, macOS, Linux or Raspberry Pi program. PICO-8 was also made available for CHIP computers.

PICO-8's successor is Picotron. It is a "fantasy workstation" with less limitations. The first version (an alpha version) was released on March 14, 2024.

The original version of Celeste, later Celeste Classic, was made for PICO-8 in four days for a game jam. It became so popular that an enhanced version was released in 2018. The enhanced version includes the original as an Easter egg.

 What it can do 
PICO-8 always uses a 128 × 128 pixel screen with 16 colors and four audio channels. Two 16-color palettes are available; the last can be used by making the color ID bigger than 128. No hardware is emulated. This allows it to do more things.

 Development 
PICO-8 was created by Joseph White, best known as Zep. It started as LEX500. Development stopped for some time until after he started working on Voxatron, another game engine. It was going to use BASIC (specifically a dialect similar to BBC BASIC), which was later replaced with Lua 2 because it was easier to use and could do more things. He added some built-in tools and renamed it to PICO-8.

The 16-color palette was inspired by the Commodore 64 and the 4-channel audio by the Amiga 500. Inspiration was also taken from the Apple IIe, Famicom and other platforms. He created the term "fantasy console" to describe it and other platforms with intentional limitations.

PICO-8 was first revealed as PICO-BASIC v0.0. at Pico Pico Cafe on May 9, 2014. PICO-8 was released in 2015 but says its first year of copyright is 2014.

 Unofficial versions 
There are unofficial versions of PICO-8. Some of these are Fake-08 and tac08. Many run on platforms that are not officially supported, e.g. single-board computers and microcontrollers, including the ESP32. RetroArch can also play PICO-8 games.

 Adoption 
Developers (including in the demoscene) liked the limitations of PICO-8. PICO-8's popularity has inspired the creation of more fantasy consoles. One of them is TIC-80, a "fantasy computer", and another is Pixel Vision 8, which has customisable limitations. Fantasy consoles have also became their own subculture.

A low poly (low polygon) CAD software, picoCAD, can be used to make models for PICO-8. It can also export models as OBJ/MTL files or animations of them as GIFs. It is well-known.

Remakes or demakes exist for some games. Some of them are Terra (Terraria), Poom (Doom), Fuz (Fez), Low Mem Sky (No Man's Sky), and unDUNE II'' (Dune II).

 See also 
 TIC-80

 References 

 Other websites 

 PICO-8 and the Search for Cosy Design Spaces: a talk by Joseph White, PICO-8's creator
 Top games tagged PICO-8 on itch.io

Category:Game engines
Category:Cross-platform software