Gunman Clive Now Available on SNES… Wait, What?

Gunman Clive is a 2011 action platformer made by one man. Bertil Hörberg, and it’s a damn fine game.  It’s short, but encourages repeated playthroughs and requires considerable skill to master it’s 16 stages.  Gunman Clive is a fun game that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 8-bit or 16-bit eras, and it’s available on a platform you own  – assuming you have access to a 3DS, Wii U, SNES emulator, Windows PC, Game Boy emulator, or an iOS or Android device.

That’s…. quite a mix of platforms, isn’t it?  Two of them seem out of place for a game that was originally released in 2011.

It seems that Mr. Hörberg is quite the tinkerer, and he’s ported his game to some very odd platforms for the fun of it. It started  in November of 2015, when, after a month of tinkering and programming, he released a Game Boy demo of Gunman Clive.  Not the full game, mind you – just a complete port of the first level of the game, with every feature in tact, and playable on every single device that can play original Game Boy games.  Since there aren’t exactly a ton of Game Boy cartridges being manufactured at present, he also released a ROM of his creation that can be played on virtually any Game Boy emulator.

So now, in 2016, Gunman Clive has been ported to another piece of vintage hardware –  Nintendo’s SNES.  Released today, he has ported the Game Boy version to run on real Super Nintendo hardware (from any region) in all of it’s glory.  Again, the first level is present and 100% complete with all features in tact, running at a full 60fps with no slowdown and is virtually identical to the original.  And once again he’s released his creation as a ROM that can be downloaded from his website and played in the SNES emulator of your choice.

Is porting a modern game to retro hardware a weird thing to do?  Maybe.  Is it a worthwhile thing to do?  Probably.  Is it cool to play a new SNES game in 2016?  Absolutely.

You can download the Game Boy ROM here, and the SNES ROM here.