Back in 2024 some friends and I discovered Drift Mania and we quickly became obsessed, this was of course during our exam period lol. It was like a month old, and the current speedrun times at that time were noted in an Google Excel sheet that the developer had set up (if I remember correctly).

We played a lot, hunting for the WR speedrun times for the A1 level, and even managed to become like top 3 or something (can’t quite remember, but we did good!). The speedrun times migrated over to speedrun.com/Driftmania, and we didn’t register us at the time there. But as of recently, I remembered the game and had to play again - currently residing in the 7th place, working my way up.

The more I played, the more curious I was about the game. This ended up in me discovering PICO-8, a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Let me just say, browsing the SPLORE-page for cartridges is so much fun. I want to play all the time now, almost every game I find. It feels so much like back in the day when I gamed a lot. So far I’ve been playing DriftMania, GhostWave, Celeste (yes it actually orignated from PICO-8) and so on non stop.

The technology is so cool. The game cartridges can be saved in a special .png-format, like what?! The game is that small, and you can even export it to stand-alone HTML5 to play in the browser offline.

I might have to set up my Raspberry PI to some sort of microcomputer or a handheld to carry these games on the go. It’s so much fun.

Check it out yourself, and try beat my highscore on DriftMania lol.