Speaking of unknowingly acquiring games, PICO-8 showed up in my Lexaloffe account recently. Lexaloffe are a small game developer who also produce what they call Fantasy Consoles, like PICO-8. Fantasy Consoles are game consoles that only exist in software but have similar limitations for developers to a real console.

For example, PICO-8 limits developrs to 128×128 pixels with 16 colors and like older 8-bit computers that had their own versions of BASIC and a minimal operating system you can launch games and switch to the editor in order to immediately start developing your own in Lua.

Or you could just play a ton of games that others have developed using PICO-8 right in your browser. There are scrolling shooterstrain (riding) simulators, drawing programs intended for Japanese calligraphy that are abusable into creating artful sketches of Splatoon charactershardcore platformers, and many others posted to the Lexaloffe BBS.

If you had Voxatron before from a Humble Bundle or directly from Lexaloffe, then you already have PICO-8 available to you via your Lexaloffe account.

Unfortunately sound for the browser-based PICO-8 games doesn’t work in Safari, they’re fine in Firefox and Chrome. The downloadable PICO-8 Fantasy Computer is available for $20 in a bundle with Voxtraon on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.