Antstream Arcade brings back five lost games created with PlayStation’s hobbyist developer’s kit, the Net Yaroze

Antstream Arcade’s mission is to bring classic retro games to modern gaming machines, streaming them from the cloud to almost any device you can think of. And they’ve just pulled off a spectacular resurrection of Sony’s Net Yaroze, bringing five of the homebrew titles to their extensive library. There’s more to come too.
 
Released in 1996 in Japan (1997 worldwide), the Net Yaroze was a PlayStation developer’s kit aimed at hobbyist game designers. For $750 dollars (approximately $1,500 today), developers received a matte black debugging PlayStation that could be hooked up to a PC or Mac alongside software tools that facilitated the programming of PlayStation-compatible games.

A community of game developers quickly formed around the Net Yaroze, producing more than a hundred games between 1997 and 2004 (a substantial number in those days). PS1 gamers of the time might have encountered these titles on magazine cover discs, which is how many of them were circulated.
 
With the advent of the PlayStation 2, the Net Yaroze development scene soon faded, and while you can still find videos of some of the games on YouTube, many of them have been unplayable for decades.
 
As of today, however, the era of the Net Yaroze is back.

“The discussions around the preservation of the original Net Yaroze games were held around the middle of 2023,” says Mike Rouse, studio head at Antstream Arcade. A retro-gaming streaming service, Antstream Arcade provides access to over 1,300 games from consoles and arcade machines of yore. Titles range from arcade stalwarts like Pac-Man and Space Invaders to adventure gaming classics like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island to PS1-era games like Hogs of War.
 
Indeed, it was during preparations to bring PlayStation games to the service when the topic of the Net Yaroze arose. “We were spinning up our production team for the PlayStation development planning,” Rouse says, “and the subject of Net Yaroze came up and how cool it would be to have that catalog of games on the platform.”
 
Finding and restoring lost media like this can often take years, “not just [in] finding the trivia but tracking down the IP owners or the original ROMs,” Rouse explains. But Antstream’s Net Yaroze project was comparatively straightforward in this regard: “The Net Yaroze was well documented, and a few of our team had worked with some of these original PlayStation Net Yaroze developers. We also managed to track down the original blank contracts that Sony had issued to make sure what we wanted to do was even possible.”
 
As a result, Antstream is adding five Net Yaroze games to Antstream Arcade this week: Adventure Game, Bouncer 2, Pushy IIb, Time Slip, and Arena. They represent an interesting cross-section of the broader catalog. As is common in new and emerging game dev scenes, many Net Yaroze games were riffs on arcade classics. Bouncer 2, for example, is a Breakout-style block-destroying game where your ball is replaced by a pair of characters who propel each other into the air by bouncing on a seesaw-like device. Pushy IIb, meanwhile, is a block-pushing game inspired by Sokoban wherein you play a cute purple blob that shunts blocks around a maze to match specific patterns on the ground.
 
More unusual is Time Slip, a puzzle-platformer that empowered players with time-manipulation abilities to bypass obstacles. “This mechanic allows for multiple variants of your avatar from the past and future,” says Sacha Allari, a QA tester on the Net Yaroze project. “You are able to work with your counterparts to solve the platforming puzzles; however, if you touch any of your other ‘selves,’ you fail and have to restart. [This] forces the player to retrace their steps and think about where and when to place their avatar to succeed.”

The most distinctly PS1 games are Arena and Adventure Game, each of which experiments with the technological opportunities afforded by the PlayStation. Adventure Game is a third-person fantasy RPG spoof, emphasizing freeform exploration and wry humor. Its most interesting feature today, however, is its 3D camera and how the game's perspective swoops in and out of its fantasy dioramas as the player switches between zones in the world.
 
Arena, meanwhile, is a multiplayer mech shooter focused on fast-paced action that was created in just four months by developer Tom Madans. “This was the era of early 3D gaming, and so everything was new and exciting,” Rouse explains. “By today's standards, they may look underwhelming, but back in the ‘90s, this was impressive stuff. It had some of the professionals scratching their heads on how these projects were achieved by often just one or two people.”

Indeed, one element that characterizes all Net Yaroze games is its hobbyist and enthusiast heritage. “These [games] were not created for commercial success but rather for personal challenge, gratification, and a passion for crafting games,” Rouse says. “Some developers had full-time jobs, others were students, and some were professionals looking for a side project.” It’s a fascinating stepping stone in the history of indie game development, at once harking back to the independent bedroom coders who collectively formed the Britsoft scene in the UK, and looking ahead to the era of Xbox Live Arcade, where manufacturers not only made the tools for game development more accessible but helped those games find an audience too.
 
It's worth noting that all Net Yaroze games are featured on Antstream Arcade with the agreement of their creators, with Rouse stating that “they will personally benefit from the same deal terms we have with other independent teams.” Yet while sourcing and acquiring these games is one thing, actually getting them to run on modern hardware is another.

To achieve this, Rouse says Antstream “needed to create our own PlayStation emulator for starters, which is not an easy job.” Moreover, he explains that Net Yaroze games are “not in an easy ‘drag-and-drop’ format’” and as such “a lot of bespoke engineering effort went into ensuring the games could run and work with our emulation.” Yet while this was a complex process, Rouse says the level of complexity for each game was the same when it came to “ingesting” them into Antstream. “Once we had solved one, the others were relatively simple to bring on,” he adds.

And if everything goes to plan, the five Net Yaroze games released today will be just the start. Rouse says Antstream currently has “4 percent of the total catalog,” but the company is in the process of securing further Net Yaroze games with the ultimate goal of featuring the entire Net Yaroze library. “Our hope is that other Net Yaroze devs will see this first release and will get in contact to have their games preserved and released so the current and future gamers can experience this seminal moment in game development history,” Rouse says.

Play the revived titles and more on Antstream Arcade today.