Roadmap for the rest of 2025 (with some big teases!)

Hi folks, Phil here! As we're heading into the end of the year, we realized we have a LOT of stuff building up that'll be dropping in December. Without giving away the surprises, we want to give our Patreon supporters a sense of what we'll be doing in the runup to the holidays.

It's winter fundraiser season

Next Tuesday, we'll be running our annual winter fundraiser again. Truth be told, we're still figuring out what a fundraising drive looks like in a post-social media universe. Going back to 2021-ish, we were able to drive a ton of fundraising just by tweeting about it, but I think we all know that social media does not have the same reach or impact that it did even five years ago. We've been pushing people towards our mailing list more than socials recently, which has had a positive effect on our communication strategy in general.

We're also moving the fundraising drive over to the platform Givebutter, which gives more opportunities for employer matching, real-time donation tracking, and all those great QOL features that we didn't get from trying to build it directly into our WordPress.

It's also content season

Back in 2023, our winter fundraiser had an advent calendar with a new little treat every day. That almost killed us, and sending a new email every single day had diminishing returns. So this year, we're instead focusing on a handful of larger bigger projects and events to drive the fundraiser! We won't give away the details just yet, but here's a few previews...

A YouTube video premiere event

We have a big video in the works that we're going to debut in December. For the last two-ish years, we've been quietly working on a large-scale video game history recovery project that we're finally lifting the lid on, and we want to be there with you live in chat when we show it off. Based on the private feedback we received, we think people are gonna love it.

We'll give our Patreon supporters a hint that this is something we teased back in 2024... but it has become a much larger project than we've told anyone! This'll be appointment viewing (date TBA).

A new "interactive product"

We teased on our podcast that we have a new interactive product coming out.

Here's what happened: We acquired the rights to an unfinished NES game (not a game you've heard of; it is not Yeah Yeah Beebis I). Then we brought in a homebrew team to finish it. Not just the game itself, but the music, the packaging, pretty much everything. This has been a years-in-the-making project!

We're planning to release the original WIP build from 1991 for free along with the source code, but we'll also be selling the completed game on a cartridge as a fundraiser. We know there's a lot of NES homebrew collectors out there, and this is a pretty unique one: a real NES game that started production during the original run of the console, finally completed 34 years later.

More EEPROMs!

Remember that stream from a few months back where Frank dumped a bunch of EEPROMs and we tried to figure out what they were, live on stream? We're doing that again! We've come into another lot of loose EEPROMs (the kind used when making test builds of games), and we're going to see what's on them again. From talking with Frank, it sounds like we have a better idea what's on these, and he's hinted to me about a couple surprises that he's keeping close to the chest.

Our final (?) word on the NES launch

If you've been following this Patreon, you know that Frank has been doing some deep research on the US launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System. We're finally putting together a TV-episode-length video about that, which'll be debuting during the holidays. The loose plan is to follow this up with a "post-show" stream where Frank talks more about the stuff that didn't make the video and answers questions.

And other fun stuff

Off-hand: we also have permission to share Frank's GDC panel from this year, which we'll also post on YouTube. Yay! There may be other goodies, depending on timing and some other external factors.

When will we hear more?

Our tentative plan is to announce a schedule for the month around Giving Tuesday (December 2nd). More details then! Thank you as always for your support!