Those who were there remember: F-Zero hit the Super Nintendo in 1990 with that spinning-track effect, the famous Mode 7, and Nintendo handhelds only managed something similar in 2001, on the Game Boy Advance. Well, in 2026 the Game Boy Color got the game it never had. ZERO, by the duo Rocketship Park and Thalamus, came out on Thursday (5) on the developers’ official itch.io page.
Fake Mode 7, real speed
ZERO is a futuristic racer that mimics the SNES rotation effect with a “faux Mode 7” technique, something the Game Boy Color hardware never did out of the box. There are three cups and nine tracks, according to GamingBible, and an unusual power meter: the ship starts every race with 11 units, boosting costs three and each overtake gives one back. In other words, good driving earns you more boost.
Developer Shane McCafferty, Rocketship Park co-founder, explained the idea to Games Asylum: “I’ve wanted to push the beloved Game Boy Color to an approximation of Mode 7 for a while now. The technique was, like all cool things, stolen from the demo scene – the real fun was turning that into something that feels thrilling and fun to play.” McCafferty had already made other racing games for the handheld, such as Nitro and Hero GP, plus tributes like OutRun GB.
Andy Roberts, Thalamus founder and CEO, added: “It’s always a delight to unleash a new Rocketship Park game on the public, and ZERO is no exception. ZERO takes everything he learned on titles like Nitro and Hero GP and elevates the genre to new heights – and speeds!”
How to play a new Game Boy game in 2026
ZERO is an official release by its own creators, sold on the ZERO page on itch.io (the price is listed there; the page was unstable on launch day). The file is meant to run on a Game Boy emulator or on a flash cartridge in a real Game Boy Color, as today’s homebrew releases usually do. Back in the rental-store days this would have been unthinkable; today it is the most common way for the 1998 handheld to get a new game.
The distinction matters: here the game is new and sold by the people who made it, so there is no piracy involved. It is the same spirit as the projects in our guide to games ported to the browser and PC and in the Ported2Browser catalogue: preservation with the creators on the right side. If you like seeing console games reborn on PC, RecompLauncher follows the same path with recompilations.
Where to buy: Game Boy Color on Amazon
See also our monthly game release calendar.
Sources: Thalamus, Rocketship Park, Games Asylum and GamingBible.
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