Kazeta is a new OS by the creator of ChimeraOS. You might have seen some news on it in the last few days, or at least some posts on social media. Its not trying to be the next big gaming platform, it’s more like a little love letter to the old style of gaming. Instead of all those menus, online accounts, and updates, it takes things back to the basics: stick in a 'cartridge' you make yourself, turn on the system, and play. That’s it! No fuss, just the game you wanted to play.
What makes it extra fun is that the 'cartridges' are really just SD cards you load games onto. Label them, stack them, swap them around, it’s built to make you feel like you’re back in the ’90s, digging through a shoebox of game carts. For someone who wasn’t alive for that era of gaming (not even close, honestly), it’s a neat little glimpse of what it was like. A tactile vision of when games came on actual carts...well, kind of.
Kazeta is a neat mix of nostalgia and practicality, especially if you’re tired of modern gaming feeling like a chore.
I got the chance to chat with Alkazar, the dev behind Kazeta, and he shared some great insights into building the OS. This feature pulls together our conversation and what makes the project so unique.
As someone who was alive for gaming in the 80s and 90s, it was nothing like that at all. Unless you were very rich, most people would have less than 10 games for the one console they had. It would be a small stack by the side of the console, next to the controllers. Games were usually around $70 depending on the game, which is like $160 in today's money. NES games were cheaper, especially once the SNES was released. So people did wind up collecting NES games (2nd hand) once the SNES released. The NES moved to the oldest kid bedroom, with the SNES taking the place of the one console in the living room. They might have a shoebox of older games at some point.
We did play a lot of games tho, often we would borrow games from other kids in the neighbourhood. Although everyone had the same 5 super popular games, the other games people had varied. Downside was, the easiest ones to borrow were often the ones that weren't any good. We all know that one kid that had the Star Wars SNES game and hated it, but you'd only very sparingly get a new game, so you were stuck with it.
Another thing we did was rent a lot of games, you would go to the rental place and they would have so many games, it would blow your mind. They'd have posters up, often large set pieces for some games and movies. It was like kid heaven. Then you'd have about 10 mins to figure out which game to rent, otherwise your dad would get annoyed and tell you to get a move on. People even rented the SNES when it was just released for a weekend, so they would know if it was any good before buying it for the family. It was a big purchase, so you'd better make it worth it.
Maybe that was the case if you buy everything from legit sources, when I grew up in the 90s my dad bought me some Chinese console and I could buy bootleg cartridges for it for pretty cheap, I have fond memories of playing contra and ninja turtles, Mario etc with my siblings and using an erasor to wipe the connectors of the cartridges. Once online games became popular that couch coop style of gaming just disappeared and the world's lesser for it.
Man, I miss biking over to friends' houses to try their different consoles and games, and trading cartridges. Steam is extremely convenient, but that magic was lost. I used to spend so much time in the rental aisle reading the game boxes and gaming magazines!
I had Mario Cart and GoldenEye on my N64. That was it!