Popular games built on game engine PICO-8
A hardcore platform game for the PICO-8 fantasy console.
Tutankham is a combination of the maze, action and shoot 'em up genres. Taking on the role of an explorer grave robbing Tutankhamun's tomb, the player is chased by creatures such as asps, vultures, parrots, bats, dragons, and even curses, all that kill the player on contact. The explorer can fight back by firing lasers at the creatures, but he can only cover the left and right directions. The player is also endowed with a single screen-clearing "flash bomb" per level or life. Finally, each level has warp zones that teleport the player around the level, which enemies cannot use. To progress, the player collects keys open locked doors throughout the levels, searching for the large exit door. Optional treasures can be picked-up for bonus points. Each level has a timer; when it reaches zero the explorer can no longer fire lasers, and once a level is cleared the remaining time is converted to bonus points.
a 8bit Space shooter in Pico 8
Everyone's favorite Watermelon Game for PICO-8. Drop fruits and merge fruits that are alike.
You are a blob bunny. Your goal? Touch every tile! Enjoy 60 bite sized puzzles across 5 different worlds in this casual puzzle game.
In 2021, the last time I taught the class, I didn’t want to hide the homework in the games. Instead I used the games as ways of presenting ideas. I made several, but I like this one, a reinterpretation of the fortune-telling minigame from Ultima IV.
A fast-paced arcade brawler, centered on scoring combos by knocking enemies into each other.
Take the cursed dagger, use its power to dispatch the horrors from this hellish place, score the best time! A fan game based on Devils Daggers for PICO-8.
Put a golf ball in your vagina and kegel it out! Neo Pussy Masters is a golfing game about transfemininity. Only on the PICO-8!
Pröng is a mutant game of pong. Also a techno-thriller dating sim.
Pico Snail is a Pico-8 game inspired by the musician Snail's House You play as Snail-Chan, and are tasked with defending the Dream castle! You can run, jump, thwack enemies, and use stars you collect for special powers!
This is 2018’s assignment, a diabolical puzzle. You’re a monk who has forgotten where his cell is in the monastery, and who must walk the labyrinth in order to remember it. If you can find his room, you’ll find out what the assignment prompt is. I was a bit worried the students would be unable to find the prompt hidden in this one, but about half of them got there eventually. (The rest were expelled from the university.) 2018’s class was 100% Pico-8 so it seemed appropriate that the prompt game should be in Pico-8 too. Pico-8 is so great for prototyping — as a case in point, it builds to a single JS and HTML file which loads quite happily in the browser from a local file, so you don’t get annoying permissions or crossdomain problems.
A demake of Terraria, in PICO-8!
You must find 3 magic relics to help rid the land of evil. Use the Find-O-Meter and your trusty shovel to search the forest. But if you dig up the dead you'll need to fight them off to stay alive, so pay attention to everything you unearth...it might just save your life.
A rhythm-based game in the style of Dance Dance Revolution for PICO-8.
A little puzzle game with a little puzzle twist.
Enter the caves and try to find as much gold as you can before you perish to the dangers of the depth. Use your trusty whip in combination with bombs, ropes, and whatever you scavenge to get as far as you can.
Build a vast interstellar empire in 30 minutes flat.
Cipher-8 is a brain-twisting minimalist arcade puzzler where you push numbers into a grid and manipulate them with randomly drawn special abilities. Blitz mode is all about frantic combo streaks. In puzzle mode you can analyze every move. Both modes scale infinitely in their difficulty.
A noisy, pixellated vampire platformer set in the Nevada desert. When Ysabel, a vampire living in Reno, finds her brother dead with a strange crucifix-like structure attached to him, she finds herself compelled to take revenge on the humans that murdered him.
A "One Level Concept" Demake of Contra for PICO-8!
A demake of Castlevania in PICO-8
Inspired by the release of CorgiSpace and SEBI16, the author wanted to try out PICO-8. Here is the result! His first PICO-8 game, made between January 18th-22nd of 2026.