DROP64 NES Edition

A downwell roguelite for the NES. Fall. Shoot. Stomp. Don't stop. Play the free demo above, right in your browser.

You drop down a haunted mine shaft with gunboots strapped to your feet: fire jumps you off the ground, and in the air it shoots straight down, slowing your fall. Stomp critters, blast through rock, chain kills without landing, and grab the glimmer, the shards of the Lantern Stone that once lit the town of Lowmarrow, all the way down to whatever smashed it.

DROP64, now on the NES

This is DROP64, the Commodore 64 game, as a real NES cartridge ROM: the C64 game's own 6502 code runs its rules, with its levels, art and music, and a new NES side for the picture, the sound and the cartridge.

• Six depths: the cave, ice, moss, crystal, magma and the abyss, each with its own look and song, and the Warden waiting at the bottom.
• Six kinds of critter, combos and the gem high, gun modules (wide shot, laser, burst shot, puncher), perks, upgrades and a gem shop.
• The Haunt: linger and Old Tallow's ghost comes through the walls.
• Deeper descents after the Warden, harder and worth double.
• On the NES: a parallax back wall, light that follows you down, dripping platforms, and the C64's SID songs played on the NES sound chip.
• The same speed on NTSC and PAL consoles.

Downloads

The .nes ROM (MMC1: any NES emulator, or a flash cartridge). Windows: Mesen inside, plays on a double-click. Mac and Linux: one HTML file that plays offline in your browser. Free demo: the first two depths, in the browser above.

Controls

Arrows move · X fire: jump on the ground, shoot down in the air · Enter start · a gamepad works too.

Made with Claude Opus 5.5

DROP64 NES Edition was produced by Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code: the NES port, its tools and its tests. I gave the direction and played the builds.

Credits

Design and direction: K. Patronas
Code, graphics, music and sound: Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic)
Windows bundle: Mesen 2.1.1 by Sour (GNU GPL v3; its source is a download here)
Browser and Mac/Linux: jsnes by Ben Firshman (Apache 2.0)

Also: DROP64 for the Commodore 64.

Bundle: all three DROP64 editions (C64, NES and 3D) for 9.99€ at https://kpatronas.itch.io/drop64all 

© 2026 K. Patronas