Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure is now available on an NES cartridge

Bitwise Reprise has announced that their 2023 NES title, Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure is available now for purchase on a physical NES cartridge.

Not really the subject matter I expect on an NES game, but it would look great next to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure is a platformer that stars the 19th-century novelist and author of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. According to the summary, she finds herself in an 8-bit video game and must “Restore Miss Austen’s books to the 8-bit library!”

While the art doesn’t look great in the trailer, the game itself shows shades of Castlevania. Jane Austen battles stuffy British-types using a quill and battles characters from her novels.

If you’re not convinced, Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure is already available on PC and is, understandably, quite a bit cheaper than shelling out for the cartridge.

I’ve said this before, but homebrew has come a long way in the past few years. I found a lot of physical releases a decade ago to be of rather questionable quality, but that’s largely because they were just hobbyist projects, and learning to program for a 6502 processor is more of a dedicated enthusiast’s undertaking. Even if you did manage to create something worth publishing, it wasn’t easy finding someone willing to produce NES cartridges. NESmaker has made developing for the ancient platform a lot more accessible, but from the looks of things, Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure was created the old-fashioned way.

Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure is available for PC and NES.