The Sequel To The Hit NES & Dreamcast Game LEAP Year Launch
Dundee’s Lowtek Games has launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the creation of Flea! 2 – the sequel to the 2020 retro smash Flea! – and has already smashed it’s initial goal in the first 24 hours!
Like its predecessor, Flea! 2 will be released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) as an actual cartridge – and the Dreamcast.
Back Flea! 2
Flea! 2 is another hardcore platformer, which follows the adventures of Henry as he attempts to free his fellow fleas – who have been proclaimed heri-ticks – across 90 levels and 8 boss battles.
LowTek is promising that familiar and favourite faces from the flea universe will return as well as a few new ones – with even more puns.
One Leap Year Later
The original Flea! was successfully Kickstarted in 2020 with the campaign launching on February 29th (i.e ‘leap’ day).
Ally Low, the founder of LowTek and father of Flea! told the SGN:
After the success of FLEA! and Tapeworm Disco Puzzle We decided it was time for a direct FLEA! sequel with the kickstarter campaign launching exactly four years after the first one. On Febuary 29th 2024 – the following LEAP year.
Why the NES?
A few reasons. I grew up playing the NES and always wanted to make a game for it. Then NESmaker came along, it’s a WYSIWYG-esque NES development software. I had the Flea idea many years before but thought its simple mechanics would be achievable on the NES. There is also a growing community for new retro “homebrew games”, and there have been a few very successful crowdfunding campaigns for these projects. This niche group helped the project stand out among the many other modern games on Kickstarter.
Why Dreamcast?
This one might puzzle a few but like the NES community, there is also a large Dreamcast homebrew community with new games being released all the time. Unlike the NES, the Dreamcast had an exploit that allowed people to play burned games making it much cheaper and easier to produce essentially a CD over a custom cartridge.
Lowtek Games commissioned a local programmer “Ross Killgarif” to modify an open source NES emulator for Dreamcast to auto-boot the NES game, it also has a custom VMU image. The process of creating a Dreamcast playable NES game has been open-sourced by Lowtek Games for everyone to enjoy.
(The Dreamcast version will be released at a later date).
Play The Demo – Speedrun The Demo
Lowtek has a demo of Flea! 2 available now. You can find and play it here. You can also attempt to speedrun the demo and beat the times of the Flea! fan community here.
Fund Flea! 2
Pledges to fund Flea! 2 start at £1, with digital and physical copies of the game available, special collectors editions of the Dreamcast and NES copies, as well as some incredibly cool merchandise. There are even rumours of a Switch edition should stretch goals be hit…
The Kickstarter campaign for Flea! 2 is live until March 30th 2024. Find it and back the game here.
Good luck to Ally and the team!
Parasite Pack
You can also support LowTek Games by purchasing the studio’s awesome Parasite Pack, which brings together the original Flea! and what we still consider to have the best game title ever – Tapeworm Disco Puzzle.
Available for those ‘modern’ consoles, you can download some retro fun today…