2023 in Retroachievements - RetroAchievements/RANews GitHub Wiki

Hello all! As we are approaching the end of the year, what better time than now to look back on the year we are leaving behind--and what a year it has been. From all the amazing new features brought to us by the Web Team, the vast quantity of new events, and of course the big haul of new achievement sets we have seen. Teams have been expanding, and our community is now bigger than ever!

As a nice send-off to 2023, I wanted to look back on all months individually of the year, complete with some fun moments and happenings that defined the month for many of us. So strap in, and let's see what 2023 has brought to us all!

January

This year would mark the start of a new event called Challenge League: The Top 100, an event where people are tasked to complete challenges all affiliated with some of the most influential people the site has seen over the past few years. The best part about this event is that it is one of the first to have received the "evergreen" treatment, so even though 2023 may be over now, you can participate in it whenever you see fit... but only if you complete all 100 challenges! The event team also saw four new members join the team, showing us that more was absolutely on the way!

On the website, we would see some impactful changes happen to the styling of game lists, the completion bar, as well as the missable tag for achievements. People may remember that the system pages used to show non-retail games as "~Homebrew~ Very Good Game Yes", which was done intentionally to put them near the bottom of the list to not obstruct the retail list. Now, they have a fancy tag behind the name indicating their type! The progress bar now has a beautiful icon behind it on completion/mastery in the completion progress, and missables were given a background to make them more prevalent when scrolling through the achievement list. The latter is no longer relevant, but we'll get to that... later this year!

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic starlite %} Bionicle (Game Boy Advance)
{% rauserpic Guinea %} Sled Storm (PlayStation)
{% rauserpic RyudoSynbios %} Azure Dreams (Game Boy Color)
{% rauserpic Chr0x %} Vendetta (Arcade)

February

The big finale of the Retro Olympics 2022 happened this month! Team USA versus Team Spain | Netherlands for the Bronze medal, with Team France versus Team Portugal | Poland for the Silver and Gold medal. Team USA ended up taking the Bronze Medal, with the exciting duel for the championship giving the Silver Medal to Team Portugal | Poland, while Team France walked away with a landslide victory! Be sure to keep an eye out for January 2024 as well, as Retro Olympics 2023 are just around the corner! The big two categories for the RA Awards 2022 were also settled this year, with the well-deserved victory for most prolific developer going to TheMysticalOne who also ended up with the set of the year, Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King.

Bizhawk testing would be open to the public this month, which is an emulator front-end that can be used as an alternative to RetroArch. The advantage of this front-end is that it could bring us systems we previously could not support yet on RetroArch or other emulators, one of which we will be seeing very soon!

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic thegotoguyy %} Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (PlayStation Portable)
{% rauserpic acheaplemon %} DJ Max Fever (PlayStation Portable)
{% rauserpic andreemendess %} UFO Kamen Yakisoban: Kettler no Kuroi Inbou (SNES)
{% rauserpic ZamArch %} Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Spirit Caller (Nintendo DS)

March

This month would mark the debut of an event us retro gamers are all too familiar with: the Console Wars. After all, you were most likely on either Nintendo's or Sega's side during this (mostly) friendly argument of which manufacturer has the better consoles, and even nowadays it's still very relevant with the discussions between Sony and Microsoft. So for this event, three random consoles were rolled and to show your support, you had to get a specified amount of points in either of them. Or maybe you would be more interested in becoming the underdog and supporting the console with the expected least amount of players? Brain games were played here, and we will return to this event in a few months!

But Console Wars would only be one of three new events this month. As an alternative to the yearly event Devember, we would see the House Cleaning event which does exactly what you expect it to do: solve tickets for inactive developers, or provide save states for them so that not only developers but also players can participate. The Cream of the Crop event is a combination of competition and social strategy, where it is up to you to team up with the strongest players or throw them under a bus. Split up into four houses, players within them would compete with each other to secure their spot for next week, with the losers potentially being voted out by the rest of the house. That's where the social strategy comes in, as you can either align yourself with others to make sure they won't vote for you!

Developers would get sequels to three beloved DevQuests, namely DQ 001-II - Ticket Massacre II for solving 50 or more tickets, DQ 002-II - Retro Renovator II for fixing three sets for the DQ2 list, and DQ 013-II - complete.me II for completing three sets from the DQ13 list. Furthermore, there was a completely new DevQuest this month as well, namely DevQuest 018 - Subset Station which, as the name may imply, involves the creation of more Subsets!

The Web Team has kept themselves busy this month as well, with the theme being navigation and the ease of it. The home page would see redesigned sidebars for links to commonly visited pages, hubs would be shown under the the games tab, and game pages would now have a link to RA Guides if applicable. Of course I have to show my bias every now and then so yes, RA Guides getting more recognition is obviously something I enjoy a lot! Most other changes were on the back-end but still very much appreciated, such as the performance of the active player widget, and the enforcement of game badge sizes.

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic ToastLover %} Pac-Man: Championship Edition (PlayStation Portable)
{% rauserpic Bilalscape12 %} Shark Tale (Game Boy Advance)
{% rauserpic AuburnRDM %} ~Hack~ Celeste.smc (SNES)
~Hack~ Celeste.smc [Subset - "Golden Strawberries"] (SNES)

April

April Fools started with perhaps the best most creative events we've seen thus far. Of course there is the unforgettable Super Mario Bros. [Subset - RetroAchievements Stimulus Package], where players could earn 1000 achievements worth 100 points each with little effort. Massive props to televandalist because it gave everyone a good laugh! Unfortunately it did come with a small tiny side effect, which brought another issue to the front that would plague the site for months: performance issues. The Web Team had their work cut our for them, and as we will see in the coming months, they have succeeded in spades.

The other event was Draw My Pokémon, where all community members were invited to, well, draw a Pokémon! This perhaps abomination creature would then replace the Pokémon in a hack, where we will be able to play through everyone's creations for an event badge. This hack has not been released yet but please be assured, it is still work in progress and the team is working hard on it!

This month would also see the first new supported system on RetroAchievement this year: the Nintendo DSi. This system could only be played on the before-mentioned Bizhawk front-end, which supports old systems as well as potential new ones. The Nintendo DSi currently has a total of 58 achievement sets ready to be played through, which includes many titles we would never see on the regular Nintendo DS or even anywhere else! Aside from Bizhawk support, several standalone RA emulators would also see new versions, most notably RAProject64, RAppleWin, and RAQuasi88.

Aside from dousing the fire, the Web Team delivered several highly requested features this month as well. Most prevalent for many would be the drag-and-drop sorting for the mastery showcase, which before this update was a bit of an annoyance to go through--especially for players with many masteries under their belt. Every system got a beautiful new custom-made icon, and users would be notified now whenever a game they have mastered has received a revision. Leaderboards now have better separation between them, and there is now a "Hide completed games" checkbox in the completion list for easier navigation to sets you haven't mastered yet. Another simple-yet-effective addition is the "Random set" button, which will just randomly pick a game for you in case you don't know what to play. Developers also got a bunch of updates, such as editing code notes on the site, as well as easier access to hashing. It was a very packed month for updates to say the least!

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic AfroRyan %} Sonic Pinball Party (Game Boy Advance)
{% rauserpic dericobanjo %} ~Hack~ Gamma64 (Nintendo 64)
{% rauserpic Casually %} Tetris Worlds (Game Boy Advance)
{% rauserpic SubliminalSiren %} Buster Bros. | Pang (Arcade)
{% rauserpic AdeptTempest %} Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy (Game Boy Advance)
{% rauserpic WCopeland %} Defender (Arcade)
{% rauserpic Hexadigital %} Hidden Objects: Mystery Media (Nintendo DS)
{% rauserpic MahBoi %} Langrisser II (Mega Drive)

May

No new events for this month, but still a lot of ongoing ones so there was more than enough for players to take part in this month! Most of the important happenings this month were instead directed by the Web Team, with the most significant change being that subsets will now inherit the player count of the main game. This will now result in the subsets getting a difference in calculation for retro points, meaning that it will be more tempting for players to attempt these subsets if they wanted to increase their position on this sub-leaderboard. This would now lead to some funny moments where famous Super Mario Bros. speedrunner has a ridiculous Retro Ratio of 1564 at the time of writing! But of course, the main intent behind this change was also to have a more accurate representation of the most difficult sets on RetroAchievements. This Retro Ratio is now also available on system pages so you know how much each game will earn you!

The "Hide completed games" checkbox now has a cousin on game pages, where you can hide all unlocked achievements, very convenient! The main profile now has some additional stats such as the total amount of achievements unlocked, and developers can more easily reach their dev stats page. Furthermore, players used to only get set requests for their RA Anniversary or for every specified amount of points, but from this month onwards, each event- and site badge will now also give an additional set request!

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic Butternnife %} Tingle's Balloon Fight (Nintendo DS)
{% rauserpic Coloradohusky %} Space Subtraction (Apple II)
{% rauserpic clymax %} Pop'n Twinbee: Rainbow Bell Adventures (SNES)
{% rauserpic QuinnWasTaken %} Arcade Classic No. 1: Asteroids + Missile Command (Game Boy)
{% rauserpic AntonioFNN %} Out of This World | Another World (Mega Drive)
{% rauserpic tomojin %} Boulder Dash EX (Game Boy Advance)
{% rauserpic Sutarion %} Sonic Chaos (Master System)

June

This month we would see another system supported thanks to Bizhawk! And what else could it be than the prestigious, highly-requested system, the Atari Jaguar CD??? Our favourite toilet console now has a total of 15 games, wow! This was indeed what we needed the most after the PlayStation 2! ...All joking aside though, thank you to the Bizhawk- and rollout team for bringing the supported platform count up to 46 with this release!

But even cooler might be the new event that launched this month: Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta. Players may be familiar with this event from other places, as it's commonly associated with streaming and charity. The same applies here, as Sutarion, MaxMilyin, and Ganymede have pledged one dollar for every successful completion of the subset, which would go to The Trevor Project. So not only can you have fun going through the game with randomly-assigned jobs for each crystal, but by doing so you also help out charity! Without a doubt this is a perfect representation of how our lovely community can work together to not only have fun, but to help out the world in the process. What an awesome event this was.

Unfortunately for the Web Team however, this month would mark the start of the many performance problems that came with the site. The API was identified as one of the main causes and would be disabled for months to come, unfortunately limiting what third-party trackers and streaming tools can retrieve from RetroAchievements. It was clear that more than anything, the site has grown too much and was in need of an upgraded database. This started the long process for the team, who have been hard at work non-stop to make sure the performance issues would be a thing of the past. Suffice to say, they succeeded!

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic bjoehanna %} Treasure Conflix (SNES)
{% rauserpic Xalerzyx %} Bakugan: Battle Brawlers (Nintendo DS)

July

One month after the release of the highly sought-after Atari Jaguar CD, it was followed up by not one, not two, but three new supported systems! Introducing WinArcadia, a standalone emulator that would bring to us the Arcadia 2001, Elektor TV Games Computer, and the Interton VC 4000. These systems originate from the late 70s and early 80s, making the games more simplistic and therefore easier to develop for. For the systems, we currently have 27, 23, and 32 games supported, bringing the total count to 82 games just from these systems alone!

But what many may consider an even bigger release is that we can now finally earn achievements on the standalone emulator for PlayStation Portable games, PPSSPP. Many people have had issues with the RetroArch core before, and especially for developers it has been a pain to work with, but now we have the best way to play PSP games available and it's a massive upgrade. Unfortunately developers are not yet able to develop achievements on the standalone PPSSPP emulator, but support for that is still planned so keep your eyes out!

Snow has started working on getting the official RA Youtube channel going, where members of the community can post- and watch tutorial of emulation and the creation of achievements, guides for existing sets, announcements, reviews, top 10s and much more. The channel has recently surpassed the 1000 subscriber milestone and is still growing, with frequent content all supported by a dedicated team. If you have ever considered joining yourself, be sure to reach out to Snow to find out more!

On the event side, the new event of this month would be Mario Party RA. This very creative event will put you on a Mario Party board, where the event team will have challenges ready for you that will determine the amount of places you move on the board depending on the last number of the achievement- or game ID. Collect stars and coins, and avoid landing on the Bowser square unless you are prepared for imminent doom! This event is currently in its last month, so be sure to check back soon to see the winners of awesome custom-made badges!

The Web Team has been hard at work and made the first of several upgrades to the servers this month. This would be combined with the 3.0 release of RAWeb, which had several features including a new news widget on the front page, and a completely overhauled forum UI. Of course most of the changes were on the back-end and not immediately noticeable by the player, such as preparation for a future feature regarding achievement types that we will be talking about very soon. Later in the month there were also a few more updates, such as the overhauled Achievement of the Week widget on the front page and improving how links to game pages show on search engines and Discord. This change now shows within the embed whether a game has achievements or not, and how many if applicable!

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developer graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic BoomEX %} Killer Instinct Gold (Nintendo 64)

August

The upgrades to the site were successful, but unfortunately August became a month many of us would probably want to forget happened, at least the first half. The site issues have gone from bad to even worse, which resulted in a hard decision by the Web Team: the site needed to be taken offline for multiple days. The emulators could fortunately still function for the most part, but those were eventually met with issues too. A server move happened during the downtime, which resulted in the site being able to be brought up again a week later. Eventually the API could be partially re-enabled as well, so third-party trackers could work to some degree.

And the cause of the site issues? Why, what else but the 50th system release, the Uzebox! This was a joke by the way, don't take it seriously. For the 50th release, we have a hobbyist console from 2008 that plays 8-bit games, and can be played on both RetroArch and Bizhawk. This supported console comes with a total of 33 games at the time of writing!

The Web Team has also included more changes this month after the server upgrades were finished. Most noticeably would be the much improved tooltips, now showing more information when hovering over a player or game, such as more emphasis on (retro) points, as well as showing if a game is in development and who is currently working on it. Most other changes are either related to site performance, preparation for another feature we'll talk about soonish, or related to the forum, such as now being able to preview a forum post which is a simple yet effective feature.

The other news is the expansion of more teams. The Events Team is now supported by five more members, whereas the DevQuest Team also received six new members. And of course, we cannot forget about WCopeland joining the Admin team, who together with the other Web Team members have poured their soul out this year for all the amazing changes we got, and are getting in the future. It's safe to say all members of the community are looking forward to what these teams will bring us!

Finally, we got the winner of the Console Wars! It was sad to see the first run of this event end, but hopefully we will see it again in the future. For the first edition, we have the ever popular Game Boy Advance as winner! The little handheld has won four times throughout the 22 week event.

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic TwosomesUp %} Zen: Intergalactic Ninja (Game Boy)
{% rauserpic QuietXOF %} Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (Nintendo DS)
{% rauserpic Amir96lx %} Point Blank (PlayStation)
{% rauserpic NeonPug %} Persona 2: Innocent Sin (PlayStation Portable)
{% rauserpic Schengo %} Eternal Eyes (PlayStation)

September

One of the most important teams we have on RetroAchievements is the Code Reviewer team. Since the launch of PlayStation 2 support, our userbase has been growing and growing, and more players want to check out what it's like to be a developer. Of course, all this need to be moderated, and that's what this team exists for! Earlier this year they added four members to the team, and this month another five have joined to deal with the growing queue. Best of luck to all of you!

Meanwhile for the active developers, three new DevQuests have launched! This time around, all DevQuests revolve around genres, such as DevQuest 019 - Wheel of Genres where a random genre is rolled for the developer to make a set for, DevQuest 020 - Genre Conqueror for making a set for a game of each genre, and finally a subset for DQ20, DevQuest 020 - Genre Conqueror [Subset - Subgenre Conqueror] for a subgenres of each genre!

And if that wasn't enough, televandalist and AuburnRDM have been hosting a new developer-specific event called the DevJam! This is a new quarterly event where systems that have never gotten a rollout in the past now get one, with the first subject being the SG-1000. It was a fairly underrepresented system, only having give-or-take 20 sets before this event happened. With the combined forces of the development team, that number has now skyrocketed to a whopping 89! At the same time, a new event has started for players called the PlayJam, where people who beat or master a set created during this DevJam earn points towards a badge together as a community!

While the site was unfortunately still experiencing issues, the Web Team kept blessing us with new features and designs, such as giving the website a wider layout and adding a new navigation bar at the top. The first phase of the progression feature would also start this month, with your progress in a game now placed on the sidebar and progression statistic being available on the home page. Most of the progression work has already been done at this point, but disabled until the site issues were resolved. The developers have been working hard on marking sets with progression types this month and after, revising sets that didn't have good progression achievements that fortunately were auto-unlocked for players who already mastered the game! The amount of work done in such a short time-span is incredible, with a huge amount of the sets now being covered by this feature.

But that's not all! Introduced during September are the highly appreciated "Want to Play" page for all users, and the "Want to Develop" page for set developers. Now it is super easy to manage on RetroAchievements what you are interesting in playing in the future, or what games you eventually want to develop. Just click a simple button on the game page and voila, you're done and it's added to the list. This will also open up room for set requests, which softcore players now also have more of due to the removal of the initial point cap.

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developer graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic UnsolidSnake %} Rockman 2: Dr. Wily no Nazo (PlayStation)

October

October was a bit of a "calm before the storm" month, with everything being done this month being in preparation for what November would bring us. The site received further performance fixes, and the developers have been hard at work on the progression feature as well as the next DevJam. Therefore, the only real happening this month visible to the players was the new Retro Achievements Halloween Challenge, hosted by Scott and ZeeRA. The objective is simple: master a game out of 13 selected ones for a point each, or participate in a bonus challenge to work towards a bronze, silver, or gold badge on your profile. Straight to the point and a perfect fit for the spooky season!

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developer graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic ArchWCR96 %} Virtua Tennis 2 | Tennis 2K2 (Dreamcast)

November

Arguably the most important month this year is November, where the Web Team has succeeded in their objective to stabilize the performance of the site with another upgrade. Me and many others were completely flabbergasted by how much quicker the site was, and this has persisted since then. Even the API, what was one of the main causes behind the performance issues, was able to be re-activated again in full in December, allowing streamers and third-party trackers to use it again for their own purposes.

But that is only the start. The much-anticipated progression feature was finally rolled out this month, with the progression box on the sidebar of a game page now correctly showing the player's status. The profile has now seen a make-over as well with how achievements are displayed, and there is an entirely new separate completion page where you can easily check your progression for any system and any game. And with this new progression feature also came new leaderboards, giving the people the ability to compete for most beaten games on a system, as well as filter between multiple game types to give people a chance to specialize in a specific aspect of a system. And finally, added to the home page is an additional widget beneath the "Last game mastered" for "Last game beaten". The home page now also has a neat widget that shows the current trending games within the community.

And of course, in the same month we would also see a new rollout for the final system of the year: the Neo Geo CD. The advantage this system has is that it brought arcade games to the home console market, therefore also making it easier to emulate compared to actual Arcade boards. A total of 25 games are currently available to be played on RetroAchievements!

The yearly Devember event has returned this month as well, where developers and players alike band together to bring the open ticket count for inactive developers to as low as possible. Just like the House Cleaning event from earlier this year, developers fix open tickets and players provide save states for them to reduce the time necessary, both earning points and working towards a beautiful badge! The Retro Olympics sign-ups also started this month, and we'll see more of that in the coming months.

Finally, the Playtester team has been restructured. This team works together with both developers- and junior developers to playtest their set before review or before release, finding bugs and reporting them back to the developers can work on fixing them in advance. If you are working on sets, definitely check this team out as they are invaluable to the development process.

The achievement set awards would go to:

The following developers graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic pickledyamsman %} Ian Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon (PlayStation)
{% rauserpic tsyque %} Grandia: Parallel Trippers (Game Boy Color)

December

For the final month of the year, the Web Team has finally been able to end the discussion regarding the missable tag by adding it as a type, similar to how progression is now marked. The additional benefit to this is that it shows the amount of missable achievements at the top of a game page, as well as that you can decide to filter on just them. The progress bar has now also seen a slight adjustment, changing the softcore colour from blue to gray. And as mentioned before, the API is back up completely and able to be used by everyone.

For events, there is the new Rack it up event, which will last an entire year. This event is dedicated to the good ol' classic magazines, where you are assigned a task pased on what page of a magazine that you roll. Depending on which page you roll, your task will be different, which could be simply beating a level or boss, or even drawing or creating a fan-fiction! And of course, there will be both a gamer and developer challenge if applicable.

The Retro Olympics 3rd year kicked off with an amazing ceremony. 21 teams with 69 (nice) players in total will duke it out this year for the famed gold medal, each having their own anthem and name based on the favourite franchise of the team. All the games have been announced, and the first stream will happen on January 6th. Be sure to follow RetroOlympics over on Twitch so you will be notified when the streams go live, or check out the highly detailed website which has the full schedule and group line-up. Yours truly will be there too!

The following developer graduated this month:

Developer Graduation set
{% rauserpic manakoDE %} Danger Girl (PlayStation)
{% rauserpic Whithbrin %} Jackie Chan Adventures (PlayStation 2)
{% rauserpic Kinglink %} Dynasty Warriors 3 (PlayStation 2)
{% rauserpic Gorgar %} WWF War Zone (Nintendo 64)
{% rauserpic s0uth %} Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (PlayStation)
{% rauserpic kiwibasket %} Super Nazo Puyo: Ruruu no Ruu (SNES)

Conclusion

Looking back on 2023, it has been a rough year for the website but also one we've been able to push through well and come up top. The Web Team has finally been able to suppress the site issues, and has introduced many amazing features that will be used for many years to come. The teams have been getting bigger and better, with more events happening each year and all processes on the site becoming more streamlined. Every team has been doing their absolute best this year, bringing older sets up to standards through revisions, better writing, art updates and so much more. And not just the teams either, but also the players have done tons contributing to the health of this community. Thank you all for making this community what it is!

And while I am certainly in no position to make predictions, I'm willing to say that 2024 will be even better. We'll be looking forward to it but in the meantime, I wish you all a great and healthy end of the year!