Star Keeper

Star Keeper is a rare NES homebrew game developed by zxdplay. About 100 copies were created and sold through the Nintendo Age forum. The game was well recieved, and its gameplay has been described as a cross between Contra and Balloon Fight.

zxdplay used his own custom-made board and mapper in order to prevent piracy, which makes the game difficult to dump and emulate. The creator has also refused to do a second run of cartirdges, despite demand, because that would be unfair to people who bought cartridges secondhand as investments.

In 2023 a Windows port was released on Steam, but this is an actual port and not an emulated rom. The creator also tried to push an NFT scheme to license the IP for new games, but this failed.