Retro 2-D platformer Flea! is available on the NES and Sega Dreamcast today.

Developed by Lowtek Games, players must help Henry the Hyperactive Flea collect blood throughout 80 levels. When it comes to releasing this game on retro consoles, Lowtek Games founder Alastair Low said:

“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 wiziwig-esk 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 the 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.”

You can grab the NES version here while the Dreamcast version can be found here. If you want to play Flea! on modern machines, you can grab the game on Steam and itch.io. The game will be featured on the Evercade compilation Indie Heroes Collection 1, which includes 14 great games from indie developers.