I recently discovered that you could make PS2 games in JavaScript. I’m not even kidding, it’s actually possible. I was working on a project and had my phone near my desk when I received a notification. Upon further inspection, it came from itch.io which was a platform where I usually published most of my web games.
Under my relatively popular Sonic infinite runner game which was made in JavaScript and developed a year ago, I received a comment from someone with the username Dev Will which claimed they had made a PS2 version of my game and provided the GitHub repo of the source code.
At first, I thought that it was cool that someone took the time to remake my game for an old console that had a reputation to be hard to develop for and probably required them to write a lot of C or C++.
Out of curiosity, I opened up the GitHub repo and was astonished to see that the project was not using even a bit of C++ or C but was entirely in JavaScript!
If making PS2 games were easier than I thought since I could use a higher level language like JavaScript, I could probably try making one in a reasonable amount of time and play it on a retro handled or an actual PS2. How cool would that be?
This is where I knew I had to drop everything I was doing to investigate how this was possible.
The AthenaEnv Project
Since the dev behind the project was Portuguese speaking (I assume they were either from Brazil or Portugal), they wrote the Readme of the repo in Portuguese which was a language I did not understand.
Fortunately, I was still able to decipher most of what was written because I had done 3 years of Spanish in school and spoke French natively. Since Portuguese is a romance language like Spanish and French, I was fortunately not totally lost.
Anyway, The readme said that the engine used to make the PS2 version of my game was called AthenaEnv with a conveniently placed link towards it so I could learn more.
... continue reading