Contra, Backwards: Geekstrada on Artnoc, Contractor, and the Joy of Assisted Tinkering

I’ve been chatting with Geekstrada, one of the two developers behind Leaf (alongside Helaas, who does a huge amount of the work) and the creator of TortOS.

For those unfamiliar, these are custom firmware projects for retro gaming handhelds. Leaf provides a customizable interface, emulation features and other improvements for the Miniloong Pocket 1, while TortOS is a more minimalist alternative for handhelds like the TrimUI Brick and Brick Hammer, focusing on quickly getting into games, with music and audiobook playback too.

Anyway, Geekstrada also has a pretty ridiculous obsession with the original NES Contra, and that’s what my latest article is all about. Using Claude, he’s created Artnoc, a completely mirrored version of Contra where you play the entire game backwards, from right to left, and Contractor, a browser-based level editor that lets you create and modify stages and export them to play yourself. He’s also released Contrarian, custom firmware for the TrimUI Brick Hammer that literally refuses to play anything that isn’t sufficiently Contra.

We got into how all three projects came together, the role AI played in developing them, and some childhood memories involving his old family television and countless hours playing Contra. It’s a strange little collection of projects, and I really enjoyed hearing the stories behind them. I also sent Artnoc to Russ (Retro Game Corps) about a week ago to ruin his brain with a backwards version of one of his favorite games, so keep an eye out midway through the article for his reaction :)

One important thing I want to highlight: these projects make use of AI, particularly Claude, which handled the vast majority of the programming for artnoC and Contractor.

I appreciate that AI-assisted development is a divisive subject, and I think many of the concerns surrounding it are entirely justified. As a gaming journalist, though, I feel it’s better to cover the interesting, unusual and sometimes controversial things people are creating, while being completely transparent about how they’re made. I’d rather give readers that information, both here and in the article itself, so they can make up their own minds than simply avoid covering these projects because AI was involved. I don’t think reporting on something necessarily means endorsing every aspect of how it was created.