We make retro-styled games for modern systems

The golden age of gaming of the 80’s and the 90’s is part of our core DNA. We aim to create similar experiences on modern systems with the utmost love and care.

We love gaming technology so we aim to take advantage of latest technologies such as Direct3D 12, DirectStorage, Vulkan, Zig and more in developing our own game engine and titles.

Our first title BioMech Catalyst, a 2D horizontal scrolling shooter/SHMUP, is currently in development part-time.

We offer game development services

Let us help you take your games to the next level or onto a new gaming platform! We offer consulting services for game programming and game porting. See our services page for more information.

We contribute to open source

We love open source and we contribute to open source as much as we can. We contribute to projects such as Zig, zigimg and more! See our Tools pages for a complete list.

Our Story

Cold Bytes Games was officially founded in May 2023 in Montréal, Québec, Canada but we are being active since late 2021. We founded the company in order to work on our own 2D games with our own technology using the Zig programming language. While waiting for our first game and tech to be advanced enough and Zig to be ready to be used in production, we offer game programming services in the meantime.

Our founder started working on our first title BioMech Catalyst part-time during weekends and evenings. During 2022, we had the opportunity to work part-time with Tribute Games to port some of their games to Sony Playstation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One. In 2023, we had the opportunity to work full-time with Digital Eclipse on various projects.

Our goal is to combine our love of technology and gaming heritage into a cohesive and fun package.

With the name Cold Bytes, we wanted to honor our Québec and nordic heritage and combine it with our love of programming.

Our team

Michael Larouche (Founder & CTO)

Michaël was born in 1986 and witnessed firsthand the golden age of the 8 bit and 16 era with the NES, SNES and Game Boy. During his early teenage years, he was involved with the French scene of ROM translation working mostly on Mega Man games. The love for retro games never stopped even during the heydays of the PS2 and Xbox, he worked on 2 personal emulator frontend during that time. He started collecting physical retro games in 2012-2013. During 2014 to 2017, he worked on several MSU-1 hacks for Super Nintendo games such as ActRaiser, the Mega Man series, Chrono Trigger, TMNT: Turtle in Time, Super Metroid, Rock ’n Roll Racing and more.

Michaël started programming in 2001 first in C, then Visual Basic 6, C# during the beta2 of .NET, Delphi and finally C++. From 2005 to 2009, he contributed to the KDE project mostly on the multi-IM client Kopete. He studied Computer Science from 2007 to 2010 at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC).

In 2010 he started working officially in the games industry in a company called DTI Software (now part of Anuvu) as a games integrator.

At the start of 2012, he migrated to Ubisoft Montréal to work on the Assassin’s Creed as a sound programmer using using Audiokinetic Wwise as the sound middleware.

In 2015, he saw an opportunity to combine his desire to work on engine programming and retro games and joined Tribute Games. There, he worked on several titles but also worked on a new C++ in-house engine.

During late 2018, after a cancellation of a new title at Tribute, he decided to try something new and joined Audiokinetic to work on the game engine integration team where he worked mostly on both Unity and Unreal integration plugins.

During the pandemic in late 2020, he wanted to go back to be a full-time game developer and joined Rogue Factor for a brief moment as a senior console programmer.

Feeling dissatisfied with working with commercial engines and only having big companies offering engine programming work, he decided to leave the games industry in late 2021 to work as Senior C++ consultant for Spiria. There he worked with Autodesk on Infraworks. During that time, he started working on BioMech Catalyst and the in-house Cold Bytes Games engine c0ld.

In 2023, he saw an opportunity to work with Digital Eclipse full-time. Because they don’t have a Canadian presence, Michaël needed to work as an independant contractor and thus Cold Bytes Games was officially born!

Games shipped: