👋 Hello and welcome to The Memory Core! Today, I have a special interview with Scott Breen, the founder of RetroAchievements.

If you haven't heard of it, RetroAchievements is a platform that allows you to earn achievements in retro games played via emulators, similar to Xbox Achievements or PSN Trophies.

The platform has become a staple of the retro gaming/emulation community, with more than 1.4 million registered players and more than 10,000 supported games.

Scott was very gracious in answering all of my questions, which ranged from the origins of RA to recent controversies and the future of the platform.

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The origins of RetroAchievements

Can you walk me through the moment or inspiration that made you decide to build RetroAchievements in 2012? What gap did you feel existed in the retro gaming/emulator community?

RetroAchievements began while I was working on Goldeneye 007: Reloaded at Eurocom in 2012.

I was tasked with adding the achievements into the game at work, while at home I was tinkering with the Gens emulator to understand more about how emulation works.

I was really into TrueAchievements and Xbox at the time, and I figured that adding Xbox 360 achievements/PS3 trophies was just a case of watching RAM and submitting values when they match, that perhaps we could do the same thing with Mega Drive games in Gens.

Figuring out that for Sonic 1, listening to a few bytes of RAM at 0xfe10 gives us the amount of rings, I added a message box when that value reached 10. One quick demo later, I showed my colleagues and they gave their (rare) approval that it was a cool idea.

The next few months were spent learning php, javascript and mysql in order to produce a really simple webserver that could handle receiving messages from the emulator, and once it was ready, I started the bare bones of the site, so things like how to hash ROMs, how to get a community together (wiki? forums?), the core of the toolset to produce the achievements as well, the types of logic that we would be able to check for achievements with (this AND that, this OR that, etc).

I then figured it would be important to get other people on board (instead of just me!), so I put together this intro video. Getting people to understand what the site was about and how to use it was a challenge too, but eventually we got our first external person and people gradually started trickling in.

Note: For an extra trip down memory lane, check out Scott's initial Reddit post asking for beta testers.

By 2014, the platform had thousands of achievements and a fast-growing community. What were the turning points or unexpected events that triggered that early momentum?

One of the biggest pieces of feedback was from the first users who joined saying they were much more into Nintendo than Sega, so in 2013 I tried to make a similar change to another Windows emulator that was open source, Snes9x. This was similarly engineered and was relatively easy to integrate.

Moving onto VBA to cover GB/GBC/GBA, had some difficulty getting the in-emulator overlay to work, but got there in the end. SNES and GB/GBA coverage really gave the site a boost in traffic and the community started to gather.

There was always a healthy divide between developers and players which helped generate this really useful feedback loop of "I want this game to have achievements" and "I want to develop achievements for this game". Ensuring there were as few barriers to entry as possible ensured that the site continued to grow unimpeded.

The integration with RetroArch in 2015 dramatically expanded RA’s reach. How did that collaboration happen, and how did it change your expectations for what the project could become?

In 2015/2016, leiradel and the libretro team reached out to the community to start collaborating on how to get RA integration into libretro cores, and as a result then be able to be facilitated via RetroArch.

This would then lead to giving us a HUGE boost in the amount of platforms and titles we could cover.

All the work done on libretro side of things was handled by their talented developers, and they were able to share some ideas and help us improve the flow of some of the APIs being used on RA too.

All the while the site was growing gradually and it was around this time the site was costing around £80-100 each month, just in server costs. We still didn't have any professional/paid developers on board (we never have done), and maintaining the site was being done mostly by hand without any real web-development expertise (as a game developer, I tend not to deal with web, back-end or server development).

Knowing that the community wanted to help cause RA to grow, having made all the emulator code open source to facilitate RetroArch integration, I eventually, reluctantly let the site become open source as well.

This led to a lot of positive change as developers gradually began to shape the direction of the growth of the site. We were lucky to have meleu and luchaos come aboard in 2017 who were incredibly good at handling the community and the back-end development respectively.

This then also led to a Discord server being created, which then also provided a burst in growth and a change in the core of how the community was interacting with each other.

Every milestone that RA has hit has also come with plenty of challenges, too. We've had torrents of spam and abuse, which we met with captcha, IP bans and temporarily manually closing off new account creation. We've had DDOS attacks, which we carefully unpicked, analysed and found solutions for.

Every challenge that has happened, we've been able to deal with it calmly and maturely, which I think is embodied by the quality of the team members we have at RA.

Governance and controversy

As the project grew, it became clear that some guidelines needed to be put in place. Can you explain how the current Code of Conduct was developed? What were the guiding principles when you first formalized it?

The user Code of Conduct is something that was, for a long time, completely informal and often undocumented.

In 2018, at its most basic, if a user isn't chatting on the site, then the only real rule is, don't cheat. There are plenty of ways to cheat on RA, to give yourself achievements you didn't earn, to add leaderboard values you didn't get.

There is a squad of volunteers who give their time to detect cheaters, and will happily research the likelihood of a player cheating. Often this comes in the form of clearly impossible timestamps on the achievements, or achievements earned out of order. Even with these, we've always ensured that all users are innocent until clearly, obviously proven guilty.

Even at that point, one of the core tenets was to ensure that if a user is found to be cheating without any doubt whatsoever, they'll always be offered the ability to reset those achievements and re-earn them. Given that computers are not perfect, my original code is definitely not perfect, internet traffic, glitches, bad achievement logic, there are a LOT of ways that things can go wrong for an innocent gamer, and it would be unthinkable for an innocent person to get branded as a cheater when they aren't.

So typically we only really focus on the clearly very worst offenders.

Even at this point, the site has evolved to allow for many ways to resolve this situation.

First I added the ability to reset achievements, or entire games worth of achievements. Then we added user permissions and along with it the ability for an account to be "banned", meaning basically locked.

We found this to not be enough to be able to cover all situations fairly, so we added the ability to have an "untracked" account, which is one where we acknowledge that cheating of some sort has happened, the account owner doesn't want to reset their achievements, but still wants to continue to earn achievements. In this case they can continue exactly as before, but they will no longer be part of the global leaderboard of points.

The code of conduct had to evolve quickly though as we opened the Discord servers, because naturally with lots more community and communications, there was a need for guidelines.

At their most basic, when chatting, we just ask for users to not share links to ROMs or pirated/copyrighted material, and to be respectful. In general this is enough for 99% of cases; we had plenty of volunteers come forward to help police the chat and ensure these guidelines are followed.

The more complex challenges to this that then came needed explicit discussions as to what would be allowed, and I've ensured that the community and/or the moderators discuss this as a group before making any policy changes or moderation.

In other interviews, you've stated that you were mostly hands-off until 2021 or so, when you got more involved in the community. Can you explain the current decision-making structure at RA? How do you see your role as we move into 2026?

Since its inception, I don't think I've spent more than a month away from RA. I have always kept an eye on the site and the community, whether or not I had anything to contribute or maintain.

Often throughout 2016-2020, the minimum that was required from me was to ensure that the site still exists and that the bills were paid, and I definitely was able to do more than the bare minimum.

My involvement with admin duties has been much stronger in the past 5 years and I'm proud to say I'm 100% involved with making core decisions with the team. I'm very proud of what RA has become, but I absolutely cannot take credit for the quality of the current state of the site and achievements in 2025, for the community/moderated events that are run, for the many emulators that implement RA, for the incredible moderation team who volunteer their time and energy to keep RA safe and fun.

I'm working hard to find my feet again in the source code for RAWeb (the name of the repository that contains the logic that runs the website). It's definitely changed a lot over 10 years of developer contribution, but there's still a hint of my original code in there.

Despite being one of the most requested games for more than four years, there was significant community backlash around the announcement related to a new achievement set for Pokémon Clover. In hindsight, how do you assess your/the RA team's handling of that situation?

The situation surrounding Pokémon Clover was a fascinating opportunity to learn and reflect on how we deal with unexpected challenges like this.

I'm proud of the team and I have no regrets with how we handled the situation. We all did the best we could with what we had.

Not wishing to go over old ground, but a simple misunderstanding in the first place led to us having to challenge the pillars that we have grown RA with.

Note: For more context on the Clover controversy, check out this newsletter from a few months ago.

This had originally included having a firm view that separates the achievements from the games. This was (rightly) challenged by the community, because by providing achievements, we actually do (arguably) endorse the content of the game, and we give a game a platform by acknowledging it and giving it a space on the website.

We then continued to discuss internally what the right steps forward were, given that we would otherwise be contradicting ourselves.

I think the team in general was all on the same page, but it was a challenge in how to phrase what our next steps would be. We then carefully ensured that we would be able to describe what our new direction was, while dealing with a seemingly never-ending stream of frustration from the community, who were (rightly) upset that RA's direction was, even slightly, shifting.

After an intense amount of pressure on the team, we finally reached a place where we could continue confidently knowing we've picked a direction that the team and community are happy to support.

Dealing with this level of controversy is not remotely why any of us play retro video games, why we earn achievements, or even why we share and discuss it with each other. It was a useful opportunity to reaffirm the direction of RA, and a beneficial moment to ensure that the community is happy and comfortable with RA's admin team's choices.

In a conversation with Wimpyfox, you mentioned that some controversial games may be hidden behind a new filter. Has the team made any final decisions as to how this will work or when it might be implemented? Are there still some games that will remain banned from the platform?

There is no current plan to ban or hide any further games from RA’s catalog.

One of the pre-existing pillars was to ensure that we never take a stance on the matter in order to remain impartial, and we never did so until we were pushed to. I’m not interested in censorship or policing things, but equally one of the original core goals was for RA to just be a fun and safe place to play games. Fostering an environment where users don’t feel safe is not acceptable, so I can only refer back to the original goal of expecting each user to be respectful.

I invite all users to have their own core beliefs, but when those beliefs are hateful or disrespectful, those beliefs are incompatible with RA.

In terms of looking at filters on the site to ensure we provide all users the ability to use RA, this is something the team and myself have expressed an interest in looking into in the new year. Be aware though that there are a lot of considerations that need to be made to get something like a filter up and running, and a significant amount of work to get it working, so please be patient.

Note: Scott later clarified that there are no set plans to add filters or unban games, but it isn't off the table: "In terms of filters and unbanning games, I can't say 100% for sure - it'll need a frank discussion with the admin team and the whole community to make sure this is something RA wants... but I can say for sure the community must be fully involved with decisions like this.

The future of RetroAchievements

Looking forward, RetroAchievements is slated to add Wii support next March. That's a big step into a more modern era of consoles. What challenges did this present technically and organizationally, and what does this expansion mean for RA’s long-term roadmap?

Integration of GameCube support via Dolphin was another significant milestone for RA, and was spearheaded at the time by LillyJadeKatrin.

This was a very exciting time and brought with it very unique challenges. One of these was that the Wii "technically" allows you to launch multiple titles via the dashboard, and that Dolphin in particular supports virtual addressing instead of physical addressing, and to do native integration, the Dolphin team was enthusiastic about us using virtual addressing.

This however was originally incompatible with how the achievements toolset worked, so there was a stage of time where we had to address that first and work around a few challenges.

I can't share much about the upcoming release of Wii achievements, but I can say that people should definitely prepare ahead of time by getting their Wiimotes and other hardware synced and ready, and that this is shaping up to be one of RA's biggest announcements yet!

More than ten years in, what is your long-term vision for RA at this point? How would you like to see the platform evolve in the future?

The recently demoed video from the iiSU team provided a genuinely really good-looking integration of RA, showing off a professional, social-ready interface that would fit nicely on a handheld device, with the ability to emulate a range of devices.

It's a shame to hear that so much of iiSU is theoretical rather than a proof-of-concept, but I would love to see RA being professionally integrated like this to provide an easy-to-use solution for anyone with any real interest in retro gaming.

I'd also love to see RA branch out into more integrations and into more standalone binaries. The API supports any developer arbitrarily adding achievements into their bespoke game, so I would love to see RA take a bit more of a 'publisher' type role, supporting an achievement-ready back-end solution for anyone wishing to add achievements to their game, retro or not.

Anything else you'd like to share with the community?

I'm immensely proud of everything the RA community has achieved. Together the community has been able to light a shared vision for that next step of what emulation deserves to be in the modern day and I couldn't be happier with where we're at with it.

I promise to stand by RA and ensure it keeps growing and evolving as best I can, for it to always, always remain a non-profit (no ads, no premium nonsense) and I pledge to keep driving that growth, expansion onto new platforms and supporting the team as we continue.

(Bonus) It looks like you may have worked on a Wii game very early in your career (Rio, 2011). How does it feel to have your own work added to a "retro" gaming platform?

I worked at Eurocom 2010-2012, for the first 9 months as a Core Tech member (which was really boring), then I moved over to Goldeneye 007: Reloaded on Xbox 360/PS3/WiiU for 6 months-ish, then the last 9 months worked on 007 Legends.

Eurocom made Rio in a next-door office and the tools I worked on I think were part of the tools being used for Rio, so I think I got credited by association but I don’t personally put myself on that one.

I did work a little (i.e. just a few weeks) on the Wii Goldeneye 007 but not really enough to get my name on it. That will definitely be a weird one to add achievements to!

Big thanks to Scott for agreeing to the interview, and to the entire RetroAchievements community for making the platform what it is today.

Signing out,

Archivist Rowan