Xibalba 64

Xibalba is a retro-styled first-person shooter created by Dominic Szablewski (Phoboslab). It first appeared in 2014 as a browser game built on his JavaScript Impact engine, deliberately evoking the early-1990s shooters that preceded Doom — blocky texture-mapped corridors, sprite enemies and a low resolution. Its title and setting draw on Xibalba, the underworld of Maya mythology.

In 2025 the game was ported to the Nintendo 64 as Xibalba 64, a homebrew cartridge that runs on original N64 hardware, and it was subsequently chosen as one of the four launch titles for the ModRetro M64. The port is part of a wider wave of N64 homebrew built with modern open-source toolchains that has brought both new and existing games to the console long after its commercial life ended.

As a maze-based shooter, Xibalba emphasises exploration and fast movement over cover or reloading systems, in keeping with the pre-Doom lineage it references. Szablewski is also known for the JavaScript Impact game engine and a string of open-source graphics and codec projects, and built the original as much as a technical showcase as a game; the N64 conversion drew attention in the homebrew community precisely because fitting a texture-mapped first-person shooter onto the hardware is a non-trivial feat. Because it ships as ordinary N64 software, Xibalba 64 is not exclusive to the M64 — it plays on an original Nintendo 64 as readily as on the FPGA-based clone.