VVVVVV was released in January 2010 by Terry Cavanagh, an Irish developer. You play Captain Viridian, whose ship breaks apart in Dimension VVVVVV; you have to find the five crew members scattered across an open world of several hundred screens, drawn entirely in pixels and six colours, in a 1980s home-computer aesthetic carried right down to the title.
Its whole idea rests on one button: you do not jump. You flip gravity. Viridian falls upwards, then downwards, and the entire challenge lies in choosing the moment to flip in order to cross corridors bristling with spikes. The game became famous for a handful of legendary rooms — Veni, Vidi, Vici, Doing Things The Hard Way — of fearsome difficulty, softened by very frequent checkpoints and unlimited lives. The chiptune soundtrack, PPPPPP, composed by Magnus Pålsson, has a lot to do with its cult status.
Terry Cavanagh released the game's source code in January 2020, under a dedicated licence that allows it to be reused. That is the code Recalbox compiles. The game's data — graphics, levels, music — remains commercial, however: the engine is free, the content is not.
| Author | Terry Cavanagh |
| Music | Magnus Pålsson (PPPPPP) |
| Year of release | 2010 (January) |
| Game type | 2D gravity-flipping platformer |
| Port licence | VVVVVV Source Code License v1.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
| Keyboard | Optional |
VVVVVV is a commercial game. Its author gave special permission for this port to be offered free of charge in Recalbox. If you enjoy the game, support it by buying a copy from the official site.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VVVVVV | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
VVVVVV is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on every machine, including the Raspberry Pi Zero 2: the game is two-dimensional and very light. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by the core.
Place your files in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/vvvvvv/
The folder name is in lower case, unlike most of the other ports.
Supported extension: .zip
Recalbox ships no game data: out of the box the folder only holds a
LICENSE.txtfile. You need VVVVVV's data archive, either by downloading it from the system menu or by taking it from a copy of the game you own.
This system has a built-in downloader. Open the VVVVVV system menu, then pick DOWNLOAD GAMES: Recalbox fetches the files from its repositories, extracts them into the roms folder and refreshes the game list. A network connection is required.