Paprium is a very controversial homebrew game, developed by Watermelon (a modern day retro console developer) it was initially announced via a kickstarter campaign way back in 2012. It took a whole 8 years for the game to be released which is a long time for Kickstarter backers to be without their money or game. When it did finally come out not enough copies were produced or distributed to the backers who essentially paid for the development of the game. They started another kickstarter campaign in 2021 claiming that Paprium would be released on PS4, PS5, Switch, PC, Dreamcast, Game Gear and more copies for the Mega Drive. They have yet to fulfil their obligations from the second kickstarter, yet they have taken backer’s money and still owe copies to original backers. All the people who pre-ordered a copy have gotten tired of waiting for Watermelon to come through and instead the community has taken it upon themselves to emulate the game. They have reached the point where they believe that if they don’t get the ROM and emulate the game themselves then they probably will never be able to play the game that they paid for.
That is just what happened recently. The game is very highly detailed beat’em up with massive sprites and is of the same quality as the beat’em ups that you would find in the arcade. The way they achieved this was by the use of custom chipset integrated into the cartridge hardware, just like Sega’s Virtua Racing which had a chipset that allowed the Mega Drive to handle 3D graphics. This ofcourse makes emulation a bit tricky and is not running on standard Sega Mega Drive hardware. So despite the ROM being released/dumped/leaked there was still the issue of being able to emulate it. That is until now, a core for Retro Arch has been developed which had been modified to run Paprium. The audio can’t yet be emulated directly and instead it will run the game’s music files from MP3’s which are included with the ROM. The game plays very well and is graphically very impressive. The audio is amazing with prolific voice samples played throughout the game just like the games you find at the arcade. It’s a very entertaining beat’em up set in a cyberpunk style world.
The game initially was available for $130 US which is an incredible amount of money for a Mega Drive game. Because of the shortage of copies and all the controversy the game can be purchased of eBay for a much higher more ridiculous price. Hopefully, now that the game is much more available, the price should drop and if Watermelon release more copies it should drop even further. Realistically though obtaining this game physically is probably not going to be possible for most people who want a copy. The ROM along with all the MP3 files and modified RetroArch core can be downloaded together as a package. For legal and copyright reasons I won’t provide a link here but you can easily find it with a google search for “Paprium ROM” (FYI: including quotation marks in a search engine search will look for results with all the included words together in the exact same order). Thanks to Krikkz it looks like Paprium will soon be playable on real Sega Mega Drive hardware using the Mega Everdrive. Regardless of all the controversy, this is an excellent, impressive and very welcome new addition to the Sega Mega Drive game library. One of the most impressive features is the multiple parallax scrolling layers that appear in each level, both in the foreground and background. This is definitely a very special “homebrew” game, if you are a Mega Drive fan this is one game you should check out to see what the system is capable of when pushed beyond it’s limits.
Relevant Links
- New MDGames.com Paprium [https://newmd.games/paprium/] Video review of Paprium (92/100)
- Time Extension [https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/07/missing-genesis-beat-em-up-paprium-will-soon-be-playable-on-original-hardware-with-a-flash-cart] Latest Paprium article on Time Extension
