# PUNBIT

> One real news story becomes a playable level of an original NES game. Play it in your browser or download the .nes cartridge for real hardware.

PUNBIT turns news stories into original 8-bit games. There is no fixed schedule: an issue ships when a story is worth making a cartridge out of, and each one carries the date its story ran. A news story is picked from a curated shortlist, then an agent builds a real Nintendo Entertainment System (NES, mapper-0/NROM) level from it -- original art and original code -- published to play in-browser via a jsnes emulator or to download as a .nes ROM that runs on real NES hardware through a flash cartridge.

## Issues

- [DOUBLE SHIFT (No. 20, 2026-09-09)](https://punbit.com/i/double-shift): Apple's first folding iPhone opens to 7.6 inches, and what the company says the extra glass is for is running two apps at once. Pre-orders 16 October, on sale the 23rd, from $1999.
- [RIGHT OF WAY (No. 19, 2026-09-08)](https://punbit.com/i/right-of-way): A MAN JUMPED OUT FROM BEHIND A POLE · THE DRIVERLESS CAB BRAKED EVERY TIME
- [DEAD AIR (No. 18, 2026-09-07)](https://punbit.com/i/dead-air): Researchers pulled the network lead out of a television and kept talking. The set went on writing to itself, and sent the lot the moment the lead went back in.
- [FLAG POST (No. 17, 2026-09-06)](https://punbit.com/i/flag-post): Over a few hours on a Sunday evening the US president declared the Moon, a state and a strait to be his country's. Two of that list's older entries stuck. The rest did not.
- [FUN DING (No. 16, 2026-09-04)](https://punbit.com/i/fun-ding): Spammers have started writing with characters that are invisible to people and perfectly legible to machines. Slide one into the middle of "funding" and the filter reads "fun" and "ding".
- [THIN ICE (No. 15, 2026-09-03)](https://punbit.com/i/thin-ice): For about fifty days each spring, a town of two thousand people stands on the Khumbu glacier. A study has added up what it burns and turned the heat into ice: roughly 2,492 tonnes of it.
- [DRIFT WOOD (No. 14, 2026-09-02)](https://punbit.com/i/drift-wood): BC Hydro spent part of the summer looking for a piece of shoreline that had gone from where it was. It had not sunk and it had not been taken. It was crossing the reservoir at walking pace, sideways.
- [BOTH NAMES (No. 13, 2026-08-29)](https://punbit.com/i/both-names): An executive order renamed Lake Ontario for American use and gave thirty days to erase the old name. Canada declined, New York declined, and on the Saturday the maps simply came apart.
- [BREAD LINE (No. 12, 2026-08-27)](https://punbit.com/i/bread-line): Over four days, 39 kilograms of bread and a pile of chicken liver appeared beside a mountain road inside a Japanese national park, laid out in plain sight at even spacing. The ranger who found it doubts it was dumping.
- [GROUND TRUTH (No. 11, 2026-08-26)](https://punbit.com/i/ground-truth): Cotton rots at wildly different speeds depending on where it goes into the ground. Two months underground at a thousand sites across Switzerland turned that into a map of soil life, and named the factor that matters most.
- [SPLIT SECOND (No. 10, 2026-08-26)](https://punbit.com/i/split-second): The physics of schooling fish assumed each animal steers for the average of its neighbours. Watched in a virtual-reality tank, glassfish were doing something narrower: copying one of them, in the split second after it turned.
- [SHELF LIFE (No. 9, 2026-08-25)](https://punbit.com/i/shelf-life): Sony spent August mailing its customers the small print. One line of it says the games they paid for were licensed rather than sold, and the timing turned boilerplate into an argument.
- [MUTE POINT (No. 8, 2026-08-20)](https://punbit.com/i/mute-point): A shopping home page started a live audio graph at zero volume. The only sign of it was a pair of headphones that would no longer hand the sound back to the phone.
- [HUM DRIVE (No. 7, 2026-08-15)](https://punbit.com/i/hum-drive): Hollow bells tuned to different notes turn a speaker into an engine, and a centimetre-long boat with nothing on board is steered by changing the pitch.
- [COLD BLOODED (No. 6, 2026-08-14)](https://punbit.com/i/cold-blooded): Firefighters called to a Bedford County school at half past midnight found the sprinklers already running, eight classrooms damaged, and the culprit still in the room.
- [COLANDER (No. 5, 2026-08-13)](https://punbit.com/i/2026-w33-eclipse-colander): A professional photographer put the camera aside for the eclipse and turned a kitchen colander into a field of projected crescent Suns for the family.
- [BELOW THE FOLD (No. 4, 2026-08-11)](https://punbit.com/i/2026-w33-buried-search-arena): Signed out of Google, the search button is gone. Standing where it was: create images, ask about files, brainstorm. Sign in and the old page comes back.
- [FOOLS GOLD (No. 3, 2026-08-06)](https://punbit.com/i/fools-gold-feed): A surveillance joke became a confident search answer after an AI summary treated memes and weak sourcing as technical evidence.
- [IMPACT WINDOW (No. 2, 2026-08-06)](https://punbit.com/i/moon-impact): Danuri's passes over the impact site returned the first look at the new crater, set against a NASA frame of the same ground from 2015.
- [SARGASSUM SHIFT (No. 1, 2026-07-31)](https://punbit.com/i/sargassum-shift): July's count is 27 million metric tons, and for the first time the weed is not only drifting in from the open Atlantic. It is breeding where it lands.

## Engines

The issues are built on original engines: CAMPAIGN TRAIL, STRIKE FORCE, VOTE RUSH, RED CARD RESCUE, BREAKING NEWS, VOTE MAZE.

## Season 1

- [Season 1 — the thirteen issues on one NES cartridge](https://punbit.com/season-1): a single MMC1 ROM with a game-select menu at boot, playable in the browser and on real hardware.

## More

- [Home](https://punbit.com/)
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