Last year, many of you took part in the One Credit Challenge, our biweekly arcade event on Discord. This season, we're not just carrying the concept forward — we're building it directly into Recalbox with a brand new virtual system, Recalbox Challenges. Score, leaderboard, replays… everything is now automated.

Reminder: what was the One Credit Challenge?

Since last season, Recalbox has offered you a new arcade game every two weeks, from September to June, to play under real cabinet conditions: one credit only, no continues, no save states, no rewind. The goal: get the best possible score and go head-to-head with other players, all in good spirits.

Until now, the whole thing ran through Discord: you'd share a screenshot of your score in the #challenges channel, and the team logged the results by hand to build the leaderboard. It worked, but it took a fair amount of manual effort, and the experience stayed a bit makeshift.

The big news: a dedicated virtual system

This season, we're taking it up a notch. We've built a brand new virtual system, Recalbox Challenges, accessible directly from your Recalbox menu. In practice, this changes everything:

• A new game every 2 weeks, available directly in the virtual system: no more hunting down the rom yourself — just launch the game and play.
• Automatic score recording: no more posting screenshots to Discord, your score is captured and logged directly by the system.
• Real-time leaderboard, updated every 5 minutes, both in-game and in the Recalbox Challenge menu.
• Replays: watch back your own runs, and check out the top scorer's replay to see how the leader played.
• Notifications and player interaction: a system alerts you if someone overtakes you on the leaderboard, and you can send GGs to other participants right from the interface.
• Automatic anti-cheat: any attempt at a continue, instant save, or rewind automatically invalidates the score, with no manual intervention from us.

This level of automation is a real technical achievement for an embedded system like Recalbox: we're moving from manual Discord tracking to a genuine built-in competition system, with a live leaderboard and automatic fair-play validation.

How to take part

As with last year, the general principle stays the same: a different game every 2 weeks, from September to June, with a ranking at the end of each challenge that earns you points based on your position. Finishing the game on a single credit earns you bonus points, and it all feeds into an overall leaderboard that will determine the season's champion.

The only requirement to take part: create a free Recalbox Patreon account, which is used to identify you and generate your personal ranking in the system.

A dedicated Discord channel is of course still available and will be your main hub for chatting with other players, swapping tips, and discussing the current game (and giving each other a hard time, naturally) — once again masterfully hosted by Angelfred!

Kicking off Challenge #1 with JOE & MAC RETURNS

To start the season, we're launching hostilities with JOE & MAC RETURNS, and for the occasion it's not 15 days of play on offer but about twenty (challenge ends 10/15/2026 at 11:59 PM), giving you a chance to get up to speed (and giving us a chance to do a full-scale test over the first few days).

CHALLENGERS !!! START YOUR RECALBOX !

Do you enjoy the work the Recalbox team does? Support the project by becoming a Patron!