If you’re an iPhone user, then you’ll no doubt know all about Delta. Since Apple opened its App Store to emulators, Delta has quickly become one of the most downloaded and used apps by retro gaming fans all over the globe. A big hitter on Riley Testut’s Alt Store for years, Delta is one of the most intuitive emulators around and makes playing classic Nintendo games on your iPhone or iPad a breeze.
One of the best bits about Delta is the fact that you can easily download and use custom skins to enhance your gaming experience, which is where Sean Fletcher comes in, the talent behind the incredible Delta Pocket Emulator Skins that we have shouted about across our socials for some time now. He even redesigned Delta’s logo when they were facing legal action from Adobe during the onslaught of emulators coming to iOS this year!
We chatted with Sean on episode 071 of the Retrospect Podcast, talking about his history with retro gaming, how he got into emulation, how he creates such beautiful skins, fundraising with the community, and much more. What follows is a selection of snippets from our podcast recording with Sean, and you can listen to the full episode at the bottom of this article. But for now, take it away Sean!
Table of Contents
Getting To Know Sean Fletcher
RD: Thanks for joining us, Sean. We’re avid fans of your work, but it would be great if you could introduce yourself and explain to our community what you do for those readers who haven’t discovered you yet.
SF: So I’m a designer, I live in Seattle, and I’ve been designing interfaces and specifically, basically skins for applications since I was a teenager. I was really inspired by Apple UI design in the early days, like Mac OS Tiger, when I was on a Windows XP computer, and just wished that I had the dock and iTunes, stuff that was really beautiful. So I was really involved in Windows modding communities at the time. I think one of them was called AquaSoft, where we made system themes for Windows that made it look like Mac.
SF: I was looking at it the other day, my old DeviantArt page is still up from that time. It’s pretty easy to look back at, but it’s like early 2000s interface design. When the iPhone came out, I had an iPod Touch and I jail broke it on my first day owning it. And like since then, I’ve been customising the icons on it and it’s been jailbroken from the start. I remember the first emulator for mobile… it was like a GPS phone or something. I can’t, I don’t know if it’s actually related to GBA for iOS and then Delta today, but I remember it’s like way lost to time, but I was making skins for that way back in the day.
RD: To jailbreak your iPod touch on the first go… were you a little bit nervous about that? Or were you kind of just, ‘This is straightforward, I know what I’m doing, I’m just going straight into it’.
SF: No, I was so excited about it. Like I got it for Christmas, and at the time it was super easy to jailbreak. You just went to a website and you basically clicked a button and then it was jailbroken. So it’s not great for security. I’m glad they fixed that, but it was fun.
RD: I remember vividly that I didn’t have an iPhone, but some friends who did would show me their obviously custom-designed applications, fluid menus, and cool interfaces. And I was very jealous of what it looked like. And to be fair, Apple should have taken a lot of inspiration from a lot of the jailbreaking that people were doing and the custom user interfaces, because some of it was incredibly sleek. You saw something you didn’t like and wanted to change it to make it more modern or your style. And now it’s evolved into you building emulator skins for one of the most popular emulator apps on the iPhone!
Let’s Talk Modding
RD: So it sounds like you have been taking stuff apart and checking out how things tick for quite a while and not just working with software. Have you taken your DS apart as well to kind of figure out how those things work? Let’s unpack how you’ve managed to get into the combination of console modding and designing. Usually, we speak to people who do one or the other, but you seem to have a hand in both, and that’s really interesting. Is there a memory of a first handheld or a first controller or console that you took apart when you were younger that sparked all this off as well?
SF: Oh, wow. I think it comes from breaking stuff.
RD: We’ve all rage quit in games from time to time.
SF: Yeah, I guess like dropping devices and having like… not like cracks in the shell, but having something pop off and then me looking at the internals of it. I always thought it was really interesting. And probably part of it was like my Game Boy Color; my first one was the atomic purple Game Boy Color and being able to see the internals of it was just like really fascinating.
SF: I’ve always been a fan of industrial design. I wanted to be an architect when I was younger; I’ve always been drawn to it. And having any opportunity to dig into something that’s kind of pre-built and like you said, find a way to make it my own or put my own style into it, is always something I’ve been interested in.
The Delta Pocket Series
RD: Let’s talk about the Delta Pocket Series which has revolutionised the iPhone emulator world. How many different designs have you done? I’m looking at maybe 25 or 30 designs in total on your website.
SF: The actual answer is going to be a little embarrassing probably. So for Delta Pocket, which is the version that’s out for Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color, there are 64 editions.
RD: Oh, wow – that’s impressive!
SF: So that’s 128 different skins because they’re separate for Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color. They just have the same design, and I’m just getting started on Delta Duo. I told myself I would take a break for the summer. But then a few days later, I was like, ‘Okay, I have some downtime so let me do like 12 designs’. I had been gathering inspiration and there were community requests for specific color combinations. So I had an idea of what I was setting out to do already.
SF: So I started doing that, I think pretty soon after I had the initial release of Delta Pocket and I just, I kept wanting to do more. I kind of wanted to do a weekly release or something, just a couple every once in a while. But it really spiraled from there.
The Challenges of Designing Emulator Skins
RD: What are the challenges of designing this for iPhone and iPad? Are there Apple restrictions on this kind of thing or is it pretty open?
SF: It’s pretty open. I mean, you’re limited to what you’re able to do with a Delta skin. So basically what you do is create an image and then you… you kind of map out where the buttons are on the image with JSON. I do my designs in an app called Figma, which is browser-based; it’s vector graphics. And it took me a lot longer to figure out how to do this like kind of high detail rendering in Figma. Because I’ve been using Photoshop since I was 11. If I wanted to do it in Photoshop, that would have been like, I don’t know, a couple of hours.
RD: Which is your favourite Delta Pocket design so far?
SF: I think the transparent additions; as I’m looking at the line up here, I think the clear purple still, it scratches my brain in a really nice way. Or I think a close second would be the crystal transparent addition, which is based on the Pokémon Crystal cartridge.
RD: The details in these transparent Delta pockets are incredible. You’re looking at your phone, and it looks like you’re looking at a transparent case with all the chips inside and everything. And sometimes I have to remind myself that you’ve designed all this and it’s not actually there. The attention to detail is just phenomenal.
SF: Thank you. Yeah. It’s like the smallest thing on there, but I’m super proud of the shadows. There are certain lighting conditions where the shadows make it look real.
RD: You do the shadows around the edges of the skin as well, which makes it look semi 3D, which is very clean!
Sean’s Retro Gaming History
RD: You’ve made lots of people happy with the Delta Pockets and the work you put into them. Let’s talk to you about your handheld gaming past now and find out where that started and what influence it’s had on your work. Are you like us, still holding on to your original Game Boy? Did you spend a lot of formative years with the Game Boy Color and the Advance, and do you still own any of those original consoles that you had? Seb often talks about remembering being on the stairs playing Pokémon and not coming down for his dinner for like an hour and a half, and a lot of our community have those same thoughts and feelings surrounding handheld consoles.
SF: Yeah, my first handheld was the original Game Boy. My older brother owned one, but I don’t remember what age I was necessarily when I started playing it. But we had the Rocky & Bullwinkle game which, to this day, I feel like no one has ever legitimately beat that game. It was so hard.
SF: I also had Pokémon Red and Blue. Obviously, being a kid in the ’90, Pokémon was like the biggest thing at the time. And I had my first Game Boy Color when they… whenever the purple one came out, I guess I would have gotten it for Christmas the year that it was new. And Pokémon Gold & Silver I think, were like the games that I played on it the most. I don’t actually remember owning any other games. So original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, I had the white one.
SF: But I secretly always wanted the Glacier one, which was like a transparent light blue with gray or white buttons. And I would never tell my parents that, like, oh, thanks, but I wanted this one. So when I started working on the transparent versions of the skins, I was like, oh, I have to make a Glacier one. I have to fulfill my inner child’s wish. But Game Boy Advance, oh, and I just remembered, I had the clip-on accessories for the Game Boy Color where it was like, there was one that made the buttons bigger and one that it was like a tri-fold kind of weird light magnifying class thing for it. I remember when I got the thing that let you plug it into the wall instead of using batteries – that was game-changing.
The Pride Collection & Raising Money With The Community
RD: We’ve been following your journey on Threads for a while now, and it would be great if you could tell the community about the Pride Collection you created and the charity you’ve been raising money for.
SF: The idea for the Pride collection actually came out of a typo when I was typing Game Boy and I wrote Gay Boy. I thought about that for a second; June was coming up, and June is Pride month in the US as I’m sure in other countries it is too. And so I was like, what if I made an addition that was for Pride and how could I make that something that people would be interested in? So I did like the first design of it, which was originally called High Gay–there’s a meme about it–but that later got renamed to Rainbow Road. But it’s basically a collection of Pride-inspired designs.
SF: There are, I think, 12 in total. So they’re based on different variations of the Pride flags, like the lesbian flag, trans flag, gay flag, all like that. And all the profits went to an organization that I care a lot about, Rainbow Railroad. They help people who live in countries where it’s illegal to be gay basically get out into a safe country. There are still like 60 countries in the world where it’s illegal.
SF: All of the Delta skins are pay what you want, but I wanted to be able to raise as much money as I could during June for Rainbow Railroad. So I made it… it’s like the only one that I’ve ever done a limited release on. And I get asked all the time to re-release it. So I might do that after this comes out for a limited time. But yeah, working on the Pride collection, I was just so shocked that we were able to raise over $1,300 for charity.
RD: Wow, that’s an incredible feat!
SF: Yeah, obviously in the grand scheme of things $1,300 isn’t a ton. But considering just how niche the audience is for iOS Delta Emulator Skins, it’s just really amazing that the community showed up the way that they did and paid for something that they didn’t have to just to support a really great cause. So I was just incredibly taken aback by that. So I’ll make sure that the whole Pride collection, including DazzleClean, is available to people who are just now finding out about it through this interview!
Thanks very much to Sean for joining us on the Retrospect Podcast. I urge you all to head over to Sean’s Website to check out his Delta Pocket designs and to support him by grabbing a design pack for your phone. You can follow Sean on Instagram and Threads, and if you’ve enjoyed reading about Sean’s work and his journey with Delta so far, then listen to the full episode of his podcast below to find out how he created an alternate logo for the App and to hear more about the trials and tribulations of designing emulator skins!
