Overview
Anton Retro is a retro gaming media platform serving over 77,000 YouTube subscribers. What began as a YouTube channel focused on Nintendo homebrew grew into a full media operation: news, guides, mod reviews, and video content delivered through a custom-built headless CMS and Next.js frontend at antonretro.com.
The platform is the largest and most architecturally complex project in this portfolio. It required designing and building a scalable content delivery system that a solo creator could operate without engineering support.
Architecture
The platform is built on a headless WordPress backend serving content through the REST API to a Next.js frontend. WordPress handles content creation, metadata, media management, and scheduling. Next.js handles rendering, routing, and performance. The separation means the editorial workflow stays familiar while the frontend can be rebuilt, redesigned, or replaced without touching the content.
- Headless WordPress CMS with custom post types for news, guides, reviews, games, and mods
- Next.js App Router frontend with server-side rendering for SEO-critical pages
- DigitalOcean Droplet hosting both WordPress and Next.js on a single server with nginx routing
- PM2 process management for zero-downtime restarts and auto-recovery
- Custom PowerShell deploy pipeline for one-command production deployments
- DigitalOcean Spaces CDN for all media assets with automatic compression
Content System
Anton Retro publishes across five content types with different metadata requirements. A review needs a score, verdict, pros, cons, and platform. A mod page needs download links, compatibility notes, and a video embed. A guide needs a table of contents, difficulty rating, and step-by-step structure. All of these are handled through custom WordPress meta fields and rendered through a shared article component that adapts its layout based on post type.
Performance
With a growing archive of several hundred posts and a readership that spikes when a major homebrew release drops, performance and reliability are operational requirements, not nice-to-haves. Pages are server-rendered on demand with no-store caching, meaning content updates are live immediately without cache invalidation steps. Static assets are served from a CDN with long cache lifetimes.
Community Impact
The platform exists because the retro gaming and homebrew community has a genuine information problem: documentation is scattered across Reddit threads, Discord servers, and outdated forums. Anton Retro centralises that information into well-structured, searchable, and regularly updated guides. The 77,000 subscriber count reflects the community’s appetite for that kind of organised, trustworthy resource.
