So I've made a few carts now, and am enjoying the hell out of it. Primarily for the joy of just building things, but also for the implicit little bit of roleplaying involved: I'm not just programming a game, I'm programming a game for a fictional console from another universe, from another time. I'm not just me, really; I'm the company that would have existed to be producing these things. I'm some scrappy no-budget third-party game dev concern from alternate universe 198X.
And a game company needs a brand identity.
And so: I came up with a name and drew a logo, and wrote up a little basically self-contained function to do a quick splash screen render, using a single 2*2 sprite:
The notion is, I can take this and paste it into any cart I release with just a little bit of futzing to make it the first thing the cart does on boot before moving onto normal game state stuff. At ~200 tokens its not as slim as it could be, but for most carts that won't be an issue and stripping it down to a simpler static splash would work in a pinch.
Anyway, it was fun to make, but beyond that I just like the idea, and I think it's be a great little community thing to see this idea adopted more generally. Sort of establish the odd little universe we've all opted into by adopting the constraints of PICO 8, fleshing out an ad hoc hodgepodge of fictional companies in a fictional market.