Start A Game Automatically When RetroPie Loads

Maybe you've built a multi game arcade cabinet but had it look like an original cabinet from the 80s or 90s (Like Our Replica Range?). A cool feature would be for it to boot straight in to a game while still having the option to access EmulationStation and all the other games. This is pretty easy with the following steps.

Game First, EmulationStation Second

RetroPie will automatically load EmulationStation on boot up as that is what's dictated by the autostart.sh file. Navigate your way to it ...

/opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh

Depending on how you're accessing this (the built in text editor if using something like WinSCP or nano if you're accessing directly via the console), you can open the file to see that it should contain the following ...

To make a game run first, just add the code to start the game (See Here For Info) before the line starting EmulationStation. For example, to have the system boot directly in to Super Metroid on the Super Nintendo add the following line of code so the autostart.sh file looks like this ...

When you exit out of the game, EmulationStation will load as normal.