While I am not here to debate the term Retro Games I am thinking about it. The common consensus was “Retro Video Games” was anything 10 years old or more. Obviously you keep that definition going for 20 years it includes a lot more things.
It might just be a me thing. I tend to place movies or music more in the year they were released. Video games feels like that gets trickier. Maybe it’s because video games are linked with technological advancement. And since that has kind of flat lined since the PS4 (10 years old!) it is harder to feel that advancement.
Or maybe this is an effect of aging. I’d be more inclined to our younger posters points of view if Demon’s Souls and MGS4 and Team Fortress 2 feel like a long time ago.
Or uh Destiny 1, EDF4, and Super Mario 3D Land.
This all started because I was considering if Cave Story is closer to its inspirations or today?
Yeah I can’t really get behind this whole thing of calling anything 10 years old “retro”. Retro is short for retrograde! You can’t call a PS3 game retrograde because it was made in the exact same way as video games are made today. And you can’t call Bluray discs retrograde because they’re still sold. You have to go back to the 90s to when they were still creating 3d graphics using UNIX or SGI workstations. In my opinion we should just classify everything as pre or post internet.
Tbh game design trends are a more useful gauge of era than tech at this point in time. Obviously it is often informed by tech but also cultural zeitgeists
“the vita is retro” I proclaim, crying and unzipping my pants
A combination of me effectively playing games my whole life and everything the kids think is retro is stuff I grew up with on top there still being a whole segment of games I would’ve called retro when I was a kid means it’s kind of a meaningless descriptor
I also don’t buy into the related “old games were better than our current game hellscape” because, well, the notion always pops up and- you know what? There are new games and I enjoy them. I like them old games and I like them new games. Get off my gaming lawn.
Retro games are games that I played when I was a child without the mental blocks that make taking games off the shelf to play difficult in and of itself.
Modern games are games are games that came out after that.
I remember when I used to listen to the Retronauts podcast (god forgive me) and their 10-year window for what was “retro” and ergo under their umbrella started feeling like it was lapping at the heels of contemporary games, it was kinda wild.
It feels like there’s an argument to be made that “retro gaming” has calcified in a way that doesn’t point back to the definition of “retro” outside of “games.” Rather, it’s frozen in time, not inclusive of “the past” generally, but to an age of 2D games, or at least before you launched a console game a menu rather than it just loading on hitting the power button. What then would you call playing Demon’s Souls in 2024? “Playing older games?”
The image I have for the “retro gaming community” is people who were late teens or adults who might’ve bought an “Old School” t-shirt with an NES controller on it from Wal-Mart for $9.77 in 2004.
But that’s pretty firmly embedded in my 40±year-old perspective.
As an aside, this reminds me there’s this guy on Bluesky who is on this ridiculous crusade against “retro” as a descriptor for old games, and keeps posting this every time it comes up to describe actual old games from the past, rather than whatever contemporary thing is being made to evoke it
It’s amazing and hilarious because (not getting into descriptive vs. prescriptive, etc.) he’s latched onto this one very narrow defintion, while Merriam-Webster (the preferred dictionary for many American publications/style guides), like many other dictionaries, is sitting right there with
relating to, reviving, or being the styles and especially the fashions of the past : fashionably nostalgic or old-fashioned
Continues to fuck me up that, while the oldies stations have largely dropped the “oldies” moniker (and thus there don’t seem to really be “oldies” stations anymore), the window has continued to shift so now the local (fka) “oldies” stations are all playing Nirvana and REM and I think the early aughts are creeping in now. They occasionally spin something from the 70s, but where am I supposed to go if I want to listen to, like, the 50s rockabilly and 60s Motown that were my definition of “oldies” in the mid-90s and are still my primary associations with the term?
(I mean, I don’t really listen to the radio except for when my phone needs to sit on the charger rather than the aux cord in the car, so it barely comes up but nonetheless)
most movies from 2006-2013 are ubiquitously available on demand for a few bucks
buying and maintaining the hardware to play games that don’t get ported or backwards compatibility patches for newer hardware is an expensive hobby in itself
yeah, retro is a consumer term - that feels right to me. i’d go as far to say thinking too deeply about the term is a kind of distraction from anything interesting.
in particular, i hate when descriptors overtake the actual things being described… then the descriptor has its own (unmoored) associations and connotations, and like… at some point it seems literally negative information to use such a term in most contexts
to be clear, i’m not jabbing at this thread nor anyone here for “thinking too deeply” about anything, just trying to express that the term has got this vacuousness to it that prevents much of interest from being said about it. and i do think it is fascinating to look at it from the perspective of consumption.
I think retro is ~20 years. Early PS3 era games are starting to feel old, but late PS3 games still have the same design philosophies as modern games. Killzone 3 is pretty much a bad service driven FPS. PS3 era indie games look like PS5 era indie games, but like… less shiny and produced (maybe that’s why we look at them more fondly?).
I’m unsure what new things will come out to make old games feel really old, but yeah. Pre-S3 is retro. Thanks.
