the only thing that can make old things feel older, baring giant aesthetic swings, is that they have old or unrefined ideas and interface. witness the concept of lives being largely derided as outdated, to the point where having lives in an otherwise modern game would be a pretty deliberate design choice that people will say evokes a certain period or kind of gaming
look at Rising Zan; that is a character action-ass character action game before Devil May Cry, so it was probably hilariously fresh back in the late 90s but it would feel old now because we’ve codified so much of what we think is a character action game (nevermind that attribute this to DMC but hey, history remembers the winners)
ok but yeah, i think categorization of things as “retro” is perhaps a useless moniker for games or anything. like is Beethoven “retro?”
retro is a term that only gained traction in the third quarter of the 20th century and i think it’s time to let it die. i don’t know if it was naturally-occurring slang or a marketing term (i’m betting the latter!) but it mostly referred to the recent past. but why is the recent past “retrograde”? it implies a certain amount of disdain, imo, as though folks are moving backwards. i guess in the sense of people who make “retro gaming” their whole personality, yes, it is moving backwards.
The 360 is considered “retro” by the “20 or more years old” metric, nearly. When replaying some games I had wondered if I was trying to relive the past of going to college and playing PGR3 for hours on end. Revisiting a lot of games, the 360 games feel a lot less refined, but more polished and less expressive than the OG Xbox era. It feels like we’ve been stuck in the 360 era in terms of design and scope creep.
John Woo’s Stranglehold feels like an OG Xbox game, for instance. Bioshock Infinite feels more modern, but only because so much of AAA design, scope, and writing follows the same paradigm.
when i was playing Gimmick! my wife asked if it was a new game (made for the Famicom) because of the music and style and level design, etc.
having spent a lot of time over the past few years revisiting really old games a lot, more and more i think it’s just best to think of it as its own thing rather than an evolution or what have you. like is psych rock retro or is it a genre? it is sort of both?
it annoys me when i tell people they should play an old game and they say they don’t have the patience for it! be more patient!
I should have worded this better so that folks would not have gotten hung on the term. What I am better asking is do each of you feel like there has been a flattening of cultural time in Video Games over the last say 15 years that something like Dark Souls still feels recent even if like Super Mario Sunshine feels distant from DS?
Is this just because I am getting older? (Yes) or is there a wider cultural force at play that even people younger than me have the same relationship (barring stuff they played when they were kids because that’s how time works.)
yes, but also no. tech is a big differentiator here. what kind of video game can you make in 2024 that you fundamentally could not make in 2011? nothing. that’s a 13 year difference, which is basically the difference between mario world and mario sunshine. you couldn’t make mario sunshine in 1991. quake came out in 1996 and you couldn’t make it in 1994. and it’s not just new things, it’s the speed of those new things preventing codification of mechanics and controls. the playstation had all kinds of weird shit because no one knew what you were supposed to do in 3D or how it was supposed to control. now everything controls the same and has since the 01-05 period (or whatever).
anyway, your game ain’t retro if I can’t find a game over screen in the first ten minutes if I fuck up, don’t @ me.
Increasingly i find that students use retro to mean ‘pixel art aesthetic’ more than anything. They often have very little historical awareness of tech used and limitations they created beyond ‘old computer made simple game’. I hear about ‘retro shaders’ much more often than I hear it ascribed to design or a specific era.
Many now confuse ps1 or ps2 or think that boomer shooters includes Halo or nuDoom
there are also a lot of design sensibilities that disappear or surge based on certain goals. arcades had an outsized effect on video game design in the 80s and 90s, and that bled into consoles very easily. an arcade game is designed to get you off the machine quickly. if it’s a good arcade game you can figure out why or how, if it’s a bad one the player is more or less not a factor in the design. but the goal is the same either way. absolutely nothing could be further from how really any kind of modern game is designed.
Constantly see game trailers on YouTube where (very likely) young kids call things “PS1 Graphics” on shit that might not look out of place as an early PS3 game.
And yeah I think @geist has it right, there hasn’t been a quantum leap in tech in decades, so we just keep getting prettier versions of the same stuff. “Best practices” have been codified. From the PS3/360 through the 4/Bone and 5/Series, it all feels pretty indistinct. The Wii is out there as a weirdo outlier and then Nintendo kinda got conservative again with its next couple of systems, in terms of the games at least.
At best we get novel mashups of mechanics from existing games and it’s why so many are described in the X meets Y with a Z aesthetic.
I guess maybe something like Pokemon Go feels like a game you couldn’t make with tech from 20 years ago. That’s maybe where the biggest potential for surprises lie, the mobile space. Partly because tech is mutating the most rapidly there and the devices are integrated into our lives in ways PCs and consoles can’t be. Maybe there’s something there. I’m too tired to be more smart about this at the moment.
