Yeah my thought was members of “retro” communities setting boundaries on discussion was sensible even if the label wasn’t. I dunno if my grandma would be all that pleased if she went to her favorite annual oldies festival and found half the doo-wop acts replaced with like fuckin’ Iron Butterfly and Steppenwolf, yeah all these acts are over half a century old at this point but they don’t have much in common beyond that.
Ignore that my grandmother seemingly never listened to music and was middle aged when doo-wop was at its peak – I’m allowed to make things up to prove a point!! There’s a word for it!! I don’t remember what it was!! I just woke up
if it weren’t for releases being spread across Switch/PS4/XB3/XB4/PS5/Steam(read as: PC), where you have to exactly specify which version you actually mean(™), that’d actually be a valid proposition, even if i would have to learn what Gen 5 or Gen 7 cluster actually contains
this makes me thnk of a few years ago, when i watched season 1 of married with children. they’re going on holiday somewhere and kelly says something about having to listen to the oldies station for six hours in the car and for a second i thought “but it’s 1987, you are in the oldies times”
i remember seeing arguments on wikipedia about this, since the terminology was apparently invented by a wikipedia editor, which is not what wikipedia is supposed to do
i remember growing up listening to the oldies station when more and more 70s started creeping in and my mom was like ‘what is jefferson starship doing on kool 94.9’
anyway, to bring it back to videogames, the generation thing is sneered at a lot but yeah, i think it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. it’s imperfect and a bit arbitrary, but also the alternatives are also vague and tend to sound messy or too fidgety at best
talking more specifically about genres and movements is also good, though, and helps avoid the flattening and homogenous historical narratives videogames already tend toward generating
a big problem that crops up with the generations thing is that some systems kind of straddle the line between two generations for various reasons. pc engine, 3do, dreamcast, etc.
interface complexity is a useful metric, though it splits everything into only 3 eras
no interface
basic interface with a few functions like save management, cd player, etc.
complex interface with builtin access to storefront, games and other programs saved on console’s internal storage, etc.
Likewise, I see “alt-rock” is still a thing and that feels wrong as heck, like alt-rock should be a fossil concept like classic rock. ike everything pre-beatles is “oldies”, then later in the early FM and AOR era is classic rock, then come alt.
Sort of like how New Wave can still be called new wave.
2017-now: the Odyssey era
2012-2017: the New U era
2007-2012: the Galaxy era
2002-2007: the Sunshine era
1996-2002: the 64 era
1991-1996: the World era
1985-1991: the Brothers era
1983-1985: the pre-Super era
the big bang-1983: video games didn’t exist
