I propose that the 10 year retro window was a good rule to follow when games themselves had only been around for 30 years and proportionally 10 years was a massive jump in that total timeframe. But now games have been around for 50+ years so the 10 year window feels strange when that includes games currently being iterated on and some games that are still supported. For me the time until a game is retro has increased to 15 years which maintains roughly the 10/30 proportion, and conveniently means Uncharted 2 is not retro but Uncharted 1 is, which feels right to me.
Maybe ātimeā is not the defining feature of retro games, instead it has more to do with someoneās experience. Games are derivative and there are so many different artistic and mechanical changes that have spread widely throughout the last 50 years, and its up to our own brains to recognize similarities and lump them together. Itās weird for me to flatten āretroā to contain both Gameboy and 3DS gamesā¦ Super Mario Land and Super Mario 3D Land are dramatically different games, dramatically different technologies, they mean very different things to me and I experienced them at very different points in my life. But someone just getting into games during the last 5 years would probably happily group them together as āretroā. From my own perspective I do this tooā¦ I see no meaningful distinction between Gen 1 - Gen 3 consoles because I wasn't around for those.
My boyfriend, who is a bit younger than me, told me he looks at Wii games as retro because he grew up with the system... but I skipped the Game Cube, the Wii, and Wii U. When I first around to playing Wii games it was 2020 I played Xenoblade Chronicles Remaster and Super Mario Galaxy... which felt like they were built for switch. It might just be that I'm missing the context and continuity or the fact that I wasn't there but these are not retro games to me. Yes, they show their age in little ways, but they were also frictionless experiences that compare very favorably with modern games in terms of design styles. My memories and associations with them are playing them during the pandemic. The stuff I was actually playing as a teen in 2007-2010 - games like Persona 4 and Fable 2 feel retro to me in a way that those wii games do not.
I agree. The water's only become muddier since retro-gaming has been around and it seems to only be becoming bigger. Both with the number of people falling into the hobby, the very broad definitions nobody agrees on, and the sheer number of games that keep increasing the pool of games to sort.
Eventually at some point (IMO) we're gonna have to split things up into antique, vintage, classic, retro, because there's just too many games to shove them all into one category as most seem to want.
You go into the retro category on twitch and there's FORTY years of games all shoved under one banner. Meanwhile every new game gets its own very special category, that seems very short-sighted.
@ē©“ it will never not freak me out that Smells Like Teen Spirit is older than almost every song they played on classic rock radio when Smells Like Teen Spirit came out. Nirvana canāt be classic rock it doesnāt make any sense.
Perhaps the comic book model would fit video games.
In comics they have:
The Golden Age: 1938-56, the beginnings and early success of modern comic books
The Silver Age: 56-70, widespread mainstream growth after a period of public disinterest
The Bronze Age: 70-85, A kind of maturation of the scope and content of comics
The Modern Age: 1985+, Lots of reboots and reimaginings of comic book IPs, increased commercialisation, growth of a large collector's market
I feel like this arc maps pretty closely to what happened in video games. Could do something like:
**Golden Age**: 1972-1983. Home pong machines, Atari 2600, leading up to the video game crash
**Silver Age**: 1983-1994 Huge success of NES, innovation, the birth of many major IPs, a kind of locking down of various genre norms, arcade popularity,
**Bronze Age**: 1994-2006 The rise of 3D games, the average age of gaming audiences increasing, perception shifts from being children's toys to a legitimate form of entertainment
**Modern Age**: 2006+ Gaming now a true entertainment juggernaut, "retro gaming" becomes more popular, the growth of online gaming, streaming, lots of reboots and remakes, games are becoming hugely expensive to make and much more heavily monetized, more microtransactions, DLC, etc.
Yeah I don't think my brain can deal with any game with DLC being considered retro.
The other things that stick in my brain as turning points are:
Ease of emulation of the hardware. (āAnything pre PS2 is retroā)
Arcade style game design. No in game tutorials, waypoints, quest markers, quest menus, skill trees, etc. ("Any thing pre World of Warcraft is retro")
Nothing that used an HDMI port could plausibly be called retro ("Anything pre Xbox 360 is retro")
All of which combined cement in my brain that the cut off of retro is October 19, 2004, the day that Samurai Shodown V Special, the last Neo Geo game, was released.
That being said, literally nothing on the Xbox, GameCube, or PS2 is retro, so there's a sliding scale starting back in 2000-2001.
An important point to remember is āretroā doesnāt equal āoldā. Iāve always bristled against the arbitrary ā10 years and its retroā idea. There are plenty of new games that are retro and plenty of old games that were ahead of their time. That being said, controls are a big factor in the feel of a game - 3d games with a camera in particular. Something like N64 Goldeneye from ā97 being built around a pre-twin analog controller feels very āretroā (or unplayable if Iām being a jerk about it) whereas PSX Alien Resurrection from 2000 has a relatively modern dual stick control scheme. There are a lot of game of the PS3/XB360 era that would be very easy for modern players to pick up and understand because controls and controllers were standardized by that point. D-pad, 2 sticks, 4 face buttons and 4 shoulder buttons.
@Funbil yeah, I think the distinction should be drawn directly across the analog-digital line.
Do people think that video games will āsettleā in the same way that cinema and books did? I.e., when people say āI like old movies/booksā you tend to assume theyāre watching movies from the 50s, and reading books from like, the 1800s. Most people wouldnāt think of a book/movie from 10-15 years ago as āoldā.
It makes sense that we think of video games this way because they're still such a young medium in comparison, but I kinda hope that video games keep evolving at such a fast rate (not just in graphics, but in design) that games from 10 years before will always feel "different" from current games.
Edit: Now that I think about it, "settle" is the wrong term for what has happened with cinema/books. They're evolving too. I'm just referring to the sense that a 10-year-old book/movie doesn't feel aged in any meaningful way.
@giogadi I have to say, I think the time when āold moviesā refers to the 80s is approaching very fast, if it's not already here. stuff from the 50s will probably become āblack and whiteā movies, and 80s and earlier will be āold.ā
@exodus Youāre not wrong. I was rewatching Memento (2000) the other day and it already had that mouthfeel of ānot recentā. which is insane. Must be the protagonistās bleached hair
There were always innovations in film across the eras, itās just more heady and niche. I think itās a totally fair assumption to say games will go along a similar path to films, but also, there are future innovations for film and games simultaneously coming down the pipeā¦
The Last Of Us is retro as of today according to Retronauts
I was considering replying with an updated opinion on what constitutes retro, and how in terms of underlying design trends things have absolutely changed enough from ten years ago that we can treat games from that period as separate from the present and thus retro, but I realized I'd be rehashing my McDonald's thoughts.
Damn, I love Mulholland Drive.
For me, the retro title ends with the SNES, Genesis, and Game Boy. I don't know what to call the N64, Playstation, or Sega Saturn, or later handhelds, but I wouldn't call them retro. There's too much stuff in the N64, Saturn and handhelds that still represent the way things are now.
Oh yeah I should mention I also never use this term. (retro, that is)
But here's how a book off related business considers and spells it
[URL=https://i.imgur.com/5GDM85r.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/5GDM85r.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
So retro doesn't actually mean old.
i.e. La Mulana was retro when it was brand new. Maybe this would be easier to pin down if you just said "classic". I am very comfortable calling anything more than 5 years old a classic.
Let's just call them old.