@hellomrkearns While Retronauts was the “decider” of what is retro seemingly for a long time, I think they've transitioned to a point where really what they mean by “Retro” is a game that has had enough time to have an impact on the game industry, which The Last of Us obviously has.
So anyways Chess is retro
Retro is one of those terms that doesn‘t really mean anything outside of a marketing context, which I think is the biggest single use for it. Just like indie, except indie is a term that used to have some scrap of meaning before it got co-opted to mean ’anything that‘s not AAA’. Or classic! I think classic might be the best example of both how the term retro doesn‘t really signify anything, and how it doesn’t automatically shift to accommodate newer games that fit the description until some imaginary bar has been cleared.
A tangentially related point to consider in all this: I‘ve seen a few comments here arguing to the effect that video games are still a young medium, but are they? We’ve been saying they‘re a young medium for decades at this point. As a medium, video games are hitting 70; as a popular medium, IE as something other than a diversion for military experts and university students with access to the technology, they turned 50 some time last year. This is more than enough time for genres, creative traditions, culture, everything that informs the medium to have very heavily codified. Personally, I want to interpret this idea as some kind of vestigial impulse on video game culture’s part to prove the medium‘s artistic credibility against other media, even as it’s become financially successful to the point that it's eclipsed artistic credibility as a criterion for media in general - but sadly this is where my thought process terminates.
Classic is a funny term. I consider Pac-Man a classic, but not Devil World, which could be put in my retro category. Classic sets a high standard. Retro reminds me of “retrospective,” which to me just means looking back on the past.
@Sun_Crypt As a pedant, I would agree that “retro” is the wrong word. Shovel Knight is a retro game. Mega Man X is a classic game.
Tom editing these posts has brought me back this discussion. Has anything changed for me in 2025?
The closest medium to video games appears (to me) to be Movies and they describe aesthetics as “retro” but not how actually old something is. Stranger Things and Chopping Mall have retro aesthetics. Therefore Shovel Knight would be a retro game. Movies are more viewed in a “movement” sense similar to art. Silent Movies, Talkies, German expressionism, 90s independent (not sure what they’re officially called). Or in genre ie slasher, musical, comedy, slap stick comedy, etc.
What ruins this is that Turner Classic Movies popularized calling ALL older movies classic which is an indeterminant word. Classic is to movies, what retro is to videogames. Movement and genre much better align with how we already discuss videogames historically, be it 8 bit or STG or mascot platformer or souls-like.
And then you’re allowed to call Shovel Knight an 8-bit-style game which places it with NES games while differentiating it from the actual time period or even the aesthetic though most people use it aesthetically. What gets hard is finding something that is an 8bit style game that embodies the characteristics of the 8bit movement/ period while not being 2d pixel art aesthetic. Could you maybe then call Dark Souls an 8bit style game because it rewards exploration without handing you anything? Maybe not the best example.
someone stop me I’m rambling
Medievalist answer: periodization is goofy and largely about what people in the present moment decides is separate from their own time.
The “Renaissance” is an example of such a decision being made. If you talked to someone in the British Isles who was reasonably aware of history in 1400 about what happened in 900, 900 would have been history but not necessarily a separate age or period. That strict a division in time did not exist. Texts like Le Morte Darthur (printed 1485) would imagine the legendary past in the dressings of the present - Mordred used guns to besiege Guinevere in the Tower of London: “And a short tale for to make, he went and laid a mighty siege about the Tower of London, and made many great assaults thereat, and threw many great engines unto them, and shot great guns.” The past was their past - anachronistic sometimes, yes, but theirs in its anachronism.
With the rise of Italian humanism, thinkers like Dante started to turn away from their immediate past and present and toward the further past to find the roots of where they wanted to go. So Petrarch wanted to focus on the ancient roots of classical Rome. Leonardo Bruni posed that Florence was emerging from a period of shadow (tenebrae) into a new period, a Renaissance, the rebirth of prior virtue. This move required rhetorically distancing themselves from the immediate past. To Renaissance thinkers, Italy in 1500 should look to Italy in 50 for defining who they are, not Italy in 1300. When this reflex of thinking reached England, starting in the 16th century and finally completed by the English Civil War, England too was in a new period. The “medieval” - middle age - was born when the thinkers of the present turned away from the immediate past.
“Retro” is rather like “medieval” in my head. If we had the benefit of hundreds of years of time, it might settle into a rather stable disciplinary category. But we’re kind of like the Renaissance thinkers drawing a line between us and the past that is still close to us. We may not be drawing that line for the sake of going further back, but in what we call retro, we are deciding what we feel isn’t current, what we feel gaming has moved past, sometimes in a nostalgic sense (I miss 2D Sonic) and sometimes in a vindicated one (I do not miss Medi-Evil).
It is a fluid label because consensus has not really developed about what is detached from now and why. In theory, a game released in 2024 could be retro by now, like Dubio. A game from, say, 2000 could be not retro because what’s going on in it still feels current. (I don’t think of Final Fantasy X as retro, for instance.) I’d give more examples, but I have to go meet my car ride now.
The fact that GTAV, Mario Kart 8 and Minecraft are still three of the best selling games in 2025 doesn’t help either.
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Seriously. That’s not even counting games that are funded by micro transactions like Roblox, fortnight and every phone game
Imagine telling kid me who thought that the SNES was pretty tight and wouldn’t dream of going back to the NES, that games older than I was (12-19 years old at the time of this post) were still holding a very significant market share in the current player base.
Also what “player base” and “market share” mean…
Is it an old man opinion that for a game to be retro it has to be a physical copy or physical hardware? Like some day the ps5 will be a retro console but the copy of street fighter 5 on its ssd will not. It’ll will always just be a ps5 game. Nothing in my Steam library is retro to me even when it’s half life 2. A retro game by a lot of measures. Ideas like vintage and retro when asked to games must be held or at some point have been held in physical space by a tangible object for it to be retro to me. I think there’s something about copies of copies that renew its lease in existence each time is is copied. I assume kids today aren’t going to feel that way about the games their playing now
That’s an interesting idea but I’m not so sure I agree… Are Cave Story and Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil not retro games because they’ve always (well, mostly) been digital? They’re still as accessible now as they were 20+ years ago: as a free download directly from the creator at any given moment. But they are undeniably of an older time with different tastes and cultural values. It’s hard to imagine right now, but I bet in another 20+ years, Street Fighter V per your example could feel pretty antiquated given the unpredictable trajectory of fighting games or the medium in general. Saying nothing about the qualities of these games, simply that they’re a product of their time as everything is.
Oh yes, I’m not trying to impose my perspectives onto a definition. These are my simple and singular perspective. I would also count cave story as imitating a retro game as games no longer looked like that in 2005 unless they were imitating the style of retro.
I think the definition here is always going to be a little wobbly-- mostly because retro is probably more of a marketing scheme that an actual descriptor. I’ve started to think of it in the same way as terms like organic or low fat, that started out ostensibly to describe games or ephemera from a certain era but because it was used to sell things got applied to a wide range of things.
I guess what I’m saying is I think it’s the looseness of the term that makes it hard for us all to define it.
Definitely. Retro is an emotional attachment as much as an idea. It’s a word meant to skirt the idea of nostalgia in order to make it seem more real, more definitive
I just realized what my mind was clumsily reaching for. Retro for me is something that looks and feels the way it does because of the constraints on the technology it was made for. Enough time has passed for games to evolve visually, in gameplay and design for them to stick out to people who have continued to play games. This is in no way an original opinion I’m sure
We might be at the end of this phenomena or at least and a great elongation of this cycle. Hardware can no longer improve to the degree and at the speed that it once could. Maybe 60fps will appear retro in 10 years but I doubt games will look all that much better
submitted for consideration:
a self-styled “old-school MOBA,” by the developers of a now-C&D’ed private server for a 2011 build of League of Legends
i’d say service games can’t be retro, but WoW feels ‘retro’ to me (as a non player.)
Is EVE Online retro? It was released in 2003. I’d say no as these games rely on an active community, but then again so does something like Minecraft.
80s(/-style) MUDs are service games with an extreme reliance on active communities, same as EVE (or, god forbid, Roblox, which turns 20 next year). you’d have a better time playing WoW offline by yourself than you would in most MUDs!
