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What is considered retro?
I feel like this might be a personal definition in some cases.
I've got a 3ds that's been broken for ages, hoping to get it to a repair shop this week so I can finally play a bunch of my old 3ds games. To me this feels retro because the system is 12 years old already.
At the same time it was jarring to go to the retro game shop a few weeks ago and see a bunch of wii u games and systems, even though that's 11 years old now.
2023-06-21 ¡ 11 months ago ¡ đ SamuraiCrow
It's weird because I feel like my own personal definition is really foggy.
I think my rule of thumb is ~20 years old. But I feel like handhelds go retro more quickly than PCs and consoles because I would agree that the 3ds is retro by now.
Half-Life 2 is ~19 years old now (sigh...) but I wouldn't call it retro. Maybe it's a function of how big the delta is to the state of the art â some games are ahead of their time.
Games from the 90s are undoubtedly retro now, I would say, so maybe 25+ years?
I would define something as "retro" if a big part of its novelty is its age, or if it evokes strong feelings of nostalgia for the past. Of course this definition will lead people to define different things as retro: for me the Wii U is more retro than the GameCube, because I've never stopped playing GameCube games, but I abandoned the Wii U pretty quickly.
The systems that appear in the Vimm's Lair Vault are a decent starting point. Though I'm not sure whether I consider PS3 and Wii retro or not.
For me it's actual arcade games and games and systems of that period ending in maybe 1990. I suppose if you grow up with a PS4, it will be retro for you in a couple of years.
12 years is nothing - my current computer (a notebook) is at least that old, and I would not call an I7 at 2.5GHz+ with a second UWQHD display a 'retro' machine. Apple ][ - another story.
i would say anything that is not currently marketed, which would make a 3ds retro
I would argue that 'retro' is anything that old enough for an adult to have had as a child and be fairly nostalgic about now, which is approximately 20 years or so. You can be nostalgic for 10 year old games sure but I wouldn't count anything from the ps3/xbox360 as 'retro', however ps2/gamecube/og xbox most certainly could be considered retro at this point. Anything past those is 100% retro.
The 'aesthetics' of retro that modern games try to emulate usually go for simpler pixely graphics and focus more on fun gameplay than advanced graphics and storytelling. At least this has been my experience with the current boomer shooter resurgance like dusk, amid evil, cultic and such. There are some games that aren't trying to be 'retro' that are still pixely so this isn't a bulletproof definition but a general rule I found
I find it helpful to look at retro vs modern from a genre standing instead of the medium as a whole.
Halo (FPS): Introduced regenerating shields and two weapon inventory. The genre moved away from tons of weapons and health pickups.
Oblivion (RPG): First of the genre that felt like a game instead of a living world simulation. Points of interest were spread out evenly, the monsters leveled with you, fast travel everywhere directly after the tutorial, etc.
I have a lot more to discuss on this. If you want my general rule of thumb though it's "does it require the Internet to play?".
@skyjake Yeah I hesitated a bit to say 20 years specifically because of Half Life 2 actually. Probably because it's aged so well. I doubt it will feel retro even by the time it's 25 years old.
I think Wolfenstein or maybe Doom marks _a_ line between retro and modern. All games are pretty much the same after that point. Different weapons and textures but all the same conceptually - walk/drive around and find/kill things around you... Tedious/gave up gaming. In 2000 or so.
i think retro is something made today, in the style of yesterday.
so your 3ds, i would call it vintage.
but hey, why do we have retrocomputing then? i guess because the computing is made today, like it was yesterday. but the computer which was made yesterday is vintage, not retro. (:
i'm sorry you think that way stack, it's a shame if you were an avid gamer before then, because you've really missed out on a lot of innovative and creative, and non-violent games in the past 23 years
@sugar: you are probably right. I suppose I walked by my kids playing this or that, and it always seemed just so awfully tedious! Drive across town and deliver crap hitting prostitutes along the way, or shoot your way across town, or even the newer fly across an infinite world with an elf-like friend games. I don't know, I enjoy writing code more than dicking around in a 3-d space.
I'm not a fan of those kinds of games either but that is a very small (but overly visible unfortunately) slice of game genre. There is so much more interesting and unique game experiences out there.
@kelbot @sugar and others: would you give some examples of modern games that do not involve tediously completing 'missions' by moving from place to place collecting things, and usually killing a bunch of other things, in a rendered 3-d environment? Not trying to start a fight -- I am genuinly interested.
I agree about the 3D stuff. There's nothing like a scrolling game to break up the mess that is 3D gaming.
That said, some games did make the transition a little more gracefully than others. Warzone2100 added hightmaps to the RTS genre so going from Dune2 on my Amiga to Warzone was actually a welcome update since terrain features affect tactics so much. I still play Warzone2100 on my Linux box today!
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