In my life, I’ve had the privilege to grow up knowing what the world looked like before smartphones while also not having to deal with playing games on stuff like the Atari. My first console was a PlayStation 2 and my first handheld was a GameBoy Color. Such was the life of a kid born in the mid-’90s. As was such, I’ve had the opportunity to grow up in the phase between generations of gaming able to experience both sides at once. We have the start of video games with the Atari and arcades leading to the true rise of consoles, handheld, and PC gaming, after which we arrive at the current era, what I like to call the mobile invasion. That's not what this is about however, I want to talk about retro games.
Generally, a retro game is considered something that is old and can only be played on a system that is obsolete or discontinued. Some say that the difference between retro and modern starts with the leap from 2D pixel art to 3D. Others say it has to be before a certain year or on a certain system. I would like to argue that ‘retro’ is always changing as the years go by.
For people in the ‘90s and the 2000s, retro was just the games that they had grown up with since gaming hadn’t been around that long or been incredibly prevalent. But now we’re in the ‘20s, a decade into the good years of gaming after it has really taken off. So has retro changed? I think so, but others may not.
For me, and this is definitely a hot take, Super Mario 64 is a retro game. It came out the year before I was born, and at this point, I’m 26 years old. But for many, this would not qualify as retro. For them, retro is something like Donkey Kong or Pong. So this brings up my point, is retro set in stone, or is it mutable changing as we age? One day, in 2050, will we see our kids playing this ‘weird retro game’ they found called Among Us? In that case, what will we call games from different time periods? Is retro just any older game or is it a game from a specific time period? Fifty years from now, will games from this era have a specific name or will they be retro too?
To leave off, I offer this as a middle ground for those staunch retro enthusiasts among us. Everything pre 3D is retro, then everything up to the Nintendo DS is Classic, then up to the PlayStation 4 is Recent, leaving us with Modern in the present. In the end, what does retro mean to you now, and what will it mean to you in the future? I, for one, am curious to know.
