“Retro-gaming” – it’s a sound that conjures specific imagery; a trochaic dimeter that invokes visible pixels. Pac-Man cornered by ghosts, Mario sinking into a tunnel, Sonic spewing his rings, Ryu in his Shotokan-style karate stance. To niche audiences it goes a little deeper: the bedroom coders of the 1980s had a closer relationship with this software than most. But, gamer or not, and whatever your age, it’s likely that you’ve seen the enduring appeal. Films like Wreck-It Ralph and Pixels pay homage to the quintessential retro-games, and the visual style of the immensely popular Minecraft is a nod to the 8 and 16-bit graphics of the past. It’s mainly nostalgia; the comfort of what we once knew, mixed with the new, slightly hipster, obsession with vintage technology.
A question, then: when does a console – or a generation of consoles – become retro? I was recently at a gathering with folks my age – mid to late-twenties – and the subject of video games arose. The group split into two camps. The first, immediately making themselves known, were completely up to date with contemporary gaming – they were mostly PC gamers who could have spent the rest of the night discussing upcoming releases. The second, a bit quieter, said they didn’t really carry on after the Playstation 2 – some of which admitted that they still, on occasion, booted up the black box.
Are they retro-gamers? Most people, myself included, would instinctively jump to no – but why? Is it because the last Playstation 2 game (Pro Evolution Soccer 2014) was released but three years ago? Or is it the iconic pixelated images, mentioned above, that we generally associate with the term “retro-gaming”? To use a different logic; Sony’s second console was released seventeen years ago – at this time, games released seventeen years prior were certainly considered retro.
Flicking through the recent Retro-Gamer annual, I couldn’t find a feature about a console later than the Nintendo 64. They talked about remakes and re-releases of 8 to16-bit classics, sure, but evidently anything past the mid-90s wasn’t worth celebrating. Going back to that conversation at the party; when the Playstation 2 was mentioned, there wasn’t a person in the room whose face wasn’t full of enthusiasm. The consensus seemed to be unanimous: generations 5 and 6, the Playstations one and two in particular, was our “golden age” – a childhood and adolescence too late for the arcades and too early for the online revolution. We were born into realms of early three-dimensional polygonal graphics, CDs and memory cards.
Will there ever be a time when Solid Snake, Cloud Strife and Chris Redfield can wear the prestigious “retro” badge worn by Pac-Man, Mario and Ryu? Or will there be a new label for this era?
Neo-Retro Reviews 