I keep wondering to myself “What is classified as Retro when it comes to gaming?”, its a term we use quite a bit but seem to have a hard time trying to define it. The term “Retro” tends to apply to things that began or were popular about 15-20 years ago, so this begs the question… “what about things from 30 years ago or longer?”.
I tend to approach this subject the same way I see music, we have Classic, golden oldies, modern, new age and so on… so does this practice apply to video games too?
When I think of “Retro games” I tend to go back to the late seventies / early eighties when we had Video game Arcades, Atari VCS, Intellivision and ColecoVision, it is weird to think that any system made after them should be considered “Retro” today. The Nintendo was first released in Japan in 1983 (called the Famicom) and made its way to the North American market by 1984, at the time we were in the middle of the video game crash… people in general were just not investing in video games as much. So basically Nintendo really made its mark from about 1985 as the other competitors faded away to obscurity, there were a few attempts to resurrect the brands with newer systems (Intellivision 3, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar) but all attempts failed and Nintendo continued to dominate the scene with its only rival SEGA.
I myself became a Nintendo fan and chose to get rid of my older systems to make way for the new (a big mistake), the times were changing and as with all teens we wanted the bigger, better and newer. The modern systems promised better graphics, better gameplay and superior sound, we were given new classics such as Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. This is when we started looking at previous systems as “Retro” and old, many of the systems and games were either exiled to our parents basement, sold off in garage sales or donated. Players like me who still had a small passion for those systems would scoop them up at thrift stores for very cheap, but that wasn’t enough to bring these games back to the mainstream.
So today we now have a few different generations of game systems… the systems that are “pre-nintendo” such as (Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision), then we have “Nintendo era” (Nintendo NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, SEGA Master System, SEGA Genisis) and now have PlayStation and X-box. I know am leaving out many other systems… but these are just a few popular examples to illustrate my point, and so what do we now call “Retro”? … Do you base it on your own age and experience?… do we designate a time frame? … could the first PlayStation system now classify as “Retro“? … and if so what do we call Atari, or Nintendo?
Obviously these are just words and phrases and we can technically call anything made before the year 2000 “Retro”, but to gamers like myself I still have a hard time excepting the notion that the Nintendo NES is considered a retro system. Perhaps there is a set of words that can be assigned to the various generations of video game systems (much like in music), but then again… would it really matter in the end? Older video games have made a come back within that last 10 years and we most likely have the Internet or YouTube to thank for that, For people like me the games never left and regardless of dates and time I will always have a hard time ever considering Nintendo and beyond as “Retro“.
Brian Pudden