How Old Should a Game Be Before It's Considered "Retro"?

[gogglebob]

Come to think of it: at what point do children "learn" that there will just be an inexorable march of newer and newer videogame systems until the day they die? Like, does the PS3/Wii/360 being dominant for so long feel "right" to a generation, or an aberration?

My grandfather had an Atari that I used frequently, but when the Super Nintendo (ES) was released to retire the Nintendo (ES), I was shocked at the betrayal that the little system with Super Mario Bros 3 was eventually going to be worm food (for worms that love plastic). I never expected a successor to such a mighty piece of hardware. Then again, I was similarly shocked that Pokémon as a franchise did not just stick to the first 151 critters established in Red/Blue for all future spinoffs/sequels (and I was a teenager at the time!), so I may have simply been an inordinately stupid child.

 

[Sarge]

I think the trickiness of using ODE/EverDrive is that, for the PS2/GC/XBOX and onwards, there have been quite a few solutions even in their heyday to play games from a hard drive or the like. I had HDLoader going back in the day with the PS2 (still running, by the way), flash carts were available for the GBA and DS very quickly, the Wii can be hacked to use USB and hard drives, the PSP was amazing with CFW, and so on.

I do appreciate the point on how long the PS3/360 generation was. And it did feel like an outlier - I remember how much people wanted to move away from that generation because of the perception it was holding back PC gaming at the end of it.

Regardless, I appreciate all the points being made, and basically acknowledge that all this generational/retro/classic/old discussion is just really tough to distill down into something that isn't still messy. But it's super fun to talk about, too.

 

[RT-55J]

It's worth noting that the system commonly used for numbering console generations is actually, literally the invention of some Wikipedia editors in the early '00s who had a fuzzy grasp on the history of videogames. The so-called "2nd generation" could be coherently split into two or three gens (centering around the 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision), though that ignores the market reality of them all competing against each other (imagine a system two-generations less powerful dominating the market (what a crazy thought )).

...where was I?

Oh, yeah, to answer the question in the topic title, I just go by ~vibes~. Does it feel old? It's retro. Does it not? Then it's not. (This is highly subjective and probably not very helpful.)

 

[ArugulaZ]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1528610219483226112

This deserves a look. Creem's Vidiot, a video game magazine from late 1982, refers to the ColecoVision as a "third generation, state of the art video game." That's as strong an argument as any that Wikipedia has mis-categorized the system.

 

[Purple]

Well the logic to the generations is quite consistent, see.

"... the second-generation era refers to computer and video games, video game consoles, and handheld video game consoles available from 1976 to 1992."

OK that's... kind of a wide range. Do you mean everything in that span?

No no no, it kinda all just goes by when hardware manufacturers declare they're making a 'next generation' system.

Well OK see, but that's a clone console, of an Atari 5200, so it has to be placed where that went.

"1977, Atari released its CPU-based console called the Video Computer System (VCS), later called the Atari 2600... In 1982, Atari released the Atari 5200 in an attempt to compete with the Intellivision."

LOOK WE ALREADY STARTED USING THESE NUMBERS AND WE CAN'T GO BACK AND MY 2600 WAS WAY BETTER THAN ALL THOSE PONG CLONES AND STUFF SO I'M NEVER GONNA CALL IT 1ST!

I'm really hard pressed to think of any other categorization effort that's quite so arbitrary.

 

[Phantoon]

Wait until they apply it to handhelds. The generation thing is utter poppycock and needs to be banished, forthwith.

 

[karzac]

This thread is confusing me. Aren't there only three games in the Retro series? Retro 2033, Retro Last Light and Retro Exodus.

 

[MetManMas]

The generation thing is utter poppycock and needs to be banished, forthwith.

See also: Genres. Try searching the Adventure tag on a digital games store sometime, see how long it takes you to find something that even remotely resembles what you were hoping to find.

 

[Adrenaline]

The problem with assigning everything genres is we want them to be defined by their edges but they're defined by their centers.

 

[Phantoon]

The problem with assigning everything genres is we want them to be defined by their edges but they're defined by their centers.

Yeah, exactly. And a game doesn't have to be too far from the centre before the label becomes pretty arbitrary

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

That's just been the fundamental problem of the human impulse to arbitrarily categorize things in general. We want black and white definitions, and that almost never works for a world made of greyscale. Getting hung up on labels to begin with is a really silly endeavor.

 

[muteKi]

I'm really hard pressed to think of any other categorization effort that's quite so arbitrary.

May you never get caught up in a year-long argument with terfs about intersex people on twitter

 

[Purple]

May you never get caught up in a year-long argument with terfs about intersex people on twitter

I always strive to keep the whole lot proactively blocked for that, and many other reasons.