Gaming has come a long, long way – but that just makes it all the more important that retro gaming history isn’t left behind.
In Retro Game Of The Week I pull a game from my collection and write about why it’s important or interesting. Or in some cases, badly dated and rubbish.
Before I start, I should point out that I’m not a fan of the “Gamer” label. There’s a whole toxic association to the term – much of it earned through the efforts of some pretty vile individuals – but also a sense of ‘ownership’ of the term that I feel is quite misguided.
Spend each and every day playing an MMO, Call of Duty or EDF 6? Sure, you’re a gamer, but so is anyone who plays Candy Crush Saga just once a week on their phone. If you’re inclined towards arguments about what makes a “real” gamer, you’re one of those toxic individuals… but I do understand why those labels persist.
Retro gamer is another label, and it’s one I’ve used myself as something of a badge of honour over many years, even though basically nobody can agree about what the actual definition of “retro gaming” ought to be. For some there’s a definite cut-off year – which usually relates to their own age – while others will try to frame it around specific console generations.
Still, if you mention the words “retro gaming”, there’s some very specific associations that come to mind. Most people will probably think about CRTs, maybe a single button joystick or the fast loading pattern from tape drives – again, depending on their age.
It’s a similar kind of nostalgic vibe that you get when talking about the “golden age” of Hollywood – well and truly retro films by anyone’s definition – where moody black and white images dominate in the popular consciousness.
I bring up classic Hollywood for comparison because I think it’s an important kind of comparison. While recent times have seen multiple local gaming sites and titles go by the wayside, just about any article you read about gaming in more mainstream press will inevitably make the point that gaming is a bigger money spinner than Hollywood is these days.
Numerically that’s true – and all the more infuriating in terms of the games industry not actually supporting media that can support it – but that financial comparison does ignore the fact that Hollywood has its golden age because it’s been around a long, long time.
Sure, we’re no longer astonished by a film of a train rushing towards us at low frame rates the way that we used to. Still, the essential cinema experience is largely similar to what it was when the first talkies were introduced, back with 1927’s The Jazz Singer:
Yep, that’s a movie that’s nearly 100 years old. Comparatively, while there’s plenty of discussion around Tennis For Two and the like being the “first” video games, the reality of the video game business is that it doesn’t kick off seriously until the 1970s, making it roughly 50 years old at best.
The Hollywood comparison also extends out to the way that most movies that you actually watch – yes, I have friends who will see more esoteric and honestly, more interesting cinema, and yes, I’m looking your way Matthew – because most of the big “cinema” films are the product of just a few studios.
That’s eerily similar to what’s been happening with gaming, especially as the big console makers have gobbled up not just smaller studios but even entire publishing outfits. The pace is picking up, but it’s not exactly a new phenomenon, either.
Bethesda and Activision’s days as publishing powerhouses are behind them, because they’re simply part of the Microsoft monolith these days.
Remember Psygnosis? If you do you’re both somewhat vintage yourself, but as a reminder, it’s been part of of the Sony PlayStation empire for – wait for it – 31 YEARS now.
Just as Hollywood’s history of taking care of every part of its history has been pretty woeful – while The Jazz Singer, or titles like Casablanca are pretty readily available, a lot of film history wasn’t preserved, especially early silent films – and that includes a number of once-prominent Oscar-nominated films, too!
In a similar style, sure, I can play Pac-Man whenever I want to because Namco will never not be releasing Pac-Man in one form or another.
But to stay with Pac-Man, don’t look for Ms Pac-Man to make too many appearances, because the rights to that are, shall we say, complicated.
It gets even worse when you consider games based on existing IP, especially if that’s a long-running IP associated with a movie or TV series.
Yes, we did eventually see a rerelease of N64 classic GoldenEye across Xbox and Switch platforms, but not with play parity. What if you wanted to explore the wider world of James Bond games, some of which were quite good even if many were less than stellar? Tough luck, legally you can’t.
Nintendo of course makes quite a lot of money re-releasing games, but again only where it’s got a very clear licence to it. Super Mario Bros will always be available, but what if I wanted to play me some Game & Watch Snoopy Tennis? That’s never going to see another release.
To make matters worse, my actual physical Snoopy Tennis has a screen leak, and is (as far as I can tell) unrepairable.
I’ve written before about how I’m a huge fan of AKI’s WWF No Mercy, still held up after all these years as the shining beacon of wrestling game perfection.
While AEW had a go with AEW Fight Forever to capture that No Mercy magic, it fell pretty short.
Frankly I’m worried about what happens when my cartridge copy of No Mercy finally conks out, because there’s absolutely zero chance of WWE re-releasing it, even if it did riff on its iconic intro for NXT No Mercy last year:
Retro gaming has seen something of an explosion in pricing in recent years, mostly buoyed along by investor types hoping to score the next million dollar Mario cartridge while encasing them in hermetically sealed plastic tombs.
That might preserve the plastic, though those gamers aren’t interested in gaming in any way at all, but it leaves the games within inside simple plastic tombs, which I truly hate.
What about emulators?
There is a simple solution, though it’s not one that’s at all legal in Australia, and that’s emulation.
Emulation gives you access to a wide history of gaming, though companies – Nintendo’s notable here – have been working pretty heavily to try to limit access to emulated ROM files for many years now.
I won’t be a hypocrite here; I’ve dabbled in emulation, but a lot of the time it leaves me wanting. Not so much wanting for something to play; for a very moderate sum you can buy any of a number of cheap emulation boxes that ship with literally thousands of games – but the experience is not the same.
You’re typically playing with sub-optimal controllers, on screens where the closest you can get to visual fidelity is a CRT filter that’s not quite right but there’s a bigger problem.
Remember when you were a kid and maybe only had a handful of games to play? You almost certainly cherished those games, because they were all you had. Yes, not everything was a gem, and not everything stands up over time, but you played those games hard, because your selection list was small.
I played a lot of this as a youngster. Was it great then?
No, not really, but I had fun, and persevered with it.
Sit anyone in front of a list of a thousand games, and they will quickly get overwhelmed, either doomscrolling rather than playing, or choosing an “old classic” that’s probably already available anyway. Even if you do try something new, at the first point of frustration, you’ll probably quit. After all, there’s hundreds of others to pick from.
This robs games of their vitality, because we want games to be challenging, and a good part of the fun is getting good at them. Sure, some older games were just hard for the sake of it, and some games are badly balanced – but plenty are not, even though they languish unplayed.
That paradox of having too much choice isn’t unique to gaming – how many times have you scrolled through Netflix “looking for something to watch” but choosing nothing – and it’s not new to point out why it exists, either.
Emulation does do a job of games preservation, of course, but it’s only part of the retro feast. There’s definitely something to using original hardware and dedicating yourself to a curated selection of games, rather than trying to tackle gaming all in, all at once.
Retro Gaming can teach you about… gaming
Back when gaming was in its infancy, there was a lot of concept copying going on. Every computer platform had its own “version” of Space Invaders or Pac-Man, some better than others, that kind of thing.
At the same time, there was a lot of creativity at play, because the medium of interactive gaming was entirely new, and the real barriers were more technological than anything else. Getting a few pixels to line up to appear to be a spaceship was different than making them into a duck, and what you did with that duck could make for an entirely different kind of game… or indeed a new genre entirely.
Plus ça change in one sense, because the modern gaming scene is rife with suspiciously-similar game concepts. Do we really need another military FPS?
Maybe not, but then plenty of developers would like the kind of revenue that a Call of Duty brings in, so it’s understandable. At the same time, and especially in independent games development, you do see games with some genuine creativity in play, and it’s even possible to innovate in military shooters, too.
After all, what is Space Invaders if not a military shooter? From Space Invaders there’s a pretty direct line you can draw to games like Galaga, or Raiden, or Parodius, each of which applies a layer of creativity on existing concepts.
To borrow a Pablo Picasso quote “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.
Appreciating and experiencing retro gaming can give you an appreciation of how a genre evolves, whether you’re a player or a games developer.
This isn’t intended just as some dry academic exercise, either; if you’re playing an older and maybe less forgiving retro title you’re honing skills that can be used with more modern fare. If you’re developing games, appreciating creative avenues could unlock an idea for a twist on a genre, or bringing back a feature that might have been beyond the technology of decades past into a new instant classic title.
It is a case of taking the good with the bad, because there’s no doubt that some retro titles were either poor to start with, or have concepts (or technology limitations) that mean that they’ve aged poorly. I’m certainly not arguing that all retro games are or were great, but, like film, there can be some joy in playing a bad game – that’s pretty much the entire AVGN schtick for a start – as well as uncovering whether a title is really as bad as everyone says.
Are there aspects of retro gaming that annoy me?
For sure.
There are games I’ll never own because I collect to play, and the value in spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a single cartridge will never be there; the best I can hope for is a retro rerelease on modern systems or for someone like Evercade to pick up the slack. No, you’re not going to get a ridiculously cheap copy out of Japan any more, people!
Likewise, the overwhelming American focus of the retro gaming scene annoys me; 80s gaming was far more than just the NES, and the video game crash of the early 80s wasn’t anywhere near the doom and gloom it’s painted to be. Gaming is and was a global phenomenon, and a lot of great work was done on 8 and 16 bit computing platforms.
But still, I think that well beyond just the warm nostalgic feeling of going back to that game you played when your age was in the single digits, there’s something in retro gaming for every single gamer.
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[kofi]
About the Author
But one of the downfalls of retro gaming is when you fire up an old favourite and realise that it’s graphics just don’t compare to today’s games.
I’ve done this with Sega games and been left thinking “did the graphics really look this shabby”?
Retro gaming sounds good in theory, then reality bites.
This can happen for sure — but not always and for every game. I do think it’s important to judge games graphics within in their era — simply saying “Space Invaders doesn’t look as good as Halo” isn’t terribly useful, after all, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t fun to be had there.