Retro Gaming
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The games you get today —M.J Hibbett, Hey Hey 16K
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An interest in playing older video games. Retro games have had an upswing in interest in the last 10 years as the average gamer gets older, and computers have become sufficiently powerful to emulate earlier systems at full speed.
Retro gaming generally plays out in a 2-D game space, often offering gameplay with no determined conclusion other than loss of all lives, often using a simple numerical score as its game goal. Controls are likely to be simple and non-analog with only one or two fire buttons. For this reason retro gaming has recently become more prominent on mobile phones where these attributes are advantageous to the platform, a platform which encourages simple gaming experiences that are quick to learn, use simple controls and are easy to pick up and put down.
Questions in Retro Gaming
What is Retro
The first perennial question for retro gaming is, "What counts as retro?". Diehard older retro gamers may insist that only pre-crash games and systems count, while more liberal definitions have a moving point of retro as any system at least 10 years old.[1] Most people seem to pin their preferred retro gaming system to "whatever I was playing when I was 12". For some, Retraux Gaming also counts.
Hardware Vs. Emulators
The second perennial question for retro gamers is "real hardware versus emulators", generally a question of authentic look and feel opposed to the convenience of having 10,000 games for a dozen systems available at your fingertips. Earlier systems relied on effects caused by the fuzziness inherent in their output to allow the illusion of more colours on screen and smoother transitions between colours than was strictly possible for the hardware, meaning that an emulator may not show a retro video game as the makers intended. Some very old systems are literally impossible to emulate, as they used based on analog systems.
One can also Take a Third Option in a number of ways:
- By using an FPGA to mimic original hardware. Since the FPGA itself is a special chip, this often requires its own system to function, making it more expensive than emulation or potentially original hardware. Additionally there still exists the possibility for a developer to get something wrong and not perfectly mimic original hardware. That said, a well executed FPGA project or console can effectively be indistinguishable from the real deal, often while adding additional features.
- Some companies are in the business of either refurbishing old hardware, or making compatible clones. On the low end, this consists of cheap famiclone consoles, but on the high end can consist of beautiful art consoles that source original chips with custom PCBs, allowing more and higher quality output than original consoles.
- Some retro games have their source available, and can be compiled or ported to newer platforms.
Retro Gaming in Media
It is retro gaming that often supplies the sound effects in television and movies to denote that video games are being played, regardless of the fact that Halo does not sound remotely like Galaga or Pac-Man.
Retro Gaming Online
Home of the Underdogs is a 'digital museum' of underappreciated games, the vast majority of which are fifteen to twenty years old. (It's previous incarnation at https://web.archive.org/web/20180330140406/http://www.underdogs.net/info became defunct a few years ago due to an apparent lack of funding.)
The Retronauts podcast at 1up.com is dedicated to discussion of retro gaming.
- ↑ If a generation lasts particularly long, this can result in scenarios where a last-gen console still seeing new commercial releases is considered retro such as the PlayStation 2 in 2011, The Wii in 2016, or the Xbox One in 2023.