To me retro is not just about age but also how those particular games are historically situated within the development of gaming. Retro implies pre-3d (console) gaming, so N64/PS1 onwards isn’t retro no matter how old those consoles are relative to the present. Retro itself can be broadly divided between pre-1983 crash (Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Breakout, Centipede) and post-1983 crash (Contra, Streets of Rage, Final Fantasy 1, Wolfenstein 3D). The early retro games people remember are all arcade games while the late retro games are where you start seeing franchises like Mario and Zelda.
Due to how janky early 3d is, the N64/PS1 generation is at this awkward period of time where it’s not really retro anymore but is not modern either. I mostly see it as a transitional period between late retro gaming (SNES) and early modern gaming (Gamecube, PS2).
I guess I see the N64 situated in a time when big changes were happening in gaming. Besides the obvious advent of 3d, this was around the time when gaming stopped becoming arcade-dominant and transitioned towards being console-dominant, which has huge implications (arcades existed in third places while consoles were privately owned). It’s for these two reasons that I wouldn’t call N64 retro (or lump N64 in a different historic period than the NES/SNES if we’re just using “retro” to mean “old”).
I think there’s a degree of millennial revisionism where the spotlight is shown on retro/whatever-you-want-to-call-that-particular-period-of-gaming console games when they weren’t even the dominant form of gaming during that time period. You’re not going to see video essays of The Simpsons arcade game or Alien vs Predator or Space Harrier anytime soon even though those were massively popular arcade games way back in the day. You can’t really compare arcade cabinet sales vs console game sales because obviously people weren’t individually buying cabinets to put in their garages but buying cabinets to put in a mall or a laundromat or a pizza place.
The dominant form of gaming was arcades. You can see this very clearly whenever movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s reference gaming. It’s almost always some kind of arcade game. The Simpsons’ first reference of a console game (Bonestorm) was a Season 7 episode that aired 9 months before the N64 dropped in NA and even that reference was largely a Mortal Kombat reference (Liu Kang knockoff getting owned by a tank, Goro mirror match in a bridge stage that every arcade Mortal Kombat game had). Everything else before that were parodies of arcade games. You have something like Terminator 2 where you saw John Connor briefly playing Afterburner 2 at a mall while being stalked by the T-1000.
I mean it was a turn of an era for sure. But really there have been other eras since in the nearly 30 years since the N64. Gaming is very little like it was then. I’d say the 360/PS3/Wii era was the transition point into the modern console era. Digital distribution, online gaming (which yes existed before but wasn’t really ubiquitous until this gen), and the advent of media center/console hybrids. All the major changes since then are really just iteration.
Look at media references to gaming in more recent times. Usually it’s someone playing an online game. Oftentimes with a headset throwing childish insults to a 12 year old on the other side.
I don’t think we differ that much. I mostly consider 360/PS3/Wii to be modern gaming. It’s not even early modern gaming. It’s just modern gaming to me. It’s like comparing 19th century English vs 21st century English. 19th century English isn’t even Shakespearean English, which is considered early modern English by linguists. 19th century English is English with various archaisms that no one uses in 2024, but it’s still essentially just modern English.
There is a way bigger difference between the nes and n64 than between the ps3 and ps5, hell even between the ps2 and ps5. Things moved really fast in the 90s as far as games and the technology behind them goes. A console generation is longer and also less of a defining era of gaming than it used to be because at this point putting more power into a system is yielding dismissing returns, you can only make a polygon so small until it doesn’t matter anymore or takes way more time and money than it’s worth. Gameplay has gotten stagnant as hell for AAA games over the last 15 years or so as well and at the moment, indie games are starting to fall down that trend hole too. The world can only take so many survival crafting games, rougelites and metroidvanias
That’s all true but I still think the N64 is firmly “vintage” for many, many years now. Eras in home gaming certainly last longer, but we’re pretty clearly in the era started by the 360/PS3/Wii era. Older than the PS2/Xbox/GC era I’d be comfortable calling vintage/retro. Even those are starting to become “retro”
N64 can count as retro, it does need to stretch with time to some extent. None of these terms are thar meaningful, I’ll usually go with Odyssey era, Atari era, whatever bit era until 3D. The n64 was a bit of a late comer that way but Early 3d is good enough for a term. The ps2/xbox/gc times is where it gets weird, I’d say that’s separate from early 3d and maybe bleeds into half way through the next console generation. The ps3/360 are for sure the first modern consoles but it took a bit for software to modernize, throw the wii being in there is a moderate technical improvement to the previous Gen but by far the biggest seller, I’d say around 2010 ish could be called the modern era, which I’d say is still going.
Yeah that’s the millennial perspective on retro gaming that held sway during the 2010s. Its time has passed, I’m sad to say. The 2010s were to the 80s/90s split as the 2020s are to the 90s/2000s split. The retro aesthetic of a lot of games now draws from the early 3D era, like SIGNALIS.
I completely missed out on the PS1 so the rise of all these faux-retro games with polygon jitter is honestly pretty cool. Helps that we’ve learned how to make games feel better than the first time they looked like this.
Meanwhile I, as someone who actually did play on PS1 as a kid, always try to get rid of polygon warping, dithering, etc while also cranking up the resolution when emulating PS1 games. Like the things that I liked about old games weren’t that they ran at 20 fps and were rendered at a postage stamp-sized resolution
I guess my point is that regardless of what particular label someone uses, the development of gaming can be split into various periods just like how the history of painting can be split into various periods. It’s just weird to have a floating label that basically means “old.” When I was a kid, “old games” were essentially just pre-1983 crash games while “modern games” were post-1983 crash games because gaming was only two decades old. But now, gaming is a little over half a century old at this point.
In the end, I think “retro” is used in gaming in the same way “classic” is used in film and movie. Casablanca and The Godfather are both classic films even though they have nothing in common outside of being old Hollywood films.
Classic seems to be a good word to use when trying to communicate considered good and worth talking about X years later where the line is arbitrary but X is probably something like 10 or 20 years. It’ll include items that truly stand the test of time and others that are incomprehensible/boring if you weren’t in it’s historical context to “get it”.
To me retro is not just about age but also how those particular games are historically situated within the development of gaming. Retro implies pre-3d (console) gaming, so N64/PS1 onwards isn’t retro no matter how old those consoles are relative to the present. Retro itself can be broadly divided between pre-1983 crash (Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Breakout, Centipede) and post-1983 crash (Contra, Streets of Rage, Final Fantasy 1, Wolfenstein 3D). The early retro games people remember are all arcade games while the late retro games are where you start seeing franchises like Mario and Zelda.
Due to how janky early 3d is, the N64/PS1 generation is at this awkward period of time where it’s not really retro anymore but is not modern either. I mostly see it as a transitional period between late retro gaming (SNES) and early modern gaming (Gamecube, PS2).
I think any societal consensus puts N64 firmly, like unquestionably in retro status.
The N64 is older to us than the Atari 2600 was when the N64 came out. By almost a decade.
I guess I see the N64 situated in a time when big changes were happening in gaming. Besides the obvious advent of 3d, this was around the time when gaming stopped becoming arcade-dominant and transitioned towards being console-dominant, which has huge implications (arcades existed in third places while consoles were privately owned). It’s for these two reasons that I wouldn’t call N64 retro (or lump N64 in a different historic period than the NES/SNES if we’re just using “retro” to mean “old”).
I think there’s a degree of millennial revisionism where the spotlight is shown on retro/whatever-you-want-to-call-that-particular-period-of-gaming console games when they weren’t even the dominant form of gaming during that time period. You’re not going to see video essays of The Simpsons arcade game or Alien vs Predator or Space Harrier anytime soon even though those were massively popular arcade games way back in the day. You can’t really compare arcade cabinet sales vs console game sales because obviously people weren’t individually buying cabinets to put in their garages but buying cabinets to put in a mall or a laundromat or a pizza place.
The dominant form of gaming was arcades. You can see this very clearly whenever movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s reference gaming. It’s almost always some kind of arcade game. The Simpsons’ first reference of a console game (Bonestorm) was a Season 7 episode that aired 9 months before the N64 dropped in NA and even that reference was largely a Mortal Kombat reference (Liu Kang knockoff getting owned by a tank, Goro mirror match in a bridge stage that every arcade Mortal Kombat game had). Everything else before that were parodies of arcade games. You have something like Terminator 2 where you saw John Connor briefly playing Afterburner 2 at a mall while being stalked by the T-1000.
I mean it was a turn of an era for sure. But really there have been other eras since in the nearly 30 years since the N64. Gaming is very little like it was then. I’d say the 360/PS3/Wii era was the transition point into the modern console era. Digital distribution, online gaming (which yes existed before but wasn’t really ubiquitous until this gen), and the advent of media center/console hybrids. All the major changes since then are really just iteration.
Look at media references to gaming in more recent times. Usually it’s someone playing an online game. Oftentimes with a headset throwing childish insults to a 12 year old on the other side.
I don’t think we differ that much. I mostly consider 360/PS3/Wii to be modern gaming. It’s not even early modern gaming. It’s just modern gaming to me. It’s like comparing 19th century English vs 21st century English. 19th century English isn’t even Shakespearean English, which is considered early modern English by linguists. 19th century English is English with various archaisms that no one uses in 2024, but it’s still essentially just modern English.
There is a way bigger difference between the nes and n64 than between the ps3 and ps5, hell even between the ps2 and ps5. Things moved really fast in the 90s as far as games and the technology behind them goes. A console generation is longer and also less of a defining era of gaming than it used to be because at this point putting more power into a system is yielding dismissing returns, you can only make a polygon so small until it doesn’t matter anymore or takes way more time and money than it’s worth. Gameplay has gotten stagnant as hell for AAA games over the last 15 years or so as well and at the moment, indie games are starting to fall down that trend hole too. The world can only take so many survival crafting games, rougelites and metroidvanias
That’s all true but I still think the N64 is firmly “vintage” for many, many years now. Eras in home gaming certainly last longer, but we’re pretty clearly in the era started by the 360/PS3/Wii era. Older than the PS2/Xbox/GC era I’d be comfortable calling vintage/retro. Even those are starting to become “retro”
N64 can count as retro, it does need to stretch with time to some extent. None of these terms are thar meaningful, I’ll usually go with Odyssey era, Atari era, whatever bit era until 3D. The n64 was a bit of a late comer that way but Early 3d is good enough for a term. The ps2/xbox/gc times is where it gets weird, I’d say that’s separate from early 3d and maybe bleeds into half way through the next console generation. The ps3/360 are for sure the first modern consoles but it took a bit for software to modernize, throw the wii being in there is a moderate technical improvement to the previous Gen but by far the biggest seller, I’d say around 2010 ish could be called the modern era, which I’d say is still going.
Yeah that’s the millennial perspective on retro gaming that held sway during the 2010s. Its time has passed, I’m sad to say. The 2010s were to the 80s/90s split as the 2020s are to the 90s/2000s split. The retro aesthetic of a lot of games now draws from the early 3D era, like SIGNALIS.
I completely missed out on the PS1 so the rise of all these faux-retro games with polygon jitter is honestly pretty cool. Helps that we’ve learned how to make games feel better than the first time they looked like this.
The time of millennials has passed.
Now is the time for the zillenials! (for at least a few years before we get leaped over lol)
Meanwhile I, as someone who actually did play on PS1 as a kid, always try to get rid of polygon warping, dithering, etc while also cranking up the resolution when emulating PS1 games. Like the things that I liked about old games weren’t that they ran at 20 fps and were rendered at a postage stamp-sized resolution
I guess my point is that regardless of what particular label someone uses, the development of gaming can be split into various periods just like how the history of painting can be split into various periods. It’s just weird to have a floating label that basically means “old.” When I was a kid, “old games” were essentially just pre-1983 crash games while “modern games” were post-1983 crash games because gaming was only two decades old. But now, gaming is a little over half a century old at this point.
In the end, I think “retro” is used in gaming in the same way “classic” is used in film and movie. Casablanca and The Godfather are both classic films even though they have nothing in common outside of being old Hollywood films.
Classic seems to be a good word to use when trying to communicate considered good and worth talking about X years later where the line is arbitrary but X is probably something like 10 or 20 years. It’ll include items that truly stand the test of time and others that are incomprehensible/boring if you weren’t in it’s historical context to “get it”.