Asking THAT question

My love of games was built on a foundation of those I’d grown up playing, and I never really understood the way games were – at least then – considered disposable

What’s the point at which a game, or console, becomes retro? Right now, the PS4 and Xbox One are in their twilight years, a whole new generation of gaming hardware is ready to step out of the wings and carry entire brands on their shoulders.

The PS4 and Xbox One will begin the steady shuffle towards the doors of the retirement home, where they’ll live out the remainder of their days, swapping stories with the Xbox 360, original Playstation and 3DO, between games of dominos and art therapy, while the Virtual Boy runs naked up and down the halls, whooping and chattering, and hammering on doors.

Back in the Nineties, when Digitiser was a thing, I think we were among the first – if not the first – gaming publications to embrace the idea of retro, with a weekly retrospective entitled Old Game: Here. My love of games was built on a foundation of those I’d grown up playing, and I never really understood the way games were – at least then – considered disposable. Great art should last forever, not get tossed aside. Jimi Hendrix albums aren’t called ‘retro music’; they’re considered eternal. Star Wars is a perennial film, not a ‘retro movie’.

But perhaps because of the way technology evolves with gaming hardware, there’s a different attitude towards games compared to other forms of entertainment. It didn’t even cross my mind that we were doing something at odds to the rest of the relentlessly forward-looking gaming media. Nevertheless… the pace of progress was breakneck compared to today.

At the time I started Digitiser I was

21. Many of the games we covered on Old Game: Here were less than ten years old, yet to my young brain they felt ancient. I mean, compare a game from 1983 – let’s say… Manic Miner – to one released in 1993 – Doom – and they’re night and day. Very different games, as a result of the technology they were running on.

Now, 2010 feels like yesterday, yet Red Dead Redemption, Fallout: New Vegas, Call Of Duty: Black Ops, and Super Meat Boy are all 2010 games, but I could’ve sworn they were five years old at most. So… are they retro now, even though none of them really look vastly different to the games we’re playing in 2020?

Again, where’s the cut-off? When do we classify a game as retro? At the risk of undermining this very magazine’s entire reason for existing, should we be thinking about gaming differently, as the leaps between generations of hardware becomes ever more minimal?

I’ve seen the videos of the upcoming PS5 games. Despite all the hype about ray tracing – whatever that is – and instant load times (er, yeah, we had those back in 1979, thanks), I’ve seen little evidence that the forthcoming generation is going to offer brand-new types of games.

Yet here we are; by the end of this year, Red Dead Redemption II, The Last of Us Part II, No Man’s Sky… will all be part of a previous generation. They’ll be retro, according to the definition we’ve used to date.