Keeping retro alive

There was a time, many years ago, when I was a young games journalist with the dampest of behind-the-ears spots, where I thought old games would stay in the past.

Retro gaming wasn’t a thing back in the early Nineties when I first started peddling my words for coins. Perhaps, you could argue, the games we now consider retro were too fresh in the recent past to be viewed with any degree of nostalgia. We were faintly embarrassed by the likes of Jack The Nipper

when we had Resident Evil.

I actually, at that point, believed that gaming was an ever forwards-moving medium – that games I’d played as a kid were so primitive, so crude-looking, that they wouldn’t be remembered in the same way as, for example, classic albums. I remember thinking that was a bit sad, but also fair considering that I viewed early games as more like cavemen banging on a mammoth ribcage with a rock, rather than Electric Ladyland.

I mean, there were no way in 1994, say, to play a ZX Spectrum game on any of the current systems anyway. There wasn’t, at that point, any obvious way to preserve old games digitally. More significantly, it didn’t seem like anybody wanted to, so dazzled were we by new consoles, CD-ROM, and the lure of 3D gaming. I thought the past would remain buried, and deservedly so, for it was rubbish.

And then, at some point, the excitement that came with the dawn of the polygon age sort of wore off. It became the norm, rather than the big new thing, and it was around then that I started to grow wistful for the games of my youth. It might have been that more time had passed. It may have been that I grew up somewhat. Or maybe it was just the way the industry went – that we became aware that just because a game was on a CD-ROM, it didn’t automatically equate to it being any good.

Either way, if it had been left up to Young Me – and others of my ilk – we’d have lost everything that came before, say, 1989. I’d have let it go, in my ignorance, those games living on only in memory.

Thank heck, then, for those with enough obsessive foresight to keep those early generations alive by preserving them in digital aspic. Thanks to them,

I’m still playing the likes of Pac-man, Dragon’s Lair, Underwurlde, and Skool Daze decades on – the entire history of gaming at my fingertips, and we can see, now, that all of it had artistic and creative merit. Heck, some of it is just pretty damn good in its own right.

There’s a lesson to be learned here. The past isn’t just another country; it’s in the fabric of the here and now. Without all that came before, we wouldn’t have what we’ve got today, for better or worse. Dismissing something because it’s old is for the young. Those of us with the benefit of wisdom know better.

Okay, boomers?

Perhaps, you could argue, the games we now consider retro were too fresh in the recent past to be viewed with any nostalgia