Retro Gaming

"The games you get today

Well, they might be very flash

But they'll never beat the thrill

of getting through Jetpac!"

- M.J Hibbett, Hey Hey 16K

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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 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.