this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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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).
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