Retro Gaming isn’t Mario and Sonic anymore – It’s Your PS3
I am a 40-year-old video gamer who has seen a lot of consoles arrive and few go. Perhaps a collector? My wife would call me a hoarder. I have a lot of old gaming systems, from the 1980s to the ’90s and the ’00s, in my home. I also have modern, 4K-ready games, many of which I play regularly – not just for nostalgia. Retro gaming is more than just a history lesson about how we got here. The classics of the past can be as engaging and enjoyable as today’s open worlds and multiplayer socializing. They are experiences that don’t require remakes or remasters. You already know this. Every gamer knows this. Retro, 2022 is a tricky question. Where do we draw the line?
The Xbox 360 will turn 17 years old this year, and the PlayStation 3 (and Nintendo Wii) will be celebrating their 16th anniversary. The Wii’s successor, , the unfairly denigrated Wii U (it is a great console and I will fight with you over this), will turn 10 years old. Double digits for consoles that don’t feel old, at least to those who have had a few decades (this being relative, since I don’t think you’d be 18 if the 360 was). The 360 and PS3 both have HD-ready, online-enabled consoles that are closer to today than they were in the past. They also hosted a number of successful game series, including Assassin Creed and Gears of War.
There are also the massive games that were released during this time period, such as Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V, and Mario Kart 8. (which was first available on Wii U but became a huge success on Switch), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption. These aren’t retro games. These are not retro games.
“In Retro Gamerwe view retro as anything older that 15 years, which is what I personally believe to be a good yardstick,” states Darran James, editor for Future Publishing’s Retro Gamer magazine. This magazine is one of few games media outlets that actively emphasize the past over the present. This reasoning is common because it usually means that two generations of consoles have gone, which is another yardstick gamers use to define retro. It all comes down to each person – I have found that retro is simply “What I played as a child.”
This may explain why some younger readers see the 360 retro consoles while I struggle to accept it. It turns out that I am not the only one feeling this way. “I know that retro” is a moving target in my head,” Trista (aka TristaBytes, Youtube, and many more) tells me. Retro is a mix of nostalgia and denial about the end of the ’90s. There are also a variety of visual styles. The difference between generations in gaming is now so minimal. It was amazing to see the difference between a Spectrum game and a Mega Drive one. This is even more true when you consider the differences between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 5. The games feel more like continuous smooth iterations than big leaps.
When I label the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 retro systems, the thing that really gets me thinking is that the games look, feel, and play very much the same today as they did a decade ago. There are improvements, but there is also more tech that allows for more bells and whistles to be incorporated into the experience. Play a Call of Duty, a GTA on 360, and then the most recent entry on a Series X and you will get the same impression. While the Grand Theft Auto V 2013 may look very different from the Grand Theft Auto V 20,22, the core gameplay loops that make up these popular series have remained unchanged for many years. In some cases, even since the advent of the PlayStation 2.
