When I tell people that I still play play retro games, I get some strange looks, similar to how I imagine people must look at you when you tell them that you don't vaccinate your children or ascribe to modern medical science. Why in the world would anyone want to spend time with games that have aged so badly? Why, when games have come so far as a medium in terms of storytelling and immersion, would you want to go backwards in time? I get these comments even from people who enjoyed retro games when they were modern, and for a while I struggled with answering them.
I definitely do spend quite a bit of time playing retro games, although I still do enjoy and play modern games. In the past three years, I have completed 144 video games I had not previously completed. Of those games, 16 were released in the 1980s, 48 were released in the 1990s, 36 were released in the 2000s, and 44 were released in the 2010s (I consider any game released before the Dreamcast and its internet connectivity to be "retro", by the way). And that number is decidedly skewed in favor of the newer games I play, as those are most likely to be first time plays. I've replayed several Mega Man, Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, and other retro games in that time, and those don't count in the numbers in the slightest.
It seems like the simplest answer as to why I love retro games so much is that they are a piece of nostalgia for me. I grew up with an NES, a Game Boy, a Super Nintendo, a Sega Genesis...and so on and so forth. And, in fact, many of my favorite games for those systems are ones that I owned and enjoyed as a kid. Nostalgia certainly plays a role in my enjoyment of retro games, but I don't feel comfortable in saying that it's the primary variable that explains my love for them. For one thing, I've completely fallen in love with plenty of retro games that I didn't grow up with, and never experienced. Games like the NES Mega Man games, DuckTales, Kirby's Adventure, Kirby's Dream Land 2, Super Metroid, Dr. Mario, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Dragon Warrior, Super-Punch-Out!!, and Wario Land 3 were all games I've reviewed glowingly on here despite having no prior experience with them. For another thing, there are plenty of retro games I remember enjoying as a child that are just objectively trash now. I've panned childhood favorites like Buster Bunny Busts Loose!! and been forced to turn off one of my favorite games from my childhood, Bases Loaded, in disgust. Additionally, there are plenty of games that I didn't love as a child that I now adore as an adult. A classic example is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, which is one of my favorite NES games now, but was a mildly enjoyable distraction for me as a kid.
So nostalgia can't explain all of it, even though I'll be the first to admit in reviews when I think I'm being biased, because I definitely can be. So what is it about retro games that's so appealing to me? Games have certainly come a long way since I first picked up my NES controller to play Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt in 1993. I LOVE wireless controllers. I love patches and DLC, even as I complain about needing to download a patch for 45 minutes on release day of a new game. I love huge TVs and HD graphics. I love the option to play online with friends. I love the blowing open wide of the video game industry to countless independent developers. I enjoy immersive, cinematic gaming experiences (more on this later). There's so much to love when it comes to modern gaming that there must be something substantive to retro gaming, above and beyond pure nostalgia, to keep me coming back.
Note the identical shapes of the clouds and bushes
The more I think about it, the more I narrow my reasons down to three. The first issue is that sometimes hardware issues forced game developers to be far more creative about using limited assets, an issue that modern developers simply do not face. This isn't to say that modern developers never face a shortage of resources or assets to develop their games the way they would like, but it is to say that modern games are frequently plagued by having too much junk in them, rather than too little. In games like Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto and co. were so restricted on the amount of memory that they could use that they famously had to use the exact same sprite, colored differently, for bushes and clouds. These difficult choices about where to allocate resources forced classic developers to be extremely thoughtful about where to focus their limited time and resources in development, while not including things in a modern game just feels like laziness. Don't have online multiplayer in your game? Lazy. Don't have a single player campaign? Lazy. Don't have a particular mode or option another game has? Lazy. There's so little stopping you from making your game 1 GB bigger in the modern era, that you're limited only by your imagination and your time. I think that modern games frequently have so much stuff crammed into them that nothing is done particularly well or thoughtfully, but at least the developers can avoid being compared unfavorably to a similar game with more modes or options. Why, in heaven's name, did Mass Effect 3 need an online multiplayer option? Why do Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 need 12 minigames a piece, with none of them being any good? The feature bloat in these games takes away the time and attention developers could be giving towards more critical aspects of game design, and these little shortcoming definitely add up over time. Modern games that have had a more limited focus in terms of mechanics and design, such as Shovel Knight and Journey, have been some of my favorites, while AAA titles with all of their features just feel somehow lacking in sharpness.
The second reason I love retro games so much is because I genuinely do prefer the style of gameplay and storytelling present in retro games. CRTs, with their incredibly fast refresh rates, along with classic consoles and their wired controllers, enabled players to react and respond to threats far quicker than our more graphically impressive modern consoles. In addition, modern gaming's insistence on more photorealism in games makes it more difficult to achieve a twitchy gameplay experience that feels rewarding. I'll again pick on Red Dead Redemption 2, which must have the single worst hand to hand fighting experience known to mankind (this is certainly false, but I can't think of another worse one off the top of my head). Real people, of course, do not flick out their fist instantaneously to punch a foe like Little Mac. They have to reach back to gather momentum, and slam their fist into an enemy. If your focus is on realism, you'll have a split second delay between button press and impact that just never feels right. Modern games that get it right, like Marvel's Spider-Man, have some sort of supernatural reason to have that kind of lightning reaction, and so it works. But call me crazy that I miss some Punch-Out!! and Ninja Gaiden style combat from time to time! So much focus is placed on realism and immersion in modern games that sometimes I feel like you're actually being sucked out of the story, in a weird way. It was pretty easy to feel like you were the hero in games like Final Fantasy VII, Super Mario Bros., and Mega Man 3, despite their lack of graphical realism. But modern gaming breaks up gameplay so much between cutscenes and actually engagement that it can pull you out of the game by making you change hats from hero to spectator.
The final reason why I love retro games is I simply adore the gradual improvement feedback loop present in classic games. When you get crushed by an obstacle over and over again, and clear it for the first time, it's an incredible feeling. Even better than that feeling is cruising past it with easy on later plays, establishing your own sense that you're improving. You replay so little of a modern game that it feels more like perseverance and less like improvement when you get over the hump in a modern game. Give it enough tries, and you'll do it, especially when it's only 45 seconds between autosave points. A game like The Last of Us could have done better to have longer stretches between autosaves that made you actually survive for a significant lack of time, rather than hammering your way past a tricky obstacle, but instead it will save every 3 or 4 minutes. Obviously, you can't beat most modern games in a single sitting like you could with DuckTales, but games like Super Mario World and Sonic 3 & Knuckles would establish that the feedback loop of improvement could absolutely occur alongside of save functions, and I really miss the feeling of progress and achievement in a retro game.
Anyway, I think there's actually a ton of merit in a classic approach to game design and function, which is why I'm grateful for modern examples of a retro approach, and also that our retro games can exist on our modern consoles with their wireless controllers and large screens. But I think I'll always have a special soft spot in my heart for retro games, which is why almost all of my all-time favorite games are retro. So don't feel like an anti-vaxxer for spending your time with Vectorman on a Friday night. You and he deserve each other.
-TRO
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