Retro means different things to different generations. Though I’m now unfathomably old, I still think of a lot of the games I played in my 20s and 30s as ‘new’. That weird time-speeding-up effect we get as we grow older means that the past three decades feel like they lasted about two weeks, whereas the preceding 20 years seem like another lifetime ago.
Take Doom as an example. I still think of Doom as a ‘modern’ game. Likewise, Super Mario 64. I mean, even Sonic The Hedgehog – the Mega Drive original – seems somehow relatively modern to me. Why do I categorise that alongside Horizon Forbidden West instead of Manic Miner, while the likes of Chuckie Egg, The Hobbit and Space Invaders are what I class as ‘retro’ games?
When I started writing Digitiser I was a mere slip of a 21 year old. It was 1993, and I occasionally wrote about ‘old games’ that to me felt like ancient history – though most of them had been released barely a decade before.
A 21 year old here in the space year 2024 AD was 11 a decade ago, so does that mean they view Grand Theft Auto V, Dark Souls II, Destiny and other 2014 releases as retro games? I mean, it’s insane to me that Destiny is ten years old. Surely it came out about three years ago, tops? The Last Of Us is even older – that was released in 2013!
Varying perceptions aside, I do think part of the reason is that the industry has changed in my lifetime. The lack of quantum generational leaps between hardware means that there are fewer seismic shocks, in terms of graphics and gameplay. Games also tend to hang around longer. The Last Of Us got a recent remaster, whereas Destiny rumbled along for three years before Destiny 2 replaced it.
