Retro Wars

 

So, to kick off this ‘back from the dead’ blog I thought I’d start with something negative! Foolish… down beat… just plain old mean I hear you say… well, who said this blog was going to be all zen and shit!

 

Seriously though, I’ve been reading a lot online lately where people have been arguing about what is Retro?? Opinions seem to vary greatly, and people are becoming more and more entrenched in their own opinions and reluctant to consider the possibility of what others might think – how unlike social media!!

 

Ok to put it simply, what do you consider to be retro gaming? Is it anything pre 1990, 8bit, 16bit one console gen backwards or is it something else? Someone in response to one of my posts not that long ago where I was talking about PS2 games and included the common #retrogaming tag responded with (what I thought) rather curtly ‘PS2 is modern gaming not retro’. It seems to me that more and  more people are posting/ talking about XBOX 360 and PS3 as retro…. Heresy I thought at first, those consoles were only released in the last few year for gods sake! The 360 was released in 2005 and the PS3 followed in 2006 alongside the Nintendo Wii forming the core of the 7^th Gen consoles…... wait a minute 2005/6 that can’t be right! Oh, but it is dear reader, and that’s the rub, what I/ we (I’m going to badge those two together for now) think of as the near past vs the distant is rarely reflective of reality – time by its vary nature is subjective, what feels very Wars to you and I can feel quite different to someone else – after all ‘A time long ago’ might be yesterday morning depending on your stress levels or marital status!

 

Now the danger with this argument is of course that I will immediately begin to sound like a grumpy old man ‘those darn kids and their crazy ideas’ and to some extend that is true… I have been known to be grumpy and I ain’t no spring chicken for sure! However (just a heads up – I enjoy starting sentences with conjunctions…. I’m a rebel like that) my grump/ age status does not mean I’m wrong. Personal perspective massively affects what we each might consider ‘retro’ and I just can’t see that changing; however, perspective (personal or otherwise) is surely not the only pony in this race…. Gaming is never standing still, we’ve just had the latest PlayStation Showcase and the salivating around what’s coming down the pipeline is reaching bib level! We change and so does the industry to which we are all gleeful acolytes, the new becomes the old at alarming speed!

 

I’d like to postulate an idea: the term ‘retro gaming’ is vague/ misleading/ and from where I’m sat typing increasingly entangled with fetish price hiking. Older cars might serve as an interesting example here: to the lay person there are cars and there are classic cars, however there is a general rule of thumb to distinguish the different collector categories. Cars older than 20 years but not more than 45 are ‘classic cars’,  cars 25 years old or older are ‘vintage’, whilst cars at least 45 years old are ‘antique cars’….. Ok I’ve just read those brackets back and I’m not sure they actually make sense… BUT the general idea does make some sense to me. I’m not saying we (those of us who play/ collect older games) need to add another layer of jargon into our hobby but it has given me pause for thought.

 

I’m not suggesting that this blog has or even could provide any real answer to the question of what ‘retro’ really is, but for me at least it has made me think about how – just because something doesn’t appear retro to me doesn’t mean that the next person might think otherwise. Back when I opened the Megadrive for the first time I wasn’t thinking about the huge price increases the games for that system would undergo and I couldn’t have dreamed of the entire sub class of gaming that would grow up around ‘out of date’ technology, but here I am, loving my retro and genuinely excited to be part of the game!

The next time you jump straight into a Retro Wars conversation just think, is it really worth cutting into your gaming time for this?!