Is Retro Gaming Still Relevant?

You may have seen the Arcade 80’s Trunk from Pinel & Pinel. You may not. Either way it’s likely to be out of your price range. It’s certainly out of ours. But it does suggest that retro gaming is well on the agenda of gadget companies, and if consumers are willing to spend €16,000 on it, it’s certainly still relevant.

Of course everyone looks back on games with a fondness. It’s impossible to think of Pacman or Space Invaders without drawing a faint smile, whilst for others trading Pokemon cards is looked back upon as an unforgettable elementary school memory. But for most, we wouldn’t actually play them anymore- would we?

In a world of Grand Theft Auto V and FIFA 14 it seems that we have no real need for pixelated hedgehogs that don’t allow free roam. Our world now has cinematic storylines, HD graphics, and gameplay that is action-packed, and incredibly dramatic, not to mention the ability to play against people from the other side of the world.

Yet there’s a cult following that is still drawn to the likes of the SNES and MegaDrive. And there’s good reason too.

Of course that is partly down to nostalgia, but also because most of the games actually still stand up.

The likes of Super Mario Bros, Sonic, and Street Fighter are classics, with plenty of games later following similar concepts, not to mention sequels that are still being released today. And that’s because for the most part, they were memorable.

Perhaps that’s something that games lack nowadays, I can still hum the soundtrack to Sonic the Hedgehog or Toejam and Earl, but could I from a game released a little over a year ago? That’s probably unlikely.

And that’s linked to creativity. We’ve seen hundreds of war games or sporting games since, so it’s hardly anything new these days, even if there are superior graphics or a more complex storyline, which was perhaps to their advantage in the first place.

Without the complex graphic mechanics and need to make everything look as realistic as possible, we were often given something that offered more of an escape, with vibrant colors, great music, and more of a focus on levels being fun, engaging, and often pretty unique.

Which gave them that element of addictiveness. An addictiveness that has seen players replay decades on, sometimes even fed up of the realism of games today.

That doesn’t apply to all games of today obviously. We’re currently well into our own ‘golden era’ of gaming. The likes of Grand Theft Auto V broke all sales records when released at the back end of last year, whilst the diversity and variety of gaming nowadays go way beyond what we could ever imagine. With games ranging from Vegas-style casino games on Royal Vegas Canada, to virtual reality with Sim City and The Sims we really are spoilt for choice.

There is no doubt we are in a ‘golden era’, but then the late 80’s/90’s were pretty golden too, so we’d be silly to ignore them!

Photo Credit: Sonic the Hedgehog, 2007. Image courtesy of Sega. Sourced from news.softpedia.com

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