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There actually is; ISPs don't really track direct downloads.
Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster
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I feel like you are misunderstanding me on purpose, there are demos from scene groups on the commodore 64 that make some realistic looking graphics, it doesnt mean the C64 isnt retro cause of it. What I'm saying is the PS1, N64, blah are really the last home consoles where graphically, games be considered antiquated for lack of a better term, and "retro."
This is what I mean by antiquated. How is having to buy a guide in any way retro? Its more relating to bad game design and or lack of technology of the era (ie storage on cartridges.) It'd be like me saying cause of the internet, magazines are retro, even though magazines have been around for a long ass time.
![:\](/styles/custom/emotes/svg/chris-confused.svg "Confused :\")
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Mags used to be a fast way to spread information, now they're not compared to social media or blogs capable of live updates.
as more companies push for having all your content on their services, amazon, netflix, steam, nintendo, physical media will quickly become
turbo retro like a vinyl record collection.
books I physically own now are getting less use over digital copies I can find online for free, use AI to quickly find specific
sections or ask shit like "look through the entire book and show me sections where the author talks about this thing" or have different note sessions saved that I draw on, only reason I keep my book collection is the same as my game collection. it looks nice on my shelf.
it was a legitimate way to make money, games were designed in a way that we just don't see anymore, this idea of: "ok you had your fun, buy the guide"
even old arcade games were pressured to have sections of the game be straight up "you had your fun, pay up"
this same "you had your fun" is handled very differently now with live service games and farm vill shit where you either wait 7 hours to play the game, or pay a microtransaction on top of doing your daily nothing grind.
the point I'm making is realism is subjected in a graphic medium, let alone a interactive medium.
I could point to a game 15 years ago that has a lower polygon count over a game now, but has working real time reflections, NPC's
actually responding to shit you do. would a game with all these aspects feel less real compared to a game with none of these details, but had ray tracing?
Now look at this shit.
A game 30+ years ago looks and feels more realistic than the shit above. it's like comparing an oil painting to a tiktok AI filter.
the direction Nvidia wants to take the game industry is straight up uncanny valley. they somehow made the early "antiquated" generation
you were talking about look more realistic over the shit they're cooking up now.
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https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation -- following the build instructions from here builds fine on gentoo, try it with your distro
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- Apr 14, 2024
To answer your question cause you really didn't answer any of mine in a sufficient way, it just depends. Ray tracing is not needed to make a graphically "realistic" game and theres plenty of games from well before ray tracing was common that still hold up. But, I suppose I did start this off as something relating to graphics, but retro can also be something gameplay wise, audio wise and whatever might make it "retro" as well. Essentially my point is that the PS1 generation and before were more "products of their time" as it were. the Xbox, Ps2, and Gamecube generation and beyond all have games that whether gameplay wise, graphics wise, audio wise, (hell even fucking controller wise) are modern enough that if they were released today besides the fact they use physical media which isn't as common, they would not be considered retro. At least in my mind something that is retro is graphically, aurally, gameplay and further extending into input wise is foreign or distinctly from a past generation. I guess my definition of "retro" doesnt help that for the longest time everything "retro" was 8bit and 16bit related so having sprites, chip tunes, and having cartridges really feels maximally "retro."
Edit: This is my way of thinking, lets take something like Halo which will be a quarter of a century old (in 2001 atari and the nes, snes were retro) was released on the Xbox in 2001. The game graphically is outdated but its rendering methods are still being used much in the same way as today just with no ray tracing or anything like SSAO or anything, but gameplay wise is pretty much the same as the current year for shooters, crosshair in the center of the screen, gun on the right of the screen, WASD to move and mouse to aim (or rather left analog stick to move and right analog stick to aim.) Soundtrack which is pretty much just CD audio, nowadays probably just be a bunch of WAV files, which it probably is anyways. On top of all this you can still play Halo on a modern computer, through Windows' ABI compatibility, on modern gpus without really as much as a translation layer.
However you cant really say the same thing for anything from before the Xbox generation. Things might work things might not work even with the Compatibility Windows has with its older versions. Take a game like Leisure Suit Larry cause thats the thing that came quickest to my mind, shit will need DosBOX to run, Graphically using sprites from the look of things, CGA colors, using midis for sound cards no longer produced or supported. controls and gameplay that is antiquated to all but those who grew up with it.
Essentially retro to me is something that could not be released today in a positive light besides if you called it "retro inspired" or otherwise saying it is in relation to those things no longer looked at fondly by people in the current year
However you cant really say the same thing for anything from before the Xbox generation. Things might work things might not work even with the Compatibility Windows has with its older versions. Take a game like Leisure Suit Larry cause thats the thing that came quickest to my mind, shit will need DosBOX to run, Graphically using sprites from the look of things, CGA colors, using midis for sound cards no longer produced or supported. controls and gameplay that is antiquated to all but those who grew up with it.
Essentially retro to me is something that could not be released today in a positive light besides if you called it "retro inspired" or otherwise saying it is in relation to those things no longer looked at fondly by people in the current year
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- Oct 15, 2021
there are straight up better designed shots that evoked a better feeling in the OG over the HD remake.
this is the same scene where the flood is first introduced, it's supposed to be creepy, the OG's choice to keep things dark fits the mood way better.
the HD remake's choice to make the shot perfectly lit is a terrible design choice and would never work no matter how much detail you have. or what version of Unreal you're using.
this is coming from someone who wasn't even born when Halo was released,
when you're designing anything, someone is making a series of choices to achieve specific goals.
a design of "MAKE THE LEVEL DARK FOR THE SPOOKY LEVEL" is a concept that never ages, it still works! too bad the remake is made by retards who hate halo!
you could even take that same concept across different mediums, fps, 2d games, TPS and that idea would still work perfectly. even 100 years from now.
Point is good ideas don't age,
shit like finding hidden stuff behind waterfalls, limited lives, checkpoints, turn base combat, visual indicator for detection in a stealth game, are concepts you still see today despite the ideas being older than baby jesus. the fucking PAUSE button is an idea older than anyone here, imagined if I said the PAUSE button was retro because the Atari 5200 had it., 1000 years from now, we're still going to have a Pause button for games.
The only Retro aspect behind good shit is the hardware, the shit inside is still fresh if it's well made.][
the HD remake's choice to make the shot perfectly lit is a terrible design choice and would never work no matter how much detail you have. or what version of Unreal you're using.
this is coming from someone who wasn't even born when Halo was released,
when you're designing anything, someone is making a series of choices to achieve specific goals.
a design of "MAKE THE LEVEL DARK FOR THE SPOOKY LEVEL" is a concept that never ages, it still works! too bad the remake is made by retards who hate halo!
you could even take that same concept across different mediums, fps, 2d games, TPS and that idea would still work perfectly. even 100 years from now.
Point is good ideas don't age,
shit like finding hidden stuff behind waterfalls, limited lives, checkpoints, turn base combat, visual indicator for detection in a stealth game, are concepts you still see today despite the ideas being older than baby jesus. the fucking PAUSE button is an idea older than anyone here, imagined if I said the PAUSE button was retro because the Atari 5200 had it., 1000 years from now, we're still going to have a Pause button for games.
The only Retro aspect behind good shit is the hardware, the shit inside is still fresh if it's well made.][
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- Apr 14, 2024
I didnt mention the HD rerelease on purpose, cause it is the same game but with a graphical "update", Ie higher poly models and supposed better looking textures blah. But the new artstyle does not match Halo at all.
I fully agree
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- Feb 19, 2020
We don't all agree...
afaik the "20 year rule" itself has only been around for like five years (probably invented by reddit or something)... much older than that and it would've made no sense to anyone. It's already showing its age, since as of 2026 it gives us galaxy brain takes like:
Retro games: Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4, Roblox
Mainstream modern games: Metroid Prime 4, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Roblox
Yeah okay. Luckily, this is purely academic. If you say "retro video games" to any person of any age irl, they are going to assume you're talking about pixel graphics and bleep-bloop sounds, not "Call of Duty but only the older ones". Unless you're debating proposed subreddit rules with a tranny moderator, it's not worth worrying about.
If you asked this guy how a six year old game could be "retro", he wouldn't go on a spiel about TV outputs or monetization trends or argue about whether six years is "old enough" or whatever. He'd just say dude, fucking look at it, Imagine trying to explain to this guy that Space Invaders wouldn't count as retro for another year.
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- Apr 30, 2023
Retronauts (hold the laughs) had a 10 year back rule. A lot of places I've seen refer to two generations back. I'd err closer to a combo of the two but I don't think there's any one perfect rule.
You should be able to look at something like the 3DS which has already seen prices skyrocket and see how different many of the games on that thing are to what comes out today and probably agree with me when I say it's "retro." Maybe I wouldn't put the 3DS port of Fire Emblem Warriors in that list just yet (as cool as that was and how it plays like a fucked up demake) or Hey! Pikmin but we're getting close.
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- Oct 15, 2021
that's straight up a better system to determine if something's retro compared to anything reddit can come up with.
if I showed you something like this, you wouldn't understand how it would work, and if you did
you would tell me how horrible it was.
I believe it's not JUST the tech advancement that makes something age, it's also good ideas replacing things that barely worked at the time, or a direct improvement on an idea.
with that same line of thinking, what good ideas have we seen from the last 20 years? we're still using the same fucking controllers, devs being able to update their games made them lazier.
I can't think of ANYTHING that would make me point at something kinda old and go "fucking look at it, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?"
Things are getting worse and not enough good ideas are being made to make a game like The Last of Us retro (it's 13 years old now)
we STILL have games TODAY with that same cinematic framework, and people are ok with it.
imagine if FMV games never lost popularity, and we still got million dollar games made where all you
do is play simon says for 10 hours while you watch a shitty movie. that's how I feel about modern games
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- Apr 30, 2023
Kind of an odd case because it was the start of Sony's boring uncreative phase, and The Sony Formula games aren't even making money any more because budgets have skyrocketed. The release cadence has slowed down and they won't exist very soon.
CODBLOPS 2 was released around the same time as The Last of Us -- personally I never cared for either game, but the parallel is useful since they were both very popular games of a popular genre. Lapsed CoD fans frequently point back to that game as the glory days, it's very much in the retro category now; they don't make games like this any more.
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- Nov 11, 2024
All this retro talk reminded me of this video I saw
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- Mar 27, 2025
There are a number of reasons why many people hesitate to call PS3 retro, and some of them have been mentioned already:
- Ages ago, games were heavily restricted by hardware limitations, you only made blocky games with small color pallets because the NES barely functioned as gaming hardware, and already on the SNES Nintendo expected that nobody would be willing to buy Mario 3, which was one of the best looking games on the NES, unless they remade the visuals to 16 bit standards and bundled it with Mario World and 3 other Mario games that got the same treatment. However, these limitations mostly vanished with the PS2 generation of games, with the realism plateau being hit for everything except humans, and games were being released with real-time lighting and massive entity counts. There's definitely a clear visual difference between AAA games of the era like RE4 and today like RE9 (mostly being that games looked better back then
), but if you output the game in 4K and didn't show any humans on screen, there's probably a lot of gamers that couldn't tell the difference (especially since a lot of textures these days look terrible). The difference gets even smaller with cartoony games, Mario Wonder doesn't look any better than Mario Sunshine. - Everyone wants to pretend to be young. "No, you can't say PS2 is retro because I was an adult when that came out." There's a lot of reasons for this but one of the biggest ones is that nobody wants to feel like they've wasted their time, even though they have.
- The games industry has really stagnated for the past 10 years, so there's very little reason to compare retro games to modern games except to opine about how much better games used to be. When the PS3 came out "PS3 has no games" was a meme, and then it got games. When PS4 came out "PS4 has no games" was a meme, and it never got games (the only game anyone cares about which was exclusive to that system is Bloodborne). PS5 has no games, not just exclusives, it doesn't even have multi-plat games.
- Nintendo. Starting with the Wii, Nintendo started making underpowered current-gen hardware, which extended the shelf-life of older generations. Is anyone going to call PS2 retro when new AAA PS2 games are regularly released on the Wii? The Nintendo Switch is basically just a weaker Xbox 360, and the Switch 2 has no games.
- The industry shift to mobile gaming. AAA is no longer the biggest part of the games industry, it's now phone games like Generic Anime Gacha and Fortnite that have all the cultural relevance, and these are graphically outpaced by PS2 games.
- Finally, the only people talking about "retro games" are people who like "retro games," and, although new people have cycled in, they joined the existing community of "retro gamers" who were interested in Bitwars era games rather than PS2 and later, which were modern at the time.
The Noose King
kiwifarms.net
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Didn't say we did. I figured context would supplement my opinion, but to more clearly explain myself: It would make it simpler for everyone since we could agree on a hard figure to point to.
While I could potentially see your argument, I'd say your examples are cherry picked and frankly don't make much sense (at least to me):
>Metroid Prime/Prime 4
I'm not sure what this is even supposed to prove.
Prime was the first entry in the series and came out in 2002 on the GameCube, a console long since retired. Prime 4 is the fourth entry in the series and came out at the end of last year on both Switch consoles.
Yes, the fourth and less than six month old release in a series will be considered a "mainstream modern game" and the first and over 20 year old release in a series would be more likely considered "retro."
>RE4/Remake 4
Also came out on the GameCube, is often cited as the game which set the standard for and popularized the over-the-shoulder third-person shooter/action genre which has now been around for years. I'd wager this is also cause to label it "retro."
The remake is simply that, a remake. Doesn't change when the original came out and more often than not is treated as a separate entry entirely due to everything from gameplay to visuals to story/character changes.
>Roblox
I don't seek out Roblox players but I've never heard the game be brought up as a "mainstream modern game" in the first place. In fact, outside of reports in relation to it being swarmed by pedophiles (and it losing the classic "oof" sound), I haven't heard about it in any major capacity for multiple years now.
However, I realize that only applies to me. So with that being said, Roblox is a multiplayer game kept alive by its community. By its very nature, a game that could stay alive forever if it remains more profitable than not, as well as be updated or changed fundamentally from how it began. Does this make it exempt from ever becoming a retro game?
I suppose this is where an argument could be made on whether the 20-25 year rule could apply to games like this, to which I'd say it'd have to be on a case by case basis (I'll explain what I mean by this at the end).
I agree this is the immediate thought that would pop up in the average person's head, but I believe this is more due to how often the term "retro" has been used to describe only games from that era rather than naturally moving the term forward in its use as we advance in years.
If you notice, when discussing games from the 5th or 6th generation (just as an easy example), people will often describe them in various other ways such as "old," "clunky," or how it has "aged." These could all be descriptors applied to something labeled "retro."
And to bring focus to what were talking about here, this is the definition of "retro" per Merriam Webster: "relating to, reviving, or being the styles and especially the fashions of the past : fashionably nostalgic or old-fashioned."
This is the crux of the issue here and where we seem to be disagreeing. I'm on the side of applying retro to a set number of years because it removes subjectivity in the vein of "dude, fucking look at it" and instead gives people a more clearly (though still admittedly roughly) defined measurement for the label.
While Space Invaders would initially seem like a great example for why the rule can't apply, if we work by feeling rather than something similar to what I propose, someone could also easily argue that the game accomplished exactly what it was trying to, that it doesn't need to emulate the "forward thinking" of something like Mario 64 for example and still feels as timeless and relevant as ever.
See the problem?
Most games will inevitably become retro with the passage of time due to both technological advancement and game design standards changing. But if we constantly shift what we label retro based on how we feel about the game, you'll also inevitably get a bunch of people who disagree on what counts, like you and me.
On games such as Roblox, where it can be continuously updated or changed but still wear the title of "Roblox" then we would require a deeper analysis. Has the game kept up with the shifting landscape of gaming or has it remained the same since it came out? If the latter is true, then we can confidently say that it's retro once having gotten old enough.
But I should clearly state that I'm in favor of retro in gaming being defined by years due to its simplicity for everyone. This doesn't make something inherently bad or outdated, it only labels something being clearly a creation of the past in relation to where we are in gaming at the present. Which once 20-25 years has passed, that present will inevitably look very different, as all things in technology do.
Green Kitbash
kiwifarms.net
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Fortnite is now a retro game
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- Oct 15, 2021
when DLSS 19 comes out, and it's capable of fully making any game look like you hired Blue point to personally remake your old ass game
no one cares about in UE9, would it still be considered retro? what aspect beyond the old hardware makes something like the last of us retro?
when you put the word "retro" next to mechanics like on the fly crafting, cover based shooting, cinematic walky-talky bits you can't skip, tacked online multiplayer. the word starts to feel pointless if fucking Potty pigeon on the commodore 64 is also "retro"
There is a dire need for well defined era terms for this shit,
to make a gay example, the Attitude era for WWE has it's own storylines and felt completely different from the Aggression era.
both are barely 5 years apart. how the fuck does fake wrestling have better defined era's that tell you about the ABSOLUTE state of the medium depending on
drastic changes in their industry?
AI showing its head into game creation should be a clear separation from whatever the last era was.
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- Joined
- Mar 27, 2025
My entire point was that it's not about technical limitations. The entire reason why we mark out something as retro, whether in video games or any other thing, is that it doesn't appeal to normal people because it is old. Not because it is bad, or even because it is "outdated" in a strict sense, but simply because it is old. Old games get remade, not because there was anything wrong with them, but because people want new things, and therefore the old things need to be made new to conform with current fashions. The same happens to movies, Karate Kid got remade in 2010 because there was an opportunity to make it about a black kid, not because there was any technological advancement in movie making (and, at least as far as that movie is concerned, technology has not meaningfully improved since the invention of technicolor). The disconnect here comes partly from the fact that video games were so heavily affected by technical limitations for so long. If you want to quibble about how "erm, these games are really different" then feel free to call them "vintage" because "erm actually Mario World is more retro than Dark Souls" and feel free to forget that Pacman is much more retro than Mario World. Just don't call them classics, most old games are shit, even if the proportion was much better.
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- Dec 20, 2021
If you booted up Bubble Bobble on MAME, or any of its many ports, you think you'd be able to access at least the first Secret door?
(requires reaching stage 20 without dying)
(requires reaching stage 20 without dying)
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2020
No chance on the arcade version. I just tried, died for the first time on 9, game overed on 14.
