Retro gaming has been popular within the gaming community for over 20 years now, with the love of both playing and collecting the games we grew up with exploding. Both the prices of retro games and interest in these older titles have grown immensely, and today we're bombarded with retro clone consoles, retro compilations and retro-based nostalgia products from lanyards to socks.
The question I have today is...are old games as good as we think they are, or are they placed on a pedestal simply due to nostalgia?
Some classics, lots of garbage
Every console has its fair share of junk. As much as we heard about the deluge of shovelware that made up the bulk of the Wii's library, the problem is hardly a new one.
My beloved NES features a library saturated with terrible games that either coasted on the popularity of a license like Total Recall or The Uncanny X-Men, or were low-effort games cranked out to fill store shelves. The Atari 2600 was brought down entirely thanks to the glut of games by studios that sprouted overnight and cranked out garbage, which shared retail space with great games by studios like Activision.
Flashy cover art and a catchy name was at that was needed to dupe uninformed gift-giving Grandmothers who couldn't tell the difference between a Sonic the Hedgehog and an Awesome Possum.
While there is still cash grab titles being cranked out, it seems that most of those games have migrated from consoles to iOS and Android. Much of the reason is simply due to ballooning development costs. Each generation, it becomes more and more expensive to build a game. Studios can fold from a single expensive flop, so the glut of licensed games seems to be drying up and the big AAA games are willing to take fewer risks. TellTale Games recently announced their closure, and they produced games exclusively with licensed properties.
Looking through rose-tinted glasses
While nobody is arguing that games like Chubby Cherub are timeless classics, the argument does come up when the heavy hitters enter the fray. Sonic 2, Super Mario 3, A Link To The Past, Contra, etc. are heralded as timeless classics that are above criticism and beyond compare by some, though we're now living in an age where new studios are taking the formulas established by these classic games and putting a modern spin on them.
In the past few years, the pixelart aesthetic has become a popular visual style for indie games. These visuals lend themselves to the reinvention of classic gameplay styles and techniques. Enter the Gungeon is a great mashup between the look of A Link to the Past and the frantic gunplay of Smash TV. Shovel Knight borrows the trademark pogo-stick gameplay of DuckTales and Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon shamelessly ripped off of Castlevania III.
And these games are all amazing! In each instance, they take what made these classic titles so great and brings them into the modern era by using some of the advances the industry has standardized.
In essence, we're now getting retro games with modern technology and conveniences. At times, returning to older games is hard after being spoiled by pixelart games without flicker, with better music, sharper visuals, more refined gameplay, save states, fast travel, etc.
At the same time, "modern retro" games are a more casual experience. They're retro games with training wheels -- even the most brutally difficult ones like Hollow Knight make it easy to replay a hard section by giving you tools to quickly get back to where you died. Compare that to games like the Castlevania series where you had to start over when you died -- checkpoints were a luxury. If you want to truly test yourself, you have to dig out the classics.
In conclusion
The popularity of retro consoles like the NES, Super Nintendo and Playstation Classic prove there is a lot of interest in classic games, especially from the less hardcore crowd who love being able to hook up a cute little console to their modern TV and play the 20 or so classics built-in.
These games have stood the test of time on their own merit and remain fun to play 30 years after they first arrived in stores. However, they're not without faults. I'm as guilty as having the retro-blinders on as anyone, but objectively I can see how modern takes on retro gameplay styles are for the most part, superior to the games that inspired them.
What do you think? Are retro games put on too high of a pedestal? Let's discuss!
Some of those "new age retro games" are quite good, but still...nothing beats good old Mario. It´s not just the gameplay, Nintendo created an amazing character (and friends). The guy from "Enter the Gungeon" is "just some guy", even though the game may be amazing.
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I like that the great things from the past aren´t forgotten. To play classic games or read classics books can be a nice way of learning about the past while having fun.
I love retro gaming, I grew up through the 80's and 90's so I have fond memories of playing games during the 8, 16 and 32 bit generations. I do agree with you though that nostalgia for these eras does cloud our vision and distorts our memories of what those games really were and the inconveniences they presented.
Don't get me wrong, I still love revisiting the classics like Super Mario Bros. and Castlevania but honestly, like you said, they're outshone by what modern games are doing these days. Sure they can be heralded as being the advent of many of the core concepts we see in games today, but with that comes many of the annoyances that were weeded out in later iterations.
This is much more apparent when you have no nostalgia for a particular game. It's faults seem that much more noticeable.
One thing about this "retro zeitgeist" is the existence of "retro-snobbery" and the whole misconception that modern gaming is terrible. Or that retro games just did it better. It's really a shame because there are many modern games that are amazing, and to not give them a chance means you'd really be missing out.
I think it's important to appreciate what devs are trying to do these days and experience the advances in this wonderful medium. Of course, it's also difficult to appreciate the advances if you don't have any background of what was there before. It's a balancing act of reliving the past and embracing the present.
I mean, in 20 years the games of today will be considered retro, and you can't have nostalgia without the memories of playing those games to go along with it.