What is a retro game?
Back in the 2000s — at the height of The Angry Video Game Nerd’s popularity and the genesis of throwback games like Cave Story and Mega Man 9 — that question seemed straightforward. It was a term used to describe games from the Atari 2600 and NES eras. Two decades later, that question is much more challenging to answer. We are as far from the first episode of AVGN as that video was from the launch of the Famicom in Japan. Comedy videos are being made about how old Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is. Xbox is asking players on X (formerly Twitter) if they’re nostalgic about game franchises that all started in 2000 or later.
“Retro game” is still a term commonly used in the video game space. It’s the namesake behind magazines, Reddit communities, and even used to describe games intentionally made to look like they were pulled from an older console. What we actually consider retro is evolving, though. New games like Born of Bread and Akimbot are inspired by PS2 and GameCube-era titles like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Ratchet & Clank, instead of 2D side-scrollers from the ’80s. There’s a new wave of nostalgia rolling in for platforms that may not feel very old to those who grew up with them.
So what constitutes a “retro game” in 2024 when the bar is constantly moving? I spoke to multiple game developers in search of a more exact definition. That turned out to be somewhat of a fool’s errand. While there’s some general agreement on what makes a something “retro,” almost everyone has a different interpretation based on their personal experiences and nostalgia. The fact that “retro game” is so nebulous to define might just be what gives the term meaning to each of us.
What is retro?
Getting the basic definitions out of the way, Dave Oshry from Dusk and Gloomwood publisher New Blood Interactive tells Digital Trends that retro’s outright definition is “imitative of a style or fashion from the recent past.” From a scholarly perspective, Retro: The Culture of Revival from Purchase College Art History professor Elizabeth Guffey argues that retro has multiple definitions and can be a shorthand for old, social conservatism, technological obsolescence, and an overall “rejection of modernity.” While Guffey doesn’t directly address retro video games, those last two examples most closely connect to the medium.
The term retro game first gained popularity in the 2000s. The world just entered the 3D era of gaming and the pixelated games on platforms from the 1970s to 1990s were gaining a nostalgic appeal. Content creators like AVGN caught on to that wave, making videos for people enjoyed reminiscing about the technologically limited games from their childhood. Now that tech advancements of each console generation have begun to plateau and many developers make their games look or feel like games from decades ago, the term retro game becomes much more complicated to define.
Today, more people are looking back on that early-2000s era in the same way gamers then looked back on titles from 20 years prior. I posited my “What is retro?” question on X (formerly Twitter) and got diverse responses. While many said it only applied to games that were 20 years or older, everyone who responded had a slightly different interpretation. Some even cited games from 10 years ago. Even the official Discord for the Retro Gaming Network community admits in its FAQ that “The term ‘retro’ is subjective” and that “what is retro for one may not seem retro to another.” Nobody seems to agree on one clear definition.
Game developers define retro
Some developers I spoke to are quite clear about what they think qualifies a game as retro. “A retro game is one that evokes a style or feeling from the ’80s, ’90s, or even 2000s now,” Oshry tells me. “Anything from Atari-style games to games imitating the original Half-Life can be considered retro these days, especially since we’re still a fairly young industry.” Oshry’s comments line up with some of the sentiments I saw on X and even heard from other developers. On the other hand, Volgarr the Viking 2 creative director Kris Dürrschimdt tells me he doesn’t consider some older games retro because they still play well today, like chess or checkers.
Insight from Nicolas Lamarche, CEO of Born of Bread developer WildArts Inc., indicates that some developers think the feeling that older games invoke is just as crucial as the timeframe. “The definition of ‘retro’ for video games can vary, but I’d say it generally refers to games that evoke a sense of nostalgia while belonging to an older generation of gaming technology and design,” Lamarche tells Digital Trends. With those responses in mind, I went to two studios that I consider the current kings of the retro remaster — Nightdive Studios and Digital Eclipse — to see what each studio considers retro or classic at a high level.
We don’t want people to focus on how old some games are, but how important they are …
Nightdive is best known for its remasters of shooters like Star Wars: Dark Forces and Powerslave, while Digital Eclipse trail-blazed a new kind of interactive gaming documentary with releases like Atari 50 and The Making of Karateka. Both studios have a complex relationship with terms like classic or retro. Nightdive Director of Business Development Larry Kuperman told me that Nightdive “does not want to be the arbiter of what a classic game is” but outlined what the studio looks for in the games it remasters.
That includes the game’s age, whether it’s playable with today’s technology, the impact upon its release, and if someone on the team is passionate about it. Those feel like strong guidelines to use when determining a game is retro, even though Kuperman admits that these rules aren’t “inflexible.”
I was more surprised when Mike Mika, a longtime game developer and studio head at Digital Eclipse, told me that he outright rejects using “classic” and “retro” when describing the games Digital Eclipse works with.
“They’re perfectly fine words, but they’re not our mission as a company,” Mika tells Digital Trends. “The most analogous words we could use would be ‘important’ and ‘at risk.’ We don’t want people to focus on how old some games are, but how important they are and their place in history. We’re not the only ones that do this, of course. There are great institutions and developers who do incredible work and inspire us every day. It’s all part of a greater mission to build an appreciation for the history of the game industry and the people that built it and to encourage more people to support the efforts of game preservation while having fun doing it.”
Throwing it back
The term “retro” gets even more complicated with video games because it has become a colloquial title to describe a style of game. Some studios intentionally make their games feel like they released several consoles generations ago. Does their existence affect what should be considered a retro game? I asked Oshry and Lamarche if they consider their studios’ games to be retro throwbacks, and both agreed, with the latter saying Born of Bread “strongly evokes the look and feel of older titles while leveraging modern technology.”
I think about the games I played when I was growing up, about the people I played them with, and the impact they had on my life.
Adding to the confusion was Null Games, the publisher behind games like Streetdog BMX and Athena Crisis and a self-described “indie publisher of modern retro games that put the player first.” Modern retro is a bit of an oxymoron, so I asked the studio to define that further. Null Games’ Head of Community Matthew Rorie tells Digital Trends that the studio is “particularly drawn to the ethos and motivations behind” retro games.
“Modern retro games, by our own loose definition at Null, harken back to games of yesteryear, without funneling most efforts into just nailing a visual aesthetic — although that can sometimes be a critical part of modern retro as well,” Rorie says. “Modern retro games ideally excite those old enough to remember the inspirations while lowering the barrier of entry for younger generations to engage in what made ‘old’ games so great.”
Still, there are developers like Durrschmidt who avoid calling throwback games like Volgarr the Viking 2 retro because their throwback feel comes from intentional artistic choices. Producer Calvin Vu tells me that the term “retro” was a “moving target” for the team. That term helped me come to an important realization: While we can guesstimate specific dates or times to set up parameters for what a retro game is, it’s not a term that should be neatly defined.
It’s all nostalgia
I grew up on systems like the original Xbox and Game Boy Advance, so I consider those games retro. Some older game developers I talked to more immediately described games from the early ’90s or before as retro. I got so many differing perspectives because everyone is nostalgic for different things. Retro: The Culture of Revival claims that its titular word “considers the recent past with unsentimental nostalgia,” but retro games add the sentimentality back in.
A recent report by the Entertainment Software Association says that “nostalgia plays a large role in motivating gameplay.” Null Games’ comments allude to a yearning for games of years past free of microtransactions. Nightdive Studios says some of its deeper cut remasters like Po’ed: Definitive Edition resonate because “it often turns out that many fans appreciate a title that they may have not known about, a game that ‘flew under the radar,’ so to speak.”
What constitutes a retro game will constantly evolve because what people are nostalgic for will also change. AVGN struck a chord because he reminded viewers of some of the weirdest or most frustrating games of their childhoods. In 2024, games like Born of Bread resonate because they call back to the good old days of series like Paper Mario. That’s ultimately the line of reasoning Digital Eclipse’s Mika also landed on when trying to define retro in a clinical manner; it’s something much more personal.
“Whenever I think about that word, I think about the games I played when I was growing up, about the people I played them with, and the impact they had on my life,” Mika says. “There is shared knowledge each generation has in regards to the games we played at specific times in our lives. People in my generation know the joy of playing split-screen GoldenEye 007 or playing 16-player Halo on four Xboxes. Whenever I think of the word retro, I think of a time in my life that games had a tremendous impact on me. I think that’s why ‘retro’ products hit so hard: They are like a warm nostalgic blanket and hard to say no to.”
With so many 20-something gamers out there, “retro game” is now a term that can safely apply to the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. The umbrella has grown wider, and it’ll only get wider. This is a conversation that we can revisit every five or 10 years to get a completely new set of answers. That’s a good thing because it shows that the video game industry is constantly evolving while maintaining respect for what came before. Everyone reading this might have a slightly different definition of what they consider a retro game or retro throwback, and that’s how it should be.
