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Discussion The Guardian: Younger Generations Are Embracing Retro Games

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www.theguardian.com

Why are younger generations embracing the retro game revival?

Retro video games and aesthetics are having a moment, but it’s not just gen X and older millennials reliving their heyday: younger millennials and gen Z are getting in on the nostalgia too
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

On TikTok, #retrogaming videos have amassed over 6bn views. On YouTube, uploads have increased 1,000-fold. Spotify users are creating 50% more retro-gaming-themed playlists than they were at this time last year, and live streamers are cashing in on the repetitive catchphrases and mechanical movements of NPCs (non-player characters). So why, in this age of hyperrealistic graphics and ever-expanding technological possibility, are younger generations captivated by an era of technological limitation?


For Kingsley Ellis, a millennial raised on the bleeps and bloops of Sega Mega Drives and N64 cartridges, the allure of retro gaming is simple. “It’s all about the nostalgia,” says Ellis, whose TikTok account, UnPacked, has 1.5 million followers. He says his interest lies mostly in old gaming hardware. His most-watched videos revisit the gloriously bizarre world of retro peripherals – those often ridiculous attachments designed to enhance (or overengineer) the gaming experience, such as screen magnifiers and foldout speakers clipped on to consoles.
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This sentiment seems to resonate with a growing segment of gen Z and gen Alpha, too. The popularity of channels such as Ellis’s reflect a broader fascination with retro tech that’s evident in the rise of reaction videos, the resurgence of web 1.0-era Frutiger Aero aesthetics (think futuristic optimism, glossy buttons, gradients and Windows XP screensavers), a filter transforming people into PS2 characters, and the increasing adoption of Y2K-era devices by young consumers. Last year, Urban Outfitters sold out stock of refurbished iPod Minis, and a 20-year-old Olympus digital camera was dubbed the “hottest gen Z gadget”. Among the ubiquity and instant gratification of tech today, Ellis suggests that the charming limitations of retro devices foster a “hack and discover” mentality that leads to a longer-term satisfaction.

Thanks to the memetic nature of the modern internet, this thrill of discovery extends beyond gameplay, as video game soundtracks and graphics increasingly find life in new contexts. Gaming has long been a source of inspiration for artists – think Jay-Z’s Golden Axe sample on Money, Cash, Hoes; Lil B’s use of Masashi Hamauzu’s Final Fantasy score; and D Double E’s Street Fighter Riddim. On the independent online radio platform NTS, which boasts a dedicated audience of millions, video game music is part of regular programming. NTS’s monthly Otaku show dives into specific games or themes, from iconic franchises such as The Legend of Zelda to the history of video game sampling in rap.
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In a world of relentless technological advances and increasing AI anxiety, Rivera wonders whether gen Z’s affinity for retro gaming is connected to its stability. “It provides a constant – it’s not going to morph into something else tomorrow,” she says. Given the continually disrupted times that this generation has grown up in, it’s not hard to see why younger players might find something comforting and unthreatening in pixelated graphics, the janky character animations of an early Grand Theft Auto, or ever-predictable NPC soundbites.

And as technology fixates on the latest and greatest, retro gaming offers a refreshing break, perhaps a comforting idealisation of simpler times. But more than that, the games of the 80s and 90s are the foundation on which the gaming giants of today were built. “The music, the graphics, the dialogue, the clothes – it’s a whole experience,” says Gabi. “There is a deeper cultural significance. It’s a piece of history.”
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I definitely see this firsthand - teenagers emulating N64 games on their laptops, watching YouTube personalities talk about retro gaming, for a medium that often has publishers making it difficult to access and play older games, it's great to see fans both old and young putting in the work to keep the history alive. I often feel online video game discussion trends towards pushing for bigger tech and considering anything more than half a decade old as "outdated" and I hope retro gaming continues to flourish and grow.
 
This isn't all that surprising if you think about it. In music, people are listening to vinyl and cassettes (yes, cassettes are selling again!), so it makes sense that in another pop culture medium what's old is becoming new again.
 
As someone who is Gen Z, old games tend to be far better than New games. They are simpler, have far more satisfying gameplay loops, and aren't riddled with DLC and Micro transactions.

To be frank, it's genuinely hard when you have a genre mismatch. For example, I have no affinity for shooters, but there are a good amount of modern shooters I can get into. But something like the original doom I just can't. Except for Halo, despite being ancient, the Halo games genuinely are better than pretty much any shooter now or back then.

But when you have a genre you have affinity for, like platformers, or a series you like. It's some truly amazing content. Playing retro Zelda games like OoT, Majoras Mask, Wind Waker, Skyward Sword, and Twilight Princess are amazing. It's so much content too, when you add them up together. Someone who is just getting into Zelda with BotW and TOTK have so much to discover.
 
Not really shocking that people are getting into one of the cheapest ways to play games as AAA games currently are being raised in price for expensive hardware. Even if certain games are being jacked up in price, there's always a pretty tempting elephant in the room that can probably be run on even a cheap laptop or your phone.
 
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Jahranimo said:
Yeah I think this also falls under the 90s/2000s nostalgia wave happening as well.
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Hm, 2000s nostalgia I can see, but 90s nostalgia for gen z? Some of gen z was pooping their diapers back then, the rest wasn't born yet. Is there a documented 90s nostalgia among my generation? I always assumed it was millennials (maybe some gen X) that fueled this nostalgia wave.

Edit: Upon reading the dictionary, it would appear that, contrary to my previous understanding, the term nostalgia doesn't necessarily apply to a time that you have lived through yourself. So I guess it could be applicable.
 
Zedark said:
Hm, 2000s nostalgia I can see, but 90s nostalgia for gen z? Some of gen z was pooping their diapers back then, the rest wasn't born yet. Is there a documented 90s nostalgia among my generation? I always assumed it was millennials (maybe some gen X) that fueled this nostalgia wave.
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There’s a huge curiosity among Gen Z and Alpha of simpler times in the 90s. It’s practically nostalgia that they will never know. Back when kids were allowed to be kids, you could walk the street in neighborhoods, you could afford a house, etc.
 
You might be tempted to say "I was born in the wrong generation", but remember, my fellow zoomers: one Final Fantasy "III" SNES cart was like $80. Without adjusting for inflation. The past has been thrown into capitalism's landfill, and garbage is cheap. Join the raccoons and live happily.
 
Once you get a taste of something you like, you need more and you start looking at older titles.... We all did this. I was not alive in the NES era lol
 
I mean, yeah, obviously. Classic games are classic for a reason.

Even as a kid, most of the games I gravitated to were older than I was, with a lot of NES and Genesis games from before I was born. Nevermind things like text adventures or Apple II games! They still kicked ass though, and discovering them by looking around the internet and learning about early emulators like Nester or SMYGB was how I first experienced a lot of games. I'm almost envious of how easy it is for kids nowadays to just get NSO and have games like Phantasy Star IV, Alien Soldier, Link's Awakening, and Harvest Moon 64 just ready to be played for the first time without having to vote for a random website littered with hentai ads on a ranking list before you could get at those sweet, sweet zip files.
 
Not that surprising. Plenty of music, movies, TV shows, books etc. have stood the test of time. Why not video games? The only novelty here might be the relative newness of the medium.
 
Yamanoi said:
The last true Zelda game was also 2013 so I don't blame them.
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Last year, Urban Outfitters sold out stock of refurbished iPod Minis, and a 20-year-old Olympus digital camera was dubbed the “hottest gen Z gadget”. Among the ubiquity and instant gratification of tech today, Ellis suggests that the charming limitations of retro devices foster a “hack and discover” mentality that leads to a longer-term satisfaction.
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I've seen this first hand and with cameras also (e.g. Fujifilm X100 or instax). There's a certain pursuit of Aesthetics of things that aged well of that time period, while also embracing some of the manual or less automatic feeling with tech.

One aspect of the report is it's heavily reliant on the attention certain topics receive on Social media. So the quantification can be skewed towards views or watches and not much active research is done on whether there's a significant uptick in sales, e.g. through stores that carry the product. I know that retro store games, that still have older-gen games are being visited, but you wouldn't be able to find many of these retro games (e.g. the video links towards someone playing Pokemon Silver) for a reasonable price. I think I'm just at the cutoff for Gen Z, but I do notice more appreciation of tech around that time period.

So what I'm curious about is whether there's an active pursuit of retro gaming (e.g. perhaps through those handhelds that emulate old games) or the appropriate hardware, whose stock has been dwindling. Moreover, how much catering is there for accuracy vs. just being able to play those retro games. I don't know how good the sales were of those mini retro consoles, but I imagine if it were in a handheld form it might have done even better?
The cutoff at X amount of games also didn't help.

One aspect or niche/underdocumented aesthetic is the cosy gaming on YT. I've seen many videos about that, which are combined with a certain ambience and it's an interesting trend IMO.
edit: obligatory; ☝️🤓
 
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Well, my 21 year old brother still plays Halo:Reach, so I guess.
 
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As an older Gen Z growing up in the early 2000s retro gaming was made very accessible through emulation on PC, a lot of fellow peers with reluctant parents ended up playing 'free' games downloaded from the Internet and many of those were repackaged ROMs of classic games.

So I grew up with a lot of classic titles but decades removed from their original releases. I loved the Genesis Sonic titles but had no idea what a Genesis was, all I downloaded was some executable that launched the games.

The low processing and small file sizes, made it very easy to just pick up and play these titles that were already suited to this sort of experience.

And now with disposable income I've splurged on several classic gaming handhelds, upscalers, a CRT monitor, etc. to enjoy these games in the proper context. My favorite games are retro ones and indie games that resemble them. The physical hardware is also fascinating on an aesthetic level, bespoke computers designed for specific purposes with a lot of proprietary I/O and reflective of their time period. I'm still on the fence about getting a MiSTER lol
 
I'm sure the rise of emulation handhelds on like the Miyoo Mini and RG35xx is feeding this too. I know such things are really popular on tiktok and help introduce kids to some of the all time greats.
 
Honestly, my backlogs extends decades, including into my childhood, and given the current state of gaming from major developers, this is hardly a shocker. I have more fond memories of older games than I do newer ones (baring some exceptions), and a lot of this goes to most of the major parties in the industry focusing on chasing a hollywood experience in their video games.
 
Mendinso said:
Honestly, my backlogs extends decades, including into my childhood, and given the current state of gaming from major developers, this is hardly a shocker. I have more fond memories of older games than I do newer ones (baring some exceptions), and a lot of this goes to most of the major parties in the industry focusing on chasing a hollywood experience in their video games.
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This is also the case for me in other mediums. I’ve spent the last 3 months watching Star Trek TNG (literally on the last episode) and I have other older shows/games/manga/etc. I’ve been going through. Modern entertainment industries feel dire in certain ways but there’s so much old stuff out there that I don’t anticipate running out of things to experience.
 
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Having been replaying SSX Tricky on my Gamecube (and even with a friend sitting beside me for some 1 on 1), it only solidifies how true this article is. It's incredible how an arcade snowboarder from 2001 still holds up with near-rock solid 60fps in splitscreen and offers widescreen support. A remarkably diverse cast of ages, genders, and nationalities, and just oozing personality picking one damn classic song in Run-DMC's It's Tricky and with some wacky physics-defying moves that somehow no matter how spine-cracking/skull-shattering you screw up, it's a dumb quip about how you suck after getting back up and picking up speed again.

All the content is included on disc, it feels content complete, and with no patches available their QA was thorough and the glitches are so few and far between that I can only think of some minor graphical clips that do not impact gameplay whatsoever. Maybe it is nostalgia talking when there's no comparable gaming experience on the market right now, but even from a technical perspective it was what sold console gaming to me over PC; pop in a disc and you didn't have to fiddle with a million different graphical settings or wait half an hour for a 2.5GB patch to download day one. It just worked. Can't even get that experience on consoles anymore.
 
Jahranimo said:
Oh god, that would be maddening for me lol. In hindsight I'm glad I couldn't play games all the time until late high school lol.
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I literally crossed off a game I was struggling with since 2000~ (SaGa Frontier II) not that long ago, and it was definitely wild to be able to do that. There's still plenty of other things I've still not, but eventually...
 
Thanks to the memetic nature of the modern internet, this thrill of discovery extends beyond gameplay, as video game soundtracks and graphics increasingly find life in new contexts.
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I was there for the 8-bit and 16-bit era first time around, but a NES game in 1991 was £40, a GB game was £25 and a SNES game was £45-£65 back then. We didn’t have a huge rental culture either, and tons of games didn’t even release here. As such, I could go an entire console generation owning maybe ten games and having played another ten at my friends houses, that I wouldn’t waste a precious game purchase/gift on something I could play there. So the ‘thrill of discovery’ remains for me for libraries hundreds of games deep. I played NES games in the 2010s I didn’t even know existed, and plenty of SNES rpgs I only got to play decades later.
 
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