Is it the age of the game? Is it the generation of the console you play on? Is it a combination of the two?
I recently learned about an ongoing commercial development scene for the NES long past when Nintendo dropped official support for it, and it got me wondering about this. There are new games still being published for the NES that I can buy as a physical cartridge. I bought one last month in person from a physical store.
It feels retro to play this game on original hardware, but in reality it didn't exist until 2021. Does the fact I can play it on an NES make it retro, or does the game being only 2 years old mean that it's clearly not?
On the other hand, classic games are re-released in collections on modern systems all the time. These games definitely feel retro, but the console you're playing on certainly isn't.
Is there anywhere a line can be definitively drawn here, or is retro gaming more of a feeling than something that can be locked down to one definition? I wanted to get some opinions on this, what do you guys think?
Since retro gaming tends to include modern games made in a retro style, I'd say it's more about the aesthetic and overall design philosophy of the game than anything else. No, I highly doubt any definitive lines can ever be drawn, and they'll steadily move over time anyway.
You consider new games that try to look old to be retro? That's really strange. I don't think that's the case at all. I don't think Cave Story is a retro game, and it's already pretty old. That's just my opinion though.
While you say that the line for what is 'retro' or not will continue moving. I feel like it might stop someday. Most likely with the Xbox One/PS4 generation, since for the foreseeable future, they might end up getting backwards compatibility, now that game consoles have decided to embrace the fact that they're just computers. It's possible we've hit the end of retro games. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part, though.