Yeah that’s the millennial perspective on retro gaming that held sway during the 2010s. Its time has passed, I’m sad to say. The 2010s were to the 80s/90s split as the 2020s are to the 90s/2000s split. The retro aesthetic of a lot of games now draws from the early 3D era, like SIGNALIS.
I completely missed out on the PS1 so the rise of all these faux-retro games with polygon jitter is honestly pretty cool. Helps that we’ve learned how to make games feel better than the first time they looked like this.
Meanwhile I, as someone who actually did play on PS1 as a kid, always try to get rid of polygon warping, dithering, etc while also cranking up the resolution when emulating PS1 games. Like the things that I liked about old games weren’t that they ran at 20 fps and were rendered at a postage stamp-sized resolution
I guess my point is that regardless of what particular label someone uses, the development of gaming can be split into various periods just like how the history of painting can be split into various periods. It’s just weird to have a floating label that basically means “old.” When I was a kid, “old games” were essentially just pre-1983 crash games while “modern games” were post-1983 crash games because gaming was only two decades old. But now, gaming is a little over half a century old at this point.
In the end, I think “retro” is used in gaming in the same way “classic” is used in film and movie. Casablanca and The Godfather are both classic films even though they have nothing in common outside of being old Hollywood films.
Classic seems to be a good word to use when trying to communicate considered good and worth talking about X years later where the line is arbitrary but X is probably something like 10 or 20 years. It’ll include items that truly stand the test of time and others that are incomprehensible/boring if you weren’t in it’s historical context to “get it”.
