I have a theory that what we refer to as retro doesn’t advance by a year every year. In the same way words like “antique” and “vintage” bring about specific time periods and aesthetics, “retro” does as well. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass here, but say it’s like every three years that go by one year is added to what we call retro. That would mean it would take 15 years from the time we begin viewing SNES as retro to view PS1 as retro because they were released five years apart. So, if we say PS1 is retro now, that would mean we began to view SNES as retro in 2009. This sounds right, maybe? It’s hard to put myself back in that time period, but I definitely would’ve called NES games retro in 2009, but SNES it’s harder to say.
This methodology is flawed because of “retro” is tied to an aesthetic or time period then at some point nothing new will ever be considered “retro” and we’d eventually begin using a different term to refer to things from later.
A good example is “oldies” on the Radio. Nothing newer is really entering the group of songs we consider oldies.
In the same way words like “antique” and “vintage” bring about specific time periods and aesthetics, “retro” does as well.
In my opinion, “retro” gaming is a misnomer and “vintage” is more fitting for what people usually mean. Retro is something modern or recent made in an older style. Actual old stuff is “vintage”. So a game like UFO 50 is actual retro gaming; of course the definition gets more fuzzy when you look at ROM hacks that don’t even work on the original hardware of the base ROM. But if you buy an original old console and play the games from back then, that’s not really retro by the original definition.
However, I’m well aware that this ship has sailed
To me, it’s less about the time since the console and more about what the average game on the console looked like. While I personally range from “don’t mind” to “quite enjoy” older graphics including pixel art and low poly 3D, the average N64 honestly looked pretty awful in comparison to modern 3D graphics. In Super Mario 64, Bob Omb Battlefield was 2,352 polygons total, compared to an average of 60,000 per level in Super Mario Sunshine. Not to mention all of the additional effects that the GC was able to pull off on top of just raw polygon counts.
The PS1 to PS2 transition had a similar leap in graphical fidelity, though the last major PS1 titles certainly looked a lot closer to what the early PS2 titles did at the time. While I think Final Fantasy 9 looks amazing and it sometimes surprises me that it’s a PS1 title, I think Final Fantasy 7 looked closer (than at least 9 does) to what the average PS1 title looked like graphic wise and the difference in quality between it and Final Fantasy 10 is an incredible leap.
I guess you could also make the argument that retro games are the ones that were primarily designed for being played on a CRT in which the sixth generation of consoles (GameCube, PS2, original Xbox) all would fall under compared to the next generation that at least with the PS3 and Xbox 360 both largely tried to push a new “HD era”. But personally I still see the leap between 5th and 6th generation to be probably the biggest leap in graphical fidelity we’ve ever had and to me that makes it the end cap for the retro console.
Though I do know a bit of that is because of the jump to 3D did kinda take us back a few steps in graphics…
