Michael Fraser works with people struggling with video game addiction, but he’s a proponent of healthy gaming. He’s currently in a Donkey Kong–playing phase with his 13- and 10-year old children. “That was my favorite game when I was their age,” he says. “I do think there’s a nostalgia to playing. The look, the music, and the feel of the game.”
Playing older games—or games made to look retro—transport the gamer. “It takes me back to a simpler time when games were two-dimensional, the music was simple, and yet it was still a lot of fun to play,” says Fraser. “My daughter made a certain move on the third board of Donkey Kong that I forgot all about, and memories flooded through my mind of when my friends and I first discovered that move.”
Donkey Kong and other video games from childhood have a way of sticking with you, like the waxy sweet smell of a fresh Fruit Roll-up. That’s evidenced in the games hitting the market today—“old-looking” games are finding fans in 2021. In the same way that cell phone apps are designed to be addictive and resemble the psychological mechanisms that draw people to slot machines, new games designed to look like 8-bit or 16-bit games are created to sate your appetite for nostalgia.
wired.com
https://www.wired.com/story/why-retro-looking-games-get-so-much-love/