Retro games

Ocean’s Heart, a 2-D Action RPG released in January, and similar games, play to this brain chemistry and desire for the familiar. Video games that look like 8-bit or 16-bit-pixel creations, such as Bit Trip Runner, are built for gamers who want a new, well-developed game with higher replay-ability, but an older-looking design and sound that reminds them of being a kid.

The late Oliver Sacks wrote in his seminal book Musicophilia, “Music can pierce the heart directly.” The music from older games creates a subconscious emotional tug that brings us back to them—in much the same way that hearing a favorite song from your high school days puts you back in that moment. The music and design of retro games have the ability to imprint on a young gamer’s heart.

Amid unstable pandemic days, there’s still happiness to be found. For many, it comes in the form of these retro and retro-looking games. A welcome respite from a chaotic world, these games—and their sounds—can pierce the heart, as Sacks said, and instill a rare, perfect joy.

wired.com

 

The pleasure response is found in children and adults. But when we play a game from childhood, or even one that looks like a game from that time, there’s a compounding effect of pleasure. “The reward pathways are more sensitive in children and adolescents than in adults,” says Woog. “So when these childhood games are played as an adult, the pleasure response from the past adds to the current experience.”

Personal identity is also a potent force, as well as a predictor of behavior. If you identify as someone who is responsible, you behave responsibly. If you call yourself a risk-taker, you take risks. Someone who identified as a successful gamer as a kid—or merely a passionate one—may be tied to that as an adult. Woog says the pleasure response is even stronger in these types of people. “This would be especially true if, as a child, they were particularly successful at the game, or at least remembered it that way.”

“Successful life experiences become part of our identity,” says Woog. “This success identity, when activated while playing childhood video games, would further enhance the experience. Nostalgic play may also recall positive childhood experiences unrelated to gaming. Evoking these when playing childhood video games could result in a boost to mood, especially if the individual is experiencing negative mood states such as sadness or depression.”

During a global pandemic, and the subsequent three-fold increase in depression symptoms, it’s no wonder that many are finding comfort in older games and retro-looking ones. Older games instill perseverance, too, to help get through tough times. “There’s something about the old-school games,” Fraser says. “You only got three lives, you needed to earn a new life if you performed well. I talk to my kids about this with a strange sense of pride. I grew up playing games that taught patience and grit.”

wired.com

https://www.wired.com/story/why-retro-looking-games-get-so-much-love/

From the visual outset, the concept of nostalgia seems obvious. You see a game you played as a kid—or a game that looks like one you played as a kid—so it triggers happy memories. But let’s pull back the curtain: Why does your brain want to play this game, exactly?

SohoMD cofounder Jacques Jospitre Jr. says retro games have a dual appeal: Intrinsic and extrinsic properties that explain their popularity. “The intrinsic aspects have to do with classic gameplay that makes it a timeless experience, like chess,” he says. “Along with the extrinsic aspects of the game, where it’s associated with positive past experiences, in terms of people and places, making it a trigger for positive emotions. Some combination of both factors is what is driving the renewed interest in the genre.”

“Retro gaming may trigger nostalgic feelings, emotions, and thoughts,” explained Michael Feldmeier, a psychiatrist at Level Up Mental Health. “This is a great example of what happens when the memory system and the rewards system of the brain work together. A positive memory can be triggered by a sound, a smell, a certain image, or a thought. This in turn triggers a person's reward center in their brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter involved in pleasure and salience. People can gravitate towards retro gaming as they are seeking a known trigger for a positive emotional response.”

“Nostalgia is also thought to be important in emotional resilience,” says Feldmeier. “By looking at the past, one can sometimes look to the future even when getting bogged down by the pain of the present.  If someone can be reminded of a better time, they may hold out hope for the future.”

Gaming is strongly linked to the brain’s reward pathways. Kenneth Woog of the Computer Addiction Treatment Program in Lake Forest, California, says, “Brain imaging over the past decade has confirmed that video game play activates the reward pathways—pleasure centers—of the brain. These primitive mid-brain structures record this through neural connections, associating the behavior (or substance) with the relative pleasure response.”

wired.com

https://www.wired.com/story/why-retro-looking-games-get-so-much-love/

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/

As a young and fair-weather gamer, I loved playing Super Mario Brothers because it was my older brother’s favorite game, and I wanted to be just like him. I can still hear the 8-bit theme song in my head, and I’m guessing you can too, if you played Mario as a kid.

“Bah dat dat doo dat dat doo,” goes the classic, repetitive, 1985 jam. The ubiquity of those notes in many of our childhoods was as constant as a hug from grandma, a pack of Gushers after school, or Saturday morning cartoons. Retro games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and The Legend of Zelda are comfort food for gamers.

Chris Schranck, aka FutureManGaming on Twitch, says, “I think a big part of playing retro games is just the feel of the game.” Schranck, 33, played Mario as a kid in Missouri so much that his mom set an egg timer to limit his gameplay in the mornings before school. He’s currently playing Batman: Arkham Knight.

“Playing retro games,” says Schranck, “you’re happy to be feeling like a kid again. As an adult, you have all these responsibilities and anxieties, and if you can just find a way to forget about that, even just for 15 minutes, it can help. I think if you can find something, anything, that can help you feel good, that’s a good thing. Retro games evoke these happy memories. Being a kid, opening up that new game or console on Christmas. How it looks, the beautiful pixel art. It’s the nostalgia, and remembering being young again.”

Amanda Lim, a 25-year-old competitive gamer in Singapore, also loved Mario as a kid because it was “cute and fun.” But she prefers FPS games these days and is currently playing Valorant. GameBoy was a pivotal part of her early gaming years. “Some people’s passion is being a gamer,” says Lim, “and gaming doesn’t restrict to age limit.”

wired.com

https://www.wired.com/story/why-retro-looking-games-get-so-much-love/

The whole headlong run into faster/more powerful/more complicated is rooted in something larger than gaming. The concept of innovation and progress have become so ingrained in us as a people, that we tend to view it as a natural given, like gravity. We expect it, and consider it an irresistible force. This has turned us into a bunch of neophiles - people obsessed with novelty.

This obsession was folded into marketing and advertising, creating a steady drumbeat that makes people anticipate the “next thing,” and fear being “left behind.” Many products have generated revenue off of this fear and expectation, without actually bringing anything really compelling to the latest iteration. We just expect it, like a pack of Pavlovian dogs.

This drumbeat of progress tells us that the new thing is naturally better. Sometimes it really is an innovation, and sometimes it’s a bunch of hype. But we’ve been on this ride for so long, that now it’s just part of how we look at things. The idea of inevitable forward motion in all things - progress - has take on mythic proportions, and shapes culture in ways that can be hard to recognize because they are so familiar to us. This mythic quality doesn’t mean that progress doesn’t exist, because of course, it does. What it means is that the way our expectation has been trained, and the way in which we relate to the new through that expectation, has distorted the way we evaluate whether something is or is not actual progress.

Another important consideration is that we’ve been so trained to excitedly run to the next thing, and the pace of cultural change has so increased, that we do a lot less reflection and long-term follow-up evaluation than we should. New steps are very often follow-ons to previous changes that we haven’t really evaluated. We end up with a pile of poorly-examined premises we’re building on.

This elevation of change also trains people to look upon the past with derision. Look around, and you’ll see this kind of past-deriding everywhere. It’s a common-enough formula in viral social media posts - get some yuks by laughing at how silly that old stuff was! It shows up in advertising all the time, especially when tech is being advertised. It’s not just the speed and power of our silicon and software, but the paradigms that shape its purpose and use. Unfortunately, our reflexive derision of the past makes us less likely to revisit it and re-evaluate the paths we’ve taken.

Yes - there are many ways in which newer things are demonstrably better. They help us perform some task more accurately, or efficiently. But that leads me to the crux of this thing:

How are we defining “better?”

What happens when we realize the yardstick we’ve been using to measure “better” is not what we thought it was? When we realize that this particular measure of overall improvement is only partial, and at times arbitrary? Even some of our tried and true “objective standards,” like the ones I mentioned above: accuracy and efficiency… They measure specific aspects of an experience, but do they objectively hold a lock on the definition of better? If they do, why are vinyl records so popular right now? Clearly, even these sacred measurements are imperfect. Vinyl lovers have decided that records are better in some key ways, in spite of (and also because of) not being more accurate (in sound fidelity) or efficient (as a means of playback). Alternate criteria for “better” in this case include things like having a physical object, the “ritual” aspect of getting a record out, cleaning it, placing the tone arm, flipping to the other side... Even the primitive method of record grooves mechanically recreating vibrations in a stylus, is part of the charm. We just like it that way.

It’s at this point that we realize that this headlong run into an arbitrary future defined by narrow focuses, can put the blinders on us. We need to look around and ask not if something is “better” according to the criteria marketed to us, but according to more considered criteria that involve overall quality of experience, and by extension, life.

This isn’t a novel idea. Giants of the tech world, such as Jaron Lanier (founding father of virtual reality and Silicon Valley insider) have been actively questioning various aspects of tech world “progress” for years now - questioning fundamental choices, and how “In Tech We Trust” has directed cultural trajectories in negative directions.

Popular Linux insider and spokesperson Bryan Lunduke has done informal self-experiments, such as the one where he decided to do all of his computing for a month according to the paradigms of 1989. He emerged with some interesting insights, and found himself overall happier, and more relaxed. His takeaway was that he liked the idea of going back to certain ways of thinking about and relating to technology, and wanted to bring those reclaimed values into the present.

Once we prick this mythic bubble, we can stop being so focused on short-sighted understandings, look around, and see a much bigger world around us. It’s a world composed of entire cultural histories waiting to be explored, and their discarded benefits reclaimed. I believe our best future requires key ingredients we need to retrieve from our past.

In addition to accuracy and efficiency, another of the criteria we have been sold on is the idea of sophistication. We love that our entertainments have become so big, so richly envisioned, so epic! We’re at a point now where digital entertainment (gaming especially) has become so immersive and rich, it can nearly replace your real life. We need to recognize that right now, it is a well-documented fact that modern tech has deployed an army of psychological manipulators against us - from the macro to the micro - making their offerings both addictive and manipulative.

Consider also that we know smartphones, apps, and social media are intentionally designed to be addictive - not just enjoyable, but inducing compulsive behavior. Facebook, the masters of addictive manipulation, are pushing hard on VR gaming. Surely, some future entertainment mashing up VR, AI, and addictive manipulations is being cooked up into a culmination that everyone will have been trained to find irresistible.

Is that really the future we want?

You can save some real coin with retro gaming. Consoles are routinely under $100 (commonly around $75, with warranty), or less if you want to buy direct from a private seller. Most cartridges for popular systems are in the less-than-$10 range. If you’re wise, and willing to take steps to get the best prices, you can get a lot of bang for your buck.

Everyone likes to save money, and an entertainment experience with a lower total cost of ownership is a nice plus, but there’s another subtler benefit here as well. Cheaper costs mean lower risks. You can snag a handful of retro game cartridges for less than the cost of one new game on a contemporary system. I’ll assume that you’re googling the games before you buy them to avoid stinkers, but walking out with that handful of game carts leaves you with much lower total risk per game. It wasn’t great? Well, it was $3. That $5 one was great? Big win.

This total cost of ownership, and lower risk-per-game can mean a good fit for kids, too. Plus, no in-game upsells that the kiddos come to you wanting.

One last thought here on money: I’m having a blast playing games that are 40 years old, but many contemporary games are pushing toward an online, multiplayer focus. This requires pricey technical infrastructure to support (servers to handle all of the online components). Those servers only make sense when the game is making enough revenue to pay for them, the staff required to program and support all of that, AND make a profit. When those numbers change, servers don’t stick around. For games that are built around online multiplayer… that’s the end of the line. Will it be possible to play that stuff in 40 years? In 10 years?

retrogamestart.com

https://retrogamestart.com/answers/why-retro-video-gaming-so-popular-its-much-more-than-nostalgia

Here’s where a particular technological shortcoming offers a big upside. Old-school console games were not built around online play, the way contemporary ones are. This wasn’t a choice, but a byproduct of where technology was at the time. The effect of this baked-in characteristic turns out to be an interesting benefit: to play against friends, you have to actually get together, and sit down with one another. Add in the fact that cords on old controllers are kind of short, and you’re not only sitting in the same room, but relatively close to each other. Playing retro games can be very social, and not in the pseudo “social” sense of much interaction today where people do things separately and share them online.

Chomping down pizza, and rocking through a boisterous game of Atari’s Warlords with friends is a fantastically fun time. Gameplay is simple enough that no one can dominate by putting boatloads of time in to level up their skills. Variability due to surprises means that everyone stays on their toes. And being seated together around the TV means reactions and excitement are amped up - with a significant difference…

The separation of playing online, and the anonymity that often occurs in online play, work together to create a well documented spike in bad behavior. As long as “online” has existed (going back to the 80s, and BBSs), anonymous strangers coming together for interaction has meant people being less inhibited, and more likely to act in ways they wouldn’t act in person. Trolling is not new, and flame wars date back to the early days of online computing. Dropping the key elements that contribute to this can make a difference in the tone of play.

It isn’t about being unable to handle that behavior, it’s about wanting an experience that doesn’t have it as such a prominent feature.

In that real-world interaction, you are actually socializing, having an in-person, non-virtual shared experience, and you find a whole other dimension to your gaming enjoyment. I’m personally an introvert, but hanging with friends and having a noisy, fun time together, interspersed with shared food, drinks and other spontaneous tomfoolery, is something I really enjoy doing.

As an important note on this point - I recently had an online interaction with Tommy Tallarico, video game music composer who has worked on hundreds of games since the 1990s. He is the man behind the reboot of the Intellivision, which is slated for release in 2020. This single aspect of in-person play is so important to the Intellivision Amico, that there is no online play in their games. You can see the importance of this principle in the fact that their tagline is “Together Again.” It’s also noteworthy that several of my points are also echoed on their site as well. Clearly, people are seeing these issues, and Tommy & Co. are looking to address them by creating a brand new console that follows some of the key experience touchpoints as retro games. It’s new tech, deeply informed by wisdom reclaimed from old experiences.

As I hope I am making clear in this entire article, real advancement includes being able to go back and retrieve things you realize you’ve lost, but need. I believe that a modern console built with a retro philosophy makes the Intellivision Amico the most forward-thinking systems out there. This is because they are not just pushing the envelope based on what tech can do, but consciously shaping it based on what they believe would create better experiences - as measured by a more fully-dimensioned understanding of “better.”

retrogamestart.com

https://retrogamestart.com/answers/why-retro-video-gaming-so-popular-its-much-more-than-nostalgia

 

Console games, like other pursuits, have a culture. Because of the kinds of games that are so popular today, “PWNin’ n00bs” is a well-known activity. For the uninitiated, it means people who have dedicated tons of time to getting very good at the necessary skills in a head-to-head (usually combat) game, will often find enjoyment in mercilessly crushing those who have not dedicated such large chunks of their life to mastering the necessary game skills. With online competitive play being such a huge part of gaming, and games rewarding reflexes that are most often possessed by younger players, victory dances, trash talk, and rage quitting are a big part of gaming culture.

This aspect of play is the gamification of poking each other with sharp sticks. Fine if you like that sort of thing, but not everyone’s cup of tea.

And it’s not only the hyper-antagonistic pwnage that’s the issue, but with so many games being about hunting down and annihilating other players - usually looking down the barrel of a rifle - it just creates a certain tone of game. If that’s your thing, fine, but take a walk on the wild side, and try a completely different form of interaction.

This isn’t to say that competitive play and trained reflexes aren’t a big part of old-school video games, or that you won’t get trounced in an unbalanced matchup. But that shrill delight expressed when one player absolutely destroys and then humiliates another by rubbing their nose in it, is not a defining characteristic of the retro gaming culture the way it is with the “shooter game” -dominated landscape of today.

retrogamestart.com

https://retrogamestart.com/answers/why-retro-video-gaming-so-popular-its-much-more-than-nostalgia

As mentioned earlier, a game’s presentation - it’s interface - should be matched to the gameplay. But there is another angle here worth considering. We are 40+ years into video and computer gaming, and many of the things we’re seeing today are built on experiences that have come before. They are refinements of older approaches, and refinement is often a great thing. But we have seen such an increase in technological capability, that refinement has in many ways come to mean complication. Simple has evolved into sophisticated, because more sophisticated experiences become more possible as the underlying tech becomes more able.

For those who have been playing for years, all the complication can feel like enrichment. The experiences feel deeper, because they have more moving parts (in the gameplay, or in the interface, including the controllers above). This is simulationism at work again. Real life has tons of moving parts, so adding more nuances to each world, character, action, etc, makes the whole thing feel more real. BUT, at their heart, games abstract reality. Good abstraction (including the right things) is the target, not just sophisticated abstraction (including more things).

Yes - not all contemporary games ladle on fine-grained sophistication, but generally speaking, it is a common characteristic of the present era.

Now here’s where this sophistication comes home to roost, and knocks many people off their perch. Not everyone wants to have heaps of sophistication with loads of buttons, menus, actions, objectives, etc. Complicated games raise the bar to entry. While seasoned players feel it’s no big deal, this is because they are making use of their years of accumulated experience. A person who is brand new to gaming can often be overwhelmed by all the things they have to master to even become competent, much less good in a modern simulation game. Many people just don’t want to have to dedicate a whole portion of their life to getting good at sophisticated games with lots of moving parts. There are plenty of potential players who would have fun getting involved if it didn’t require so much.

So again, to be clear - sophistication is not bad, but it’s not always good, either.

Simpler games also mean easier pick-up-and-play. You can dip in, and back out of a simpler game much more quickly. Just last night, my 13 year old daughter and I wanted to play a little Atari before we closed out the night. We popped in Warlords, banged through half a dozen games, then moved on to Maze Craze, and played half a dozen of those.

retrogamestart.com

https://retrogamestart.com/answers/why-retro-video-gaming-so-popular-its-much-more-than-nostalgia