What got you (or got you back) into retro gaming?

[arkasth]

I never really left retro gaming.
The reasons being: nostalgia, lack of money to spend / other life priorities, and because I genuinely love and have a real passion for old games.

 

[beefbowl]

I was an autistic kid with unsupervised internet access and a terrible computer, and I went places.

OMG maybe we are twins too? People are reconnecting with their lost family in this thread i love it

 

[Yousef Yousef]

I never really left retro gaming.
The reasons being: nostalgia, lack of money to spend / other life priorities, and because I genuinely love and have a real passion for old games.

Same, can’t buy new games anymore xD

 

[Vardalis]

I'd say it was the Raspberry Pi 3B. Around when it came out I was fascinated by the idea of turning it into a retro games console, and while I didn't play a ton of stuff on it in the end, it definitely got me into the idea of playing PS1 games, Genesis games, etc.

That and modern games slowly and steadily failing to capture any of my interest.

 

[Electronic Shuze]

every laptop ive owned is kinda garbage specs wise so i kinda got forced into playing older games regardless if i wanted to or not

 

[seaglass]

never really left it, but losing all my childhood games/consoles in a massive fire a few years back kicked my ass into gear about building and storing an extensive rom collection for myself. from there been more consistently revisiting old favorites and working through a backlog of games I never had the chance to play the first time 'round

 

[null_exe]

Me and my siblings have kind of always been into retro games. Growing up in the early 2000s we had an NES, SNES and a Sega Genesis along with most of the major Mario and Sonic titles for those consoles.

My mom would just buy whole lots of games for super cheap on eBay or games being sold from rental stores trying to get rid of their older titles so we had a pretty big library of games, most of them were pretty whatever licensed LJN and Acclaim games but we had some cool stuff like Splatterhouse 3 and Ristar.

We ended up losing most of those consoles (but not all the games somehow) in a house fire so from that point we were pretty much just playing our PS2 which thankfully survived.

We never really truly lost interest in retro games. The Wii Virtual Console, experimenting with emulation and YouTubers like AVGN kept us passively interested but we mostly just stuck to our newer consoles.

When the PS4 rolled around I started to become very jaded after being burnt by nearly every new release I picked up and with things being more and more online dependent my family's shitty DSL Internet just couldn't keep up. It just wasn't stable enough to download the constant updates. If the connection got bad enough (and it always did) it would just stop the download entirely and playing unpatched PS4 games was a nightmare. Buying a $60 game and having to wait for a 4GB+ day one update to download at around 500kbps (maybe 1mbps if I was lucky and nobody else in the house was using the internet) and having to babysit the console the whole time to make sure it wouldn't stop the download just got to be way too much of a hassle.

I REALLY started to appreciate the simplicity of being able to just buy a game, put it in and have it just work straight out of the box.

I got really lucky that a used games shop opened in my small town right down the street from my house. I pretty much used any money I got to build up a collection of older games and I've only gotten deeper and deeper into it since then.

 

[Kovlak]

All the good stuff I missed out on, like Die Hard Arcade, Castlevania Rondo of Blood, Metal Slug, ...

 

[Yeti21]

Nostalgia. I grew up with a Genesis (and hand me down NES) and about 2 years ago decided to just go ahead and get the stuff i had throughout my childhood. You know... all the stuff i essentially gave away to Gamestop/EB Games...

Spoiler

Not the N64 though, there's nothing i really want to play on it.

Of course i've ended up branching out and getting the things i never had a chance to get (like an entire Dreamcast!) and haven't grabbed the now expensive things that i used to own. Bought Subterrania and Valis completely blind and have thoroughly enjoyed playing both. So finding new to me stuff has been really exciting too. When it's affordable i like to buy sealed games so i can open them and pretend it's 1999 again lol.

Being offline, no DLC, No Ads, No downloads whatsoever has been huge in me enjoying the time i spend playing the games too.

 

[strawberry29]

i mostly grew up with a ps3, meaning retro games weren't my type untill i tried the ps2 and i had a pirated copy of mario games imported for the console, then i owned a new consoles like ps1, NES, SNES till i found out about emulators in 2018, later i brought my switch in dec of 2023 using nintendo online and at the time i used to watch youtubers like LGR, micheal MJD, johntron ofc with avgn in dec of 2024. i had alot of reasons that got me into retro gaming

 

[ThatOneLum]

I guess it was wanting to try out the original handful of Final Fantasy games after hearing people online talking about them.

When I was a kid the MegaDrive was my first system, and so I was relatively present for that era of gaming onwards. The reason I managed to get into retro gaming was through finding out that you could technically run PS1 games on a laptop, though I didn't consider them that retro at the time.

After I played through Resi or whatever it was I was doing, I looked into the systems I never played as a kid, so I tried out some SNES and NES games, specifically the 1st Final Fantasy game on the NES and I wanna say Assaults Suit Vulkan (but the UK name so Cybernator) and since then I've never looked back lmao.

It probably wasn't long after that when I got a PSP and could play PS1 games and retro 8 bit stuff to my hearts desire.

 

[Cautious0218]

Weirdly enough, what got me back into gaming & led me to retro gaming in particular was when my mom bought me a switch in my last year of middle school. I had a wii as a kid & so did my cousins, but by that time i had stopped playing it & the whole family forgot about the other wii because it was kept at my grandma's house & she had it on a closet shelf in her bedroom.

I mostly kept to free games & demos, + mario kart 8 cuz it came with the switch, but what really sparked my interest in order games was when one of my mom's coworkers got me Legends Arceus after I mentioned I had never played a pokemon game before. Afterwards, I wanted to play the older pokemon games & now I have 3ds with a bunch of games from multiple generations on it, a computer with a bunch of emulators (that I need to fix unfortunately) & a ps2 that I only have one game for & have barely played because shortly after getting it I switched to a more powerful computer.

 

[Xdqwerty Xdqwerty]

Emuparadise

 

[Pokenami's icon Pokenami Pokenami]

My mom introducing me to two little known sites called Vimm's Lair and Emuparadise.

 

[Megarockman _1987 Megarockman _1987]

Emulators, I discovered it in pandemic time. I used to play Street fighter 2 while I was in my virtual classes

 

[Morgana Veil]

Basically, growing up with the consoles everyone now calls retro, I never left.
You merely adopted retro gaming, I was born of it, molded by it ~ Bane, probably.

 

[HikaruKitsune]

Never left it. I just lost interest in most current-gen AAA slop sometime during the PS4/XBone Gen and focused more on all the old stuff I had (which I really never stopped playing in the first place).

 

[dizzypixel]

todays games being enshitfeid growing up with avgn and also pandemic boredom

 

[Sleepstate]

Kinda always lived retrogaming as my first console was a Gameboy Advanced SP and my first owned game was a game boy port of that awful nes star wars game

 

[KenaiPhoenix]

King of like a slope fall if you wish

I first got a Dreamcast a couple of years ago with the mad idea of developing stuff for it (Reason? idk, it would be cool methinks).

Since I needed to connect it to a HD TV, I got an OSSC. Since I was already there, why not dust off my PSone, the sole survivor of the 'console collection' i wanted as a kid.

When I went to Canada I went through a retro game store (stores here rip you off badly, to the point they buy old games, take the manual out, and then charge you one for the game, and a bonus for the manual). I got Halo 1, 2 and ODST and Battlefront 2 for my personal collection. Not to actually play it.

Then I learned that you can actually PLAY them online. Since I got a some money off, I bought an used OG Xbox and show up for many events in the Insignia servers.

And I had so much more fun. Like how great is to start a game and the first screen is not 'Why dont you spent 25 more bucks on us?'. And that if it wasnt totally destroyed like the MCC that added Fortnite poses and the matchmaking is so bad you either get you ass blow out of the water, or you are so locked in, that you become the monster yourself and destroyed the other team 100-20.

And lastly it was more of a final opening my eyes, like games feel like a job, you have to dedicate as much time as possible and whats worse, for a worse version that is heavily monetize and dumbed down so people dont get frustrated and spent as much as possible.

And when you learn to not depend on flashy graphics, positive reinforcement or just be playing the current popular game, you can see that there are actually incredible good games right here and right now. They are just a little old.

 

[PhrawzT]

I go back and forth between newer (past 10 years) games and retro games. Buying a Saturn last year and turning my Raspberry Pi into an emulation machine got me back into mostly retro games.

 

[Mileena]

I’ve never gotten out of it. Not just for nostalgic reasons but games were just built differently back then, there’s a spark newer games don’t have. It’s not to say later generations aren’t great, I’ll always be a big gamer and love gaming in general, I just think retro games are timeless, they have a complete package to them and no matter how many times you play them, they’ll always be fun.

 

[Sonic Boomer]

This is going to be a weird one, but nothing got me "back" into retro gaming.
I don't play retro and retro style games for nostalgia purposes or anything, I just never stopped playing them. These type of games are the "default" when I think about video games or that I want to play a video game.

I like simple to pick up and play, linear gaming experiences and retro games are perfect for that so I just never stopped.

What got me into retro gaming or rather into exploring games I've missed tho is another story. When I was 5 or 6 my uncle gave me his Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, when I was 4 that same uncle gave me Donkey Kong II Game & Watch and Tronica Space War, LCD games. As a kid I thought these were some ancient devices from my uncle's childhood even tho at the time they were still fairly new and only a few years old technically. So I imagined I was playing all these amazing forgotten old games on them. That alone made me fascinated with all kinds of games and made me always want to explore gaming myself as well as apprciate games that came even before my time, to being born in '83 I was pretty up to date on gaming.

 

[Merkabruh]

The OG Xbox, though not for the reasons you think, as many years ago, my cousin got it and it wasn't a stock Xbox, it was modded with some games on the hard drive like Halo 2, GTA Vice City, and Star Wars Battlefront, as well as what I spent most of my time playing it, emulators from arcade, NES, Genesis, and SNES, as this was pretty much discovering a whole new world to my then 11 year old self and of course, awakened my love for retro gaming and eventually, emulation. My cousin still has that Xbox though sadly, it no longer works, which is a shame.

 

[zombie100379]

it might be connected with my ps3 dying for the second or 3rd time around a decade ago - it really got to me and i just refused to get it fixed because i feel it would just die again a few months later , i now have a stack of ps3 games that i may never get to play and ps3 emulation isn't an option because my ancient notebook won't be able to handle it.