What is the definition of 'retro' to you?

[Ajderniz]

I looked over a discussion on the other site, that kind of hovered around this topic, but went around and away soon enough. 'Think it was @Deadgar64 that defined retro games as ones that were made before... a fairly recent year, don't remember which one.
To you, what does it mean for a game, movie, piece of technology, whatever, to be retro? Since it's such a vague term to provide a solid definition to, I don't think there is a proper way to say "yeah, this is retro; now this isn't". Should it be delimited by a fixed or constantly moving date, a criteria based around quality, "yankiness", control scheme, graphics...?
For me, at least, if some fucking guy, completely out of his mind, approached me one day at a bus stop (there aren't bus stops in my country) and asked me to state, out loud and on the spot, the definition of retro, I'd... first of all, look around to see if he's not just trying to set me up for a mugging, and then say, with a knot on my throat, that retro video games are, probably, those old, "pixelly", "beepy", games that people used to play before I was born; even before that, actually: I think really retro stuff goes before the fifth generation at least. But that's just your friendly neighborhood zoomer's humble opinion.

 

[Agustina]

For me retro depends on the topic we're talking about.
For video games? Well... Games from 15 or more years ago are already retro. Yeah, MGS4 wasn't released in the 90s, but it's been so long since it came out that my life has moved on a lot since then and now Bloodborne is almost 10 years old... But things are different for let's say books, because of how technology advance, for books to be old they need to be at least 100 years old because it needs a change in society for us to see a difference between then and now. We're just starting to see differences with books from the 70s (If they are for medicine then a lot less we need), and with games this happens much faster.

 

[Octopus]

It is really hard to say a definitive 'cut off' on, yeah. The pop culture image of 'retro games' is like the NES/SNES/Genesis era but like both of you guys said obviously the cut off point has moved forward. Some people consider the 360 retro now which I don't want to even think about since I was playing my 360 when I was almost an adult so that horribly dates me.

I personally say the PS2/Xbox are the last retro consoles. If you look at the modern retro-style throwback games they're almost always either 16-bit pixel art or early PS1/PS2 3D type things, and pop culture is obviously never wrong. I'm doing to keep saying that at least.

 

[Ajderniz]

It is really hard to say a definitive 'cut off' on, yeah. The pop culture image of 'retro games' is like the NES/SNES/Genesis era but like both of you guys said obviously the cut off point has moved forward. Some people consider the 360 retro now which I don't want to even think about since I was playing my 360 when I was almost an adult so that horribly dates me.

I personally say the PS2/Xbox are the last retro consoles. If you look at the modern retro-style throwback games they're almost always either 16-bit pixel art or early PS1/PS2 3D type things, and pop culture is obviously never wrong. I'm doing to keep saying that at least.

360 being retro is disturbing

 

[Octopus]

360 being retro is disturbing

Nightmare inducement: you now realize the Xbox 360 is 19 years old.

 

[Deadgar64]

Nightmare inducement: you now realize the Xbox 360 is 19 years old.

Th.... Thanks

 

[Deadgar64]

"Retro" at this point is a moving target, jah?
I think it has more to do with perspective and age.
To a 20-year-old, the PS2 is "retro". Whereas to a 30-40-something it's just "old stuff"

I guess to compound the chase we have to worry about "vintage" as an applicable term since games as a popular medium has leaped past the 30-year mark.

 

[It's Thinking 2]

Everything up to Dreamcast, XBOX, PS2, and GameCube

 

[Ded]

I think it's come up to the point that what I thought was once retro (SNES, N64) is now vintage and that hurts me. Is Xbox 360/PS3 retro? I feel like people don't view it as such, people I talk to. I feel like graphic fidelity has alot to do with what people consider retro. The 360/PS3 still looks up to par with even the latest mobile games.

 

[DunkeyKong]

It is actually quite hard, I even thought Wii was more retro than Xbox360

 

[It's Thinking 2]

It is actually quite hard, I even thought Wii was more retro than Xbox360

Knack is considered retro now. So is Gex.

 

[Lee__Kanker]

Nightmare inducement: you now realize the Xbox 360 is 19 years old.

Ps2 is 24
PSP is 20

To me retro is whatever comes before the ps1 but to zoomers the ps2 is retro so...

 

[KAGE-008]

This is pretty much subjective since it varies from person to person, but if you want me to be a bit more objective then it's from 6th gen backwards. Including the 7th gen stuff into this category is debatable though, considering the Wii was marketed like that but it just repeated 6th gen hardware, not to mention it was discontinued earlier than the higher end counterparts.

 

[Gentlemanvaultboy]

Retro is any previous generation where the majority of it can be emulated.

 

[Inkingsama]

I think "retro" as a definition has more to do with the design choices of games from the past and less with how old a game is. Residen Evil 4 is almost 20 years old but you can't take RE1 and RE4 and classify both as "Retro" just because both games are old, RE4 has more in common with games from today than it's predecessors.

Another example: Mario Galaxy is 17 years old but, would you say it belongs in the same category as Super Mario 64? in my opinion, they don't. The difference in technology is so high that it's mistaken to say that mario galaxy is retro. Following that logic of "X game is 20 years old, it's retro now" TLOU for the ps3 will be retro some day but the game is pretty much the same as the games released today.

 

[Gorse]

I completely agree with everything @Inkingsama has said directly above me – very well put! I'm the Zoomiest Zoomer who ever Zoomed out of Zoomtown, and I grew up on the GBA and Gamecube, but even I have a lot of difficulty considering that console generation as being "retro". Context is critical, here – the sixth gen was when mainstream game development firmly stopped being a small-time venture and become a multi-million-dollar blockbuster business with developer counts at least three or four times larger than the PS1/N64 era. Internet gaming became standard, all competitors to Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft died off, controllers were standardized – there's really no shortage of points you can list.

We can all play year-counting games with whatever platform we like, but the fact of the matter is that this game and this game came out on either side of a clear, impassable barrier – and that barrier is named "retro".

 

[IrkenElite]

Retro means not easily available for the masses to buy. You gotta seek them out in gaming shops or from people who keep and value them. Good amount of people who don't care about games at all in this world.

 

[VampireLord1024]

Old designs and so ons.

 

[The Almighty Hamster]

I was born in 2006, only four years off of being Gen-Alpha, so my definition of 'retro' is around sixth gen. There are probably people on this forum twice as old as me who would strongly disagree, but let me try and justify. I grew up playing seventh/eighth-generation consoles and also older consoles like the MegaDrive + emulators of the SNES, Super Famicom, NeoGeo, PC Engine etc. etc. I think the idea of what is retro has gradually shifted from the cliche image of 80's arcade games to more recent consoles. You see this represented in games like Bombrush Cyberfunk or those polygonal fifth-gen-style games. Even Angry Video Game Nerd has started covering "newer" stuff.

However, Minecraft, Angry Birds, LittleBigPlanet, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Prince of Persia, Metal Gear Solid IV, Half Life 2 - those seem way too recent to be considered retro, so basically anything made before the "brown-sludge visual" era of the PS3 and Xbox360 where everything was edgy can be classified as such. Also, if it looks too good then it's probably too recent to be retro. That being said, I played VRChat not too long ago and there was a giant annual virtual shopping centre event and it was the trippiest, most futuristic thing I have ever seen. Some Bladerunner or Ready Player One type stuff. So maybe in the next five to ten years, we can justifiably say that seventh generation consoles are retro too in comparison to the technology we currently have. It just doesn't register in my mind as "retro" yet because I grew up playing them.

I think the term 'retro' is now defunct. It worked when video games had only been around for about 40 to 50 years but we are far beyond that now. Can we class Rock 'n' Roll as classical music in the same light as Mozart because it's "old"? No, there are different genres, graphical and visual aesthetics, hardware and software and gameplay elements that define periods that cannot be compared to games prior. Pong should not be in the same category as Super Mario Galaxy! That is unbelievably stupid. "Retro" seems like a useless, vague blanket label for anything that isn't strictly new.