We have modernism and also post-modernism that are tied to a specific range of dates. I'm wondering if people feel the same way for "retro"

For me, retro is two generations ago. But I'm no authority on this matter! :)

It's going to vary for everyone, but retro basically just means old stuff, so it's always a moving target.

When I was playing the NES, games like Pong and Donkey Kong and Pac Man felt retro.
When I was playing the N64, NES games felt retro.
Nowadays, PS1 and N64 definitely feel retro to me.
I don't think I'm ready to call the Wii retro yet, but I know most people probably accept it as retro now.

To me, it's always a matter of context.

If a kid who never heard of Nirvana buys a shirt because they saw other people wearing it, are they being 'retro' or buying the latest thing?

Is Alfred Hitchcock 'retro' or 'classic?'

If I have liked something for twenty years, am I 'retro?'

20+ years seems like a solid cutoff point.

I would say anything before circa ~2000 is definitely retro.

It does get more complicated with the release platform.

PC games can be updated and can even take a life of their own, while console games tend to be tied to a specific console/generation and the associated gameplay experience.

One good example is Simcity 4, even before decomp/recomp's got big, the community modded it to such an extent that it wasn't really the same game as the one released in 2003. Simcity 2000 is definitely a retro game though with Simcity 3000 being somewhere in between. Recent decomp/recomp have added much needed modding capabilities to Simcity 3000, but a lot less people play 3000 versus 4 (and the modding scene is a lot smaller).

To me, a product that invokes childhood memories is retro if its wider use has seized more than 40% of my lifetime ago.

Though, the requirement might change when I grow older.

Retro shifts. What was new will eventually become retro, but not at the same rate for everyone.

Kids today probably think the 2010s are retro. I would consider my childhood, 80s 90s, retro. My parents would probably set the "retro bar" even earlier then that.

20 year to become retro then a 5-8 year oscillating cycle where some stuff during peak retro popularity become "Classic", and classic is really what drives the retro economy long term because as classic things becomes the central main focus for themed events it carries it's retro cohorts up with it.

20+ years as the cutoff means half life 2 episode 1 is retro now.

definitely agree wrt sim city though.

Than*

I know that. My phone doesn't always. Proofreading before posting is a privilege, and today you didn't get it.

In three years Minecraft will be retro.

Or if you wanted to go with succinct, "fucking autocorrect"

Console generations, engine generations or human generations?

To me retro describes the 80s only. But I was also a kid in the 80s, so that might be what makes it retro, things I remember from when I was a kid. So NES and Atari are retro for me. Like things from the 90s when I was a teen do not seem retro to me, Super NES and Sega are not retro game systems to me.

Also in the same vein, "vintage" to me (born 1979) is things from the 60's and 70's. To my mom how almost had a heart attack when teenage me called her 70's sweater jacket "vintage". She (born 1948) feels "vintage" is from the 40s and 50s. But my best friends daughter (born 2009) and thinks things I bought in the 2000's are vintage and loves raiding my closet.

@anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz made a good point here and I tend to agree. It's more about something being gone and brought back. How long does it take for something to be considered gone? At the very least, I wouldn't consider something retro if it can still be easily purchased via official channels (never gone).

I happen to have been born exactly when retro ended and modern started.

Now I'm 43, retro is anything i played as a child/teenager. So NES/megadrive/SNES/OG playstation

I'd say games from the 5th generation of consoles and before are absolutely retro, while games from the 6th and early 7th generation are in a weird zone where they're not exactly retro, but not exactly modern either.

IMO, I'd say modern gaming started in earnest in 2011, or possibly even 2010. When you think about it, console generations used to average about five years before 7th gen and the recession of 2008, so if the recession didn't happen, I feel like 8th gen could've started around that time.

It's marketing first and foremost. I don't remember older things when I was a kid being called retro, they were just oldies or classics. They had their mark of time, but there wasn't a push to bring it back as old, but new again like retro stuff does.

I got heart attack reading you sentence only to realize the period after “always”.

the older you get the farther it becomes. Im have only recently accepted that lord of the rings is not a recent thing.

It's probably supposed to mean 20+ years old. But next year IDK if I'll be able to call Mass Effect and Crysis "retro games"

I'm damaged by vocabulary outside of gaming so for me "retro gaming" always sound a bit weird.
I'm used to retro being a newly produced item that mimics an older style - a chair produced in 2026 that looks like it belongs in the 1960s f.e., compared to vintage being an item that is at least 20 years old and an antique being at least 100 years old. My teacups will officially be antique in two years and it feels kinda cool.

When speaking of games I've just accepted that retro either means "from my childhood" or "old" depending on how the speaker feels about it and that "how old" usually differ from meaning "at least two console generations old" to "20 years old" to "The era of my childhood, forever and ever!".

For me, the cutoff is with the introduction of HDMI. The Wii is the final retro console, and the 360 and Playstation despite being concurrent with the Wii are the start of the second age. The video format isn't actually the cause so much as it's emblemic- the Wii was one last hurrah for colorful arcade-y games while the PS360 really calcified the modern cinematic RPG FPS model that rules AAA single-player games to this day. That was also the first generation where nostalgia became a moneymaker, with things like the wiiware Mega Man games. Before that, nods to classic games weren't uncommon, but this was the start of games whose entire point was to be a nod

I would argue it's less the cable and more the resolution.

480i is retro. 720p is where it changed. 1080p? Definitely not retro.

Retro means modern games that remind you of old games. Like Shovel Knight or UFO 50. There's not really a time limit to that. Shovel Knight is quite old now, but the graphical style it copied is even older, so it's still retro.

Obviously, I'm sort of joking, but y'all do use the word "retro" wrong. You're talking about vintage games, not retro games, and yes, I will die on this hill. Gamers are the only people who don't know the difference between retro and vintage. Everyone else gets it right: car people, clothing people, furniture people, sneaker people, jewelry people, etc.

Gamers are the ones with the damaged vocabulary. Everyone else know the difference between vintage and retro. ;)

Vintage emoji right there. Or wait... is it retro because the font is modern?

gamecube isn't retro, n64 is

Nintendo 64 is next gen.

By that logic wouldn't you call Mass Effect a classic/oldie game and Super Mario Bros a retro game? 🤔

I think there are two related concepts that the same word gets used for.

One is the sliding window of things that seem old. I'd put that around 2 gens ago - just long enough for things to go out of print/leave retail, lose media focus, and have adults remembering them from childhood.

The other idea encompasses the foundation era of game history. I think of that as the time when games harshly constrained by the available hardware, with the chunky pixels, chiptunes, low-poly models, etc. I'd cut this off at or after the PS360Wii gen. That's about when tech returns started diminishing, and it's also when the internet started strongly defining design and business models. But everyone looks at it a little different.

Still, the concept of video games is just a baby. There are humans alive that played some of the earliest ones. Maybe centuries from now people will look back fondly on the era where you owned game hardware at all, or didn't control them with your mind.

Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 can be considered Retro, and by that extension all the games from its era. Both released about 20 years ago, discontinued 10 years ago and since then 2 generations of new consoles appeared. But games like GTA 5 that are developed, re-released and sold to this day, I wouldn't consider that game to be Retro. And that's one of the problems with evergreen running games.

Anything older than the 3rd rerelease of skyrim obvs.

The makes sense, like "retroactive" meaning going back to. In that case, maybe retro gaming means to go back to games that you have played in your childhood? Words are used by people and sometimes they don't make much sense.

I don't think it's either. I think there were certain phases that had a distinct style, and we had huge jumps from phase to phase. Atari to NES to SNES to N64 to Playstation 2 to Playstation 3 were all gigantic. But then PS3 to 4 was, to me almost unnoticeable. Same to PS5. Wii to whatever modern Nintendo thing is also probably not gigantic either IMO.

I have a tough time calling PS3 retro because of that, even though it's pretty old now.

The painting is called "children's games" by Bruegel (1560) btw if anyone's curious. My favorite snippet is this one right here

It's still a pretty popular game in modern day Turkey called "Uzun Esek"

256 colors and below. 32 bits and below. Synth music or speaker only.

Actually, in the car community the terms "antique," "vintage," and "classic" can all describe the same car depending on who you ask, the make and model, and when it was built. Even where the vehicle is residing can change it.

No vehicle class for "retro" exists, though there are "retro styled" vehicles, which is what you appear to describe.

Retro marches on and on with the passage of time. There is no clear cutoff; it's whatever is old enough for you to not just be able to buy and run it. Blink and you'll miss how people start calling GTA V retro...

I would argue that HL2 and EP1 are not retro, the core FPS experience in HL2 still seems to reflect modern standards.

A acquaintance in their early 20s mentioned playing HL2 for the first time recently and they said it didn't feel like a game that was almost a quarter of a century old.

they do feel dated, what with the huge arsenal and floaty movement, but yeah they're not old feeling. mostly because they were so novel at the time.

It's interesting how these things work, I actually dislike the lack of KB+M style granular movement controls in games with first person views (FPS or otherwise). Games that weren't made for computers often just have strange feeling first person controls.

I might just be showing my age here. :)

well yeah. they can be made to work but the precision is lost. hence mhy autoaim largely disappeared from pc shooters but is a requirement on console.

with floaty movement i'm mostly referring to the insane inertia. much better than hl1 but it still feels like you're on ice.

I don't see how your first paragraph contradicts anything I said, so I'm confused by your use of "actually". You can call old games "classic", although I'm not sure any of them are old enough to be called "antique". Maybe an old Pong home machine or something. Those words all largely mean the same thing.

I would say "retro style" is redundant. Retro is always referring to the style. Looking back and taking styles from the past is what retro means. Like modern bell-bottom jeans, or cars like the 11th generation Thunderbird which looks more like the original that any previous models.

The Wikipedia article uses the word to describe it.

This was the last year [4th generation] for the convertible until the "retro" models of 2002–05.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Thunderbird

My point was saying that the term antique, vintage, or retro could all theoretically describe the same game depending on who you ask, where you are, what game you are talking about, etc. For example, some people may consider Atari 2600 and Colecovision games as antique, where others may call them vintage. An NES game like Duck Hunt may be called classic and vintage, and even antique depending on who you ask. A particularly young person might call it antique, but an older person may not even consider it "that old."

Your initial post seemed to complain that the use of the term "retro" in the context of the post is somehow "wrong," but there isn't really a "wrong" way to use the term. Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying.

I will accept any console made before the year 2000 as "retro." once games achieved a level of poly count where you could render indevidual fingers during actual gameplay, I hardly count them as retro consoles. The only thing consoles have been improving is output resolution, as vector rendering has been standard for 2 decades now.

Looks like a cross between leap frog and a chicken fight

Ah, no, I was definitely saying that, and I still think "retro" is definitely incorrect. It was just confused that your first reply didn't actually contradict me. I don't mind at all that you think I'm wrong, but I'm not convinced. When everyone else but gamers seem to understand the difference between retro and classic/vintage/antique, it's the gamers using it wrong.