People have a lot of opinions on what counts as "retro" games.

People have a lot of opinions on what counts as "retro" games.

I think I've finally settled on mine:

Retro systems are ones where developers were required to work around the limitations of the system while building games.

Retro games are games for retro systems.

This means that, for example, modern games for retro consoles are, themselves, retro games.

It also means that, for example, Grand Theft Auto V will _never_ be a retro game, no matter how old it gets; GTAV comes from a time well after developers were meaningfully limited by the hardware they are developing for when it comes to simply implementing the systems of their game.

There's my spicy take for the day.

I need to figure out a term for "non-retro games that are nonetheless quite old", like GTAV will be in a few years.

---

And look, yeah, I know, people are still trying to make photorealism a thing, and I don't minimize graphical achievements of current-gen games in any way. If that's your thing, great, but I don't think it'll ever sit in the same class in my mind as, like, Crash Bandicoot, where they had to _hack the console_ to get their game to work.

@b4ux1t3 I would change your definition with “working around hardware limitations” because some old games did exploit limitations of CRT displays and don’t have the same look and feel on flat ones. Which is neither power nor performance in my book.

People have a lot of opinions on what counts as "retro" games.

I think I've finally settled on mine:

Retro systems are ones where developers were required to work around the limitations of the system while building games.

Retro games are games for retro systems.

This means that, for example, modern games for retro consoles are, themselves, retro games.

It also means that, for example, Grand Theft Auto V will _never_ be a retro game, no matter how old it gets; GTAV comes from a time well after developers were meaningfully limited by the hardware they are developing for when it comes to simply implementing the systems of their game.

There's my spicy take for the day.

I need to figure out a term for "non-retro games that are nonetheless quite old", like GTAV will be in a few years.

---

And look, yeah, I know, people are still trying to make photorealism a thing, and I don't minimize graphical achievements of current-gen games in any way. If that's your thing, great, but I don't think it'll ever sit in the same class in my mind as, like, Crash Bandicoot, where they had to _hack the console_ to get their game to work.