Today’s podcast topic is retro games and retro gaming as a whole, a subject near and dear to my heart as The Punished Backlog’s resident Old Games Guy. As much as gamers constantly look to the future for the newest and coolest experiences, revisiting and revering the past remains a crucial part of gaming culture.

When I was growing up, the difference between what was modern vs. “retro” was fairly stark and easy to identify: pixelated, 2D arcade games or blocky, early 3D titles were easy to call old and retro (or, in some ways, “dated”) compared to things like Mass Effect, Skyrim, and Gears of War. As time has gone on, however, the lines have blurred, as it still feels weird to call games from the mid-to-late-2000s “retro” when they’re not quite as different from their modern counterparts.

In the latest Punished Podcast episode, we discuss the definition of retro, what retro games still hold up, what game companies owe to preserving game history, and much, much more. Plus, we even have a little WHO YA GOT competition based on retro gaming later in the episode!

– Sam Martinelli, Editor

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Here’s a few quotes from throughout our conversation:

David: “I think there’s a public necessity to preserve these games and a way to partner with private companies to make it happen. But I would also argue that for the big publishers of the world—Amanda, you and I, we’re in marketing—it helps your brand to assure gamers that you care about your history because then gamers give a shit about your future.”

Vaughn: “It’s honestly embarrassing that big game companies lose source code. I’ve seen this stat that like 90% of source code from before 2010 is lost. Like, if you’re Square Enix, and you don’t have the source code for Final Fantasy VIII, and you have to rebuild it from someone’s copy? Like these games have won multiple awards. You don’t just have a copy of it on a disc in a case on a frame on the wall, break in case of emergency?”

Amanda: “Some of those games y’all described, like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), I might think of as ‘old school,’ but I don’t think of them as ‘retro.’ I have a very 1980s aesthetic idea of retro. It’s big CRT arcade boxes. It’s these standalone booths. It’s Atari, it’s Pac-Man. It’s pixelated, it’s beep boop beep boop. Trying to define anything from the 2000s as ‘retro’ is hard for me, even if it’s been almost 20 years since a game like Mass Effect (2007) came out.”

Sam: “I think once platform-specific feel went away… that’s when things kind of stopped feeling retro. For example, we’re all big Xbox 360 fans here. If I play an Xbox 360 game on my Xbox Series X, it pretty much feels the same. It’s basically the same experience. I just can also play a new game at the same time. Whereas if you play an N64 game on Nintendo Switch Online, you can tell that it’s weird, that it’s different, that it feels off, because you’ve just copied and pasted something old onto something new.”

Starts around 55:00 during our discussion of preservation in gaming.

Amanda: I’d love to give a shout-out to Zachary Horton and the Vibrant Media Lab at the University of Pittsburgh [where I did my MFA in Creative Writing]. They are one of the preeminent authorities on the [Magnavox], the first home video game console. They’re collecting them… We got to see them in-class. They are so few left in the world! This an academic effort to preserve this stuff, to rebuild things, to share why it mattered. If it’s not going to be the private companies [investing in preservation], then I’d like to see a public investment, and if not then, then it’s going to be the cool academics, the cool nerds… So, shout-out to Zach for that work.

Learn more about the Vibrant Media Lab and their projects here.

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