The Truth of Our Modern Day Reality
This is going to be a different type of article than everything else I’ve written on this website so far. I feel like there is a deeper significance behind retro gaming in modern society that really needs to be highlighted. This isn’t just a hobby that serves as a welcome distraction to the insanely fast past pace of the world and technology that is taking over and changing our lives completely. It’s no longer just about gaming now, it’s now become a form of protest and resistance to the modern world which is very quickly becoming a technological dystopia. You don’t have to be very smart or even very observant to see how a prison is being built all around us in the form of technology. All of us can see what is happening and perhaps many of us are scared to accept the reality of things but subconsciously we know because we can’t lie to ourselves. If we try to lie to ourselves by rationalization or logic there is always a part of us that knows the truth no matter how hard we try to bury it. I get why people don’t want to face the truth of reality, because it’s scary and it’s basically a runaway snowball flying down a mountain constantly picking up speed and mass and consuming everything in it’s path. Short of a massive worldwide disaster there is really nothing we can do to stop the scary monster that technology has become.
The Beauty of Retro Gaming Nostalgia
I’m assuming most of my reader’s are about my age as nostalgia is a massive factor in the hobby of retro gaming. I was born in the mid-eighties and grown up in a household where the most advanced piece of equipment in the house was an Atari 2600 Jr. When I was a child I grew up playing games such as Space Invaders and Atlantis on the 2600 and those extremely simple graphics and beeps appearing on my cathode-ray tube TV kept me entertained for countless hours. These days those experiences do not have that effect even on children unless they are somehow raised in an environment without any modern technology. I still have vivid memories of getting picked up from school when I was in year 1 and my mum and brother were waiting in the car with a brand new copy of Mario Bros. for the Atari. It got me so excited seeing that box in the car, looking at the artwork on the front and the screenshots on the back and being unable to wait to get home so I could stick in the console and start playing it. It was almost like a major family event every time we got a new game. It’s the feeling I got from these experiences which is why I treasure that feeling of nostalgia so highly that reliving that time through retro gaming has made it my favorite hobby as an adult. Newer generations wouldn’t understand this like us children of 80’s do. However I understand that the hobby of retro-gaming has many draws and newer generations are attracted to this hobby other reasons.
Retro-gaming is a way to relive the blissful feelings that experiencing the “ancient” technology of the past gave us. The novelty of being able to control things on the TV was so incredibly entertaining and and mesmerizing. When combined with the experience being a significant event in the memories of my formative years and the wonder that a young child has it has produces an extremely strong feeling of nostalgia that makes me remember the blissful feeling of a time that was filled with simple pleasures. Life could not have been any better, technology didn’t need to advance any further, that was enough to keep us occupied for an endless amount of time. Of course technology did increase but very slowly, when new consoles were released the graphics were still made up of pixels and the games still came on cartridges. The experience was enhanced but fundamentally still the same. Then the rate of the development of technology increased, exponentially… 3D graphics came and before we knew it CGI mimicked reality to the point where it was difficult to tell apart. Generations that have grown up in the modern era don’t have the same feeling of nostalgia as they have grown up in an incredibly complicated society that is dependent on technology so advanced that very few people even understand it. They don’t know the simple pleasure of a life that moved slowly, that wasn’t connected to the internet 24/7, that didn’t rely on people having to have a mobile phone to make them contactable by anyone at all times.
The Future and The Promise of a Technological Utopia
For us generation X’ers or whatever we are referred to, retro gaming is a way to emotionally link us back to that simple time. Do you, dear reader, remember how the future was portrayed in back the 80’s, 90’s and even the 00’s? A technological utopia filled with advanced cities in glass domes connected by high tech transportation systems with flying cars and space travel being everyday conveniences. The future was illustrated to be a blissful wonderland and it filled us with hope, excitement and anticipation for the future. Well the future that is now appearing before us, may have some of those elements and technologies but the feeling of it being a utopia free of worries and concerns is far, far from the reality that is manifesting. In fact the reality that is being built around us has more problems than ever and the technology that defies human belief instead of making our lives easier is destroying us and making a prison out of our society. Remember Shadowrun for the Super Nintendo? This is a far more accurate portrayal of what the future is turning into. A horrible technological dystopia ruled by power-hungry mega corporations and the average person is forgotten and lost among the shadows between the giant buildings of the capitalistic monsters. In this new environment the hobby of retro gaming has suddenly taken on a far greater significance then simply being a window to the most idealic period in recent times. It is becoming a form of protest against the technological giants that are running our lives and ruining our society.
I don’t think anyone could have saw this coming, if anyone did then they have a level of foresight that goes way beyond what even the most intelligent human mind can conceive. I certainly never imagined that retro gaming would become a form of protest against modern technology. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well it’s still in the early stages but the signs are all there if you look a bit deeper and don’t take things just on face value. Think about Nintendo and what they are doing with the Switch 2. They are trying to put an end to physical games and even game ownership. They are even actively trying to erase the memories of their past when they would sell game cartridges for their consoles that people would own, could lend to friends, could sell it on when they were finished with it or could hand down to their kids so they could experience the same magic for themselves. Nintendo is making an enemy of retro gamers which is why RGN does not support Nintendo in it’s current form and why we don’t even deal with anything newer than the PS3. I feel like the Playstation 3 was the last retro console and even that already had the beginnings of the end of retro gaming starting to appear in the way it operated and distributed software (referring to the temporary ownership of games purchased through the PSN). Fortunately the PS3 has been cracked and hacked to the point where the retro gaming community has hi-jacked it from Sony and have made it into the most powerful retro gaming console we have today.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
I don’t want this to be a doom and gloom article, I’m simply calling a spade a spade reporting what I have been observing in reality. Additionally I want to highlight the fact there is hope, we aren’t powerless when we act together and I have seen the retro gaming community achieve incredible things when people have worked towards common goals with other like minded individuals. New game studios that focus on producing games for retro consoles with a strong emphasis on producing games in physical, tangible form that is fully owned by the consumer from the moment they purchase the game. The latest example of this is the TigerChainsaw Studio’s which has been recently formed with their focus being creating games for retro-gamers who love physical collecting. This is in clear contrast to the way the mainstream gaming industry is focusing on producing games in digital only format and even worse, that need internet connection to actually be able to play and even worse than that the buyer doesn’t even own. They are trying to normalize a model where a subscription feed needs to be paid regularly to have access to the game. Thankfully the retro gaming community has now formed it’s own sub-industry that is bucking the trend of the modern gaming industry. Nintendo is no longer the same company that we have grown up with and loved, that revitalized a dying industry and created the best and most treasured games of our childhood. They are now the enemy of our hobby and we must fight them or risk losing everything we love about our precious hobby that is more like a way of life and even a philosophy.
"The future is retro" - Palmer Luckey, ModRetro
Relevant Links
- TigerChainsaw Studios [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLH9tAONSTI] A new game studio that is producing games for retro gaming systems, starting with a platform game for the Gameboy DMG.
- ModRetro.com [https://www.modretro.com/] Ironically the man behind VR headset’s and merchant of high tech weaponry has been a great ally for the Retro Gaming industry. Creating a faithful Gameboy Color clone and publishing many newly developed retro games.
- ZX Spectrum Next Official Website [https://www.specnext.com/] A real powerhouse of the modern Retro Gaming industry giving rise to a whole new community around their new retro computer giving rise to over a dozen new retro game developers and over 200 games.
