Talking Point: How Do You Define 'Retro'?

I think if the console is no longer new at retail, it becomes retro by default. Feels wrong for that to apply to, say, Wii U and 3DS, but they’re definitely historical pieces now…

Anything with beeps and boops.

Games from the PS1 and PS2 era I still consider modern to a certain degree.

I'm 46, so for me retro means up to the 16 bit era. Although I can accept the Saturn, PS1 and N64 being called retro.

If Wind Waker is retro, then what is A Link to the Past? Putting them in the same category just doesn't seem right. At this point the term retro became more of a style rather than anything to do with age.

15-20 years seems about right at this point in video game history, but the gains continue to become smaller as the medium matures, so who’s to say? Is it style? Graphics? Type?
I don’t know that it’s an easy answer. There are games from the PS2/GC era that still hold up extremely well, while there are also games from the PS3/360/Wii era that are really showing their age.
Maybe I need to ask my kids what is retro to them since time flies too fast for me now!

I’ll keep this as short as I can. Generally, I think of “retro” as having to do with the technology that drives the game. Not a generation or time period, per se, but rather how a game was developed and on what hardware it originally launched. Atari 2600? Retro. NES? Retro. Once we hit 3D gaming and 3D worlds, I feel how games were designed fundamentally had changed, but (and I’m broadly saying this) not too much has changed since. I personally feel that N64 and prior is “retro” while everything since is contemporary. That’s just me.

On the other hand, I don’t like the term retro. Maybe if we followed other genres like film or books or TV and just said “classic” that would be best for videogames. No one says that Star Wars is a “retro” movie. You know?

Some of those facts are hard hitting such as there’s more time between vice city and now than when it was set and when it was released. Brutal.

@JimmyFleck I like the term “classic” definitely has a nice sound, and it shows respect for a well-crafted game regardless of age.

Its hard to imagine calling something like the PS4 or Xbox One retro, whatever retro is supposed to mean. What defined previous generations of games was the jump in both technology, design and graphics.

N64 > Gamecube. That's a pretty noticeable difference.

PS2 > PS3 . Also a decent difference.

But since the seventh generation, consoles have sort of plateaued in terms of these aspects. A PS4 game isn't all that different from a PS5 game.

Even the term modern is in question. There are some older games that could pass off as modern games, today. A game like Mega Man X feels just as good today as it did over a decade ago.

any console/handheld that is no longer receiving new first-party games for it is retro.

"vintage" is a term I would used based on age, not retro.

Kids these days will never know what it was like playing with a Tesla Coil back in 1891. True retro gaming.

Interesting article! I love these sorts of talking points.

For me, I consider a game to be “retro” or “classic” if it is 20 years or older, though I also think it has to be the technology as well that makes me consider a game to be classified as that. Any console released from the first generation to the early years of the fifth generation I consider to be “retro.” I see any game or console released after those generations to be “modern.”

I wouldn’t call a game or console released ten years ago to be retro, since the software, hardware and technology is still newer and stronger than most older games I consider to be retro. To me, it doesn’t seem correct to call 10-year-old games retro just because the games and technology are in double digits like the older games and technology that came before it. 10 years ago is, for sure, a while ago, but not that long ago like say 20 or 30 years ago.

As an example, I would call the N64 a retro console, but wouldn’t call the WiiU the same. Both are in double digits, but the N64 is older than the WiiU and have differing technology. I just think the technology of a game or console plays a role in what is considered “retro” or “classic” alongside age.

Anything that doesn't contribute to a nation's standard of living / quality of life / GDP I consider retro. And it applies to any product / service not just vidyagames.. So in an affluent country, the PS3 would be retro, the PS4 would be for folk who can't afford a PS5 etc. There may be another less well off country where everyone is playing PS3. And that's where that country is at because noone can afford a PS5. So PS3 is still a reflection of the country. (Made up example but it illustrates my point.) If the Switch was still on store sheles in 5 years time, it's still relevant and I wouldn't consider it retro. Normally, progress takes around 12 years (And looks to be getting longer to be blunt!) and folk start missing stuff when it's gone. But the timeframe isn't set in stone. If something was a failure and perished well before this, then it will have a long agonising wait for it's peers to become retro. But trends, fashion and the odd zeitgeist can all impact this timeframe.
So yeah, XBox 360 is retro. It doesn't contribute to quality of life. It's something if you want to play, you would have to track down. And if you think the quality of life was better back then...well congratulations. You are a retro fan (as opposed to a collector.)

If everyone started using airfryers and noone made microwaves anymore, microwaves would be retro as they aren't contributing to GDP / Quality of life anymore. Y'know, folk would see one in your home and be like "Oh, not seen one of those in aaages!" They might gain a resurgance in popularity and become "in" for a while because retro is cool or whatever, before disappearing back.

Anything that can't output 1080p is "retro" to me!

I was born in the middle of the 80s.

Retro for me is:
NES (JP: 1983, NA: 1985, EU: 1986)
Sega Master system (JP: 1985, NA:1986, EU: 1987)
Game Boy (JP/NA: 1989, EU: 1990)
Sega Mega Drive (JP: 1988, NA: 1989, EU: 1990)
Game Gear (JP: 1990, NA/EU: 1991)
SNES (JP: 1990, NA: 1991, EU: 1992)
GBC (JP/NA/EU: 1998)
GBA (JP/NA/EU: 2001)

To some degree:
PlayStation (JP: 1994, NA/EU: 1995)
N64 (JP/NA: 1996, EU: 1997)

I can understand that GameCube (JP/NA: 2001, EU: 2002) is retro - it came over 20 years ago. But all the same, it doesn't feel very retro to me.

I think what feels retro has to do with:

• What you played when you were young. Nostalgia here we go!
• The greater gaps in technology. Like the leap from 2D to 3D. And early 3D vs. later 3D.

Made of pixels (out of necessity, not style): definitely retro.
Sharp, Polygonal 3D: Retro.
Pre-HD: Kinda retro.
HD: Modern.
4K: Futuristic.

All from my perspective, of course.

There was a line we crossed somewhere in the Wii/360/PS3 generation where materials in video games started looking just realistic enough that they could exist in the real world. They still looked more like plastic than the stone/wood/metal/etc. they were supposed to be, and even now "realistic" characters mostly look like they're made of rubber, but in my mind there's a very clear separation between that and the era before where everything was just made of video game stuff.

You can go by years, you can go consoles generations, or you can go by feel. I have realized that for me, only going by feel makes sense. Old games have a certain vibe, a style or aesthetic that is hard to define but noticeable. It’s not reducible to something specific like pixel art. For me everything up through the Dreamcast is retro. The PS2 generation is sort of a transitional period. Nintendo then goes off on its own which means the Wii still feels like a transition system while the PS3 and 360 definitely do not. Games from the PS360 era will eventually be old, crossing any arbitrary year marking you choose, but they will never feel retro because the style of game design they used is totally unlike earlier games, and is indeed still the dominant style of game design today. So I think ultimately that’s the way to think about this. At least that’s what makes sense to me.

Anything 8-bit, 16-bit, or polygonal. Pre-HD consoles being considered retro might be a stretch, but I'd let it slide. I personally don't believe the Wii is retro, and absolutely not the 3DS and Wii U.

A lot of these are interesting points. It may be fair to say that something enters into the “retro” space when a wave of games try to replicate the era. The amount of relatively successful RE1-esque survival horror games and collectathon platformers with that sharp, low-poly style out now firmly put the N64 and PS1 in the retro space, despite my lack of comfort in that fact.

It’ll be interesting to see in a few years if the market gives room for a wave of “small” Halo-esque FPSes and open world games that look like GTA3.

Typically, I think of retro based on age. The Wii's Virtual Console is effectively my standard, since that was the first time I was able to access old(er) games (well, mostly; we had some old Atari devices for Pong and Adventure and stuff before the Wii).

The NES was 20 when the Wii came out, and the N64 was 10. Both were equally retro to me, even though the NES predates my birth and the N64 doesn't, and even though I grew up on the N64 (and Gameboy) and didn't play the NES until, that's right, the Wii came out.

By that metric, anything 20 years or older is definitely retro, which catches the Gamecube and nearly the Wii/PS3 (give it two more years). If I called things 10 years old retro (per the N64 at Wii's launch end of the scale), people would throw things at me, so I don't. 15 years, eh, depends on how I feel day by day.

Then there's the design perspective. Games are, for the most part, designed very differently now than they were even on the PS3, which has only become more obvious to me as I've been revisiting the PS3 lately. I'd even venture as far as to say that the current live service era is itself as defining a change as any that has come before. Would I go so far as to say anything that predates constant updates, enormous downloads, and lean offerings has a retro design?
I think I might.

TLDR: 20 years or older; unavailable for purchase; game design; there's no bad metric. Retro is just a fancy way to say it's of the past, and however you define that is A-OK with me.

Age is completely irrelevant for what is retro, especially as games basically haven't changed significantly now for well over a decade, so I always think of retro as a style. The PS3 isn't far off 20 years old but has way more in common with a PS5 than a PS2, even the Dreamcast had online gaming and is arguably closer to today's gaming then the Megadrive/SNES of just a few years earlier

So for me retro is still the likes of Atari and up to and including the 16 bit era and now including the early 3D consoles of the PS1, Saturn and N64

8-16 bit, and early 3D generation(NES, SNES e N64), is what i consider a console/game retro, basically consoles/games that defined what gaming is today.

It's like classic rock, the classical period of history, or antiques (things made before the era of mass production). It refers to a specific time period/style, not the current year less an arbitrary number of years or console generations.

Retro gaming refers to consoles before the Dreamcast (with the Dreamcast itself a grey area - good arguments can be made both for and against it being a retro console). The Gamecube, PS2, Xbox, and later have modern graphics. A Gamecube game like Twilight Princess looks more similar to a ninth-generation Switch game than like an N64 game, even though the timespan and number of generations are less. Retro consoles, in addition to graphics, lack online play. All modern home consoles have some level of online functionality. And critically, the sixth generation saw the exit of Sega from the hardware market and the debut of Microsoft - a major historical event that draws a bright line between the two eras.

How about this definition?

Retro: a system no longer being manufactured by the manufacturer (in its original lifespan, a re-release years later doesn’t count)

I say anything 3 generations back or further is retro, so PS2, GameCube etc.
But I don't know if I'll feel that way when it's the ps3/Wii's time.
Something about those games feel too similar to the games we got today, like not enough has advanced. It would be hard to call them retro but not modern games as well.

Wii and GameCube games just don't seem retro to me. I would say, for now, the dividing line is the N64, PS1/2 period — before we had robust online, downloadable games, rechargeable controllers and DLC. I think of those as modern conveniences and hence, all games before then retro.

Toward that end, I think putting a time frame on what's retro doesn't work. To me, it's more of a feel of modern versus old, and that can change according to the progress of technology.

I think the advancement in tech has made it more difficult to distinguish what is retro. PS3 for example is retro since it's been off the market for quite sometime with outdated visuals. But it doesn't feel that retro because it plays very similar to modern consoles. Same goes for the 3DS and the 360.

We've also gotten to a point with graphical leaps aren't as dramatic as it once was which makes it even harder to distinguish what is retro as we move on from older consoles.

For me I go by console generations. Does the console still have games coming out? Is it still available on the market to purchase? How long has it been since it's been discontinued?

If it's been 5 plus years off the market that's usually when I define the console retro.

If you refer to old games as ‘retro’, it doesn’t detail anything about their age, it doesn’t make them special, it doesn’t do anything other than label them as not current. It’s a shoddy descriptor. It’s marketing terminology from the 70’s fashion industry. It’s useless if you’re trying to be informative and not a hipster about your hobby.

@Euler “Retro consoles, in addition to graphics, lack online play.“

Nah…the Mega Drive/Genesis had a few online games. Even the Famicom got a modem and had some online features, and though it never had online games they did try to make them for it

A quick Google search basically helped sum up what retro means to me.

The term "retro game" refers to video games that were developed and released during earlier eras of gaming history

So for me PS2 onwards is not retro, neither is GameCube onwards for Nintendo. Retro are NES, SNES, PS1, Atari, Sega Genesis and Saturn. So the earliest forms of gaming, each new gen doesn't make the previous gen "retro" by default and there shouldn't be any new additions to the reto category going forward.

Two console gens past is “retro” to me. But that doesn’t bother me. My mom games in her 70’s so the only thing retro impacts for me is the ability to easily find games at a fair price that are “retro”. Retro to me has more to do with availability than anything.

Luckily, the Japanese market isn’t as inflated as the American one. But I usually can get the games I want within their active generation (since the WiiU forward) and I mostly pass on games that I didn’t know about unless they become available on modern systems. My collection has gotten to the size that I no longer really want to buy lots of games (especially physical) or line some scalper’s pockets. That being said I wish someone would make it legal to make new tvs for “retro enthusiasts “ so we don’t have to worry about converters. I’ve spent more money on trying to keep my systems future proof than anything.

Technically I don't really consider anything retro, because I never stopped playing it.
"When's the last time you saw THIS classic game?" "Like ten seconds ago."

But if I had to pin it down, for me, I'd say maybe the 16-bit gen and older (whatever gen that is...third? I don't know).
Like "Golden Age", maybe a bit of "Silver Age".

To me, anything from the XBOX/PS2/Dreamcast/Gamecube era or before is retro.

I have trouble considering Wii U/PS3/XBOX 360 games as retro.

Ultimately though, I am not sure that it really matters all that much. It is just a word.

There are plenty of games from the NES era that hold up well even today and are still enjoyable to play.

every console that existed before 2000 is retro for me, after 2000 it's just old games.

SNES was considered retro when it was barely 10 years old.
DS, Psp, Ps3, wii and X360 are all between 18 and 20 years old and yet people hold stand fast they’re not retro yet.

Just weird. They’re very much retro to me.

With this logic, Breath of the Wild will be considered retro in 3 years

When you can really only buy second hand, I say it's retro. No new retail releases, unless you're a crazy cool indie dev that does that sort of thing.

I generally prefer to go by graphics.......mostly because it's often the only metric I can actually measure myself.

Copy paste from a previous comment. I'll repeat it since yesterday I actually got Wii Party U for the Wii U, a system I do consider retro by now.

My general rules for a console to be considered retro, regardless of how technologically advanced is. They need to comply with all of them to be retro in my books.

*Be 10 years old or more.
*Not getting active support or a notable number of new games, specifically from their first-parties.
*Games for the system get increasingly harder to find on a local basis. Maybe even non-existent unless you buy in another city or online.

So, yes. The 3DS, and even the Wii U, apply for those 3 rules and I consider them retro by this point.
Even if the Xbox One and PS4 are 10 years already, I cannot call them retro yet. New games are still coming out for those and they're still easy to find in my city.

In the case of Nintendo, I consider retro anything I see here (except for the 2020s Game & Watches and the mini consoles).

20 years+ I would say. That would mean I don't consider Gamecube era retro, but the N64 and before I would.

With the way remasters and the download scene is now, I really feel 3 console generations is where it's at. The Wii is just BARELY retro. I would say the GCN, PS2, and XBOX era is Retro at this point with the Wii/360/PS3 era right on the cusp.

I just call them old, cause that's what they are at the end of the day: old games.

All systems covered by NSO and NSO Expansion Pack are retro to me, characterised by aesthetics, controls and online capabilities.

In comparison, Halo 1, GTA 3 and Wind Waker are non-retro to me. They are of a scale much more in line with today’s games, and controls still feel modern.

Meanwhile, „modern gaming“ starts with Super Mario Bros. for me.

10 years? By that definition, some Wii U titles are retro. If we're going by years, 20 makes more sense. Otherwise, go by console generations.

The Retro gamer magazine I read do 15 years + . Which sounds fine to me, a lot has changed in games since then.

90s or earlier, and it will remain that way until I die. GameCube will never be 'retro'.

For me, I define retro as anything from the early 1970s to the mid-to-late 1990s; from the early days of Atari to the turn of the century.

That being said, the primordial form of video games came out in 1947 with the cathode-ray tube amusement device; and through the majority of the 1950s, there were very basic video games made for research purposes and tech demonstrations. But the first video game meant solely for entertainment is believed to be the 1958 game Tennis For Two, which used an oscilloscope as the screen.

It wasn't until the early 1970s when Atari released Pong in the arcades and Magnavox came out with the Odyssey (the first commercial home game console) that video games started to gain in popularity with the general public, becoming the entertainment powerhouse that they are today.

I go by the smell of the console.

From what I've gathered from the comments retro is "when I personally was a kid and there is no leeway at all I am the arbiter of all temporal matters," so that means that the cutoff is PS1/N64 and just by a hair because I'm 44.
That said, I think at least 20 years makes the most sense. Think of how we classify music as "the oldies" and ask yourself if you'd play Adele or Taylor Swift on an oldies station.

Having seen a handful of PS5 games, I kind of think the PS3 era is retro. But that's not an insult-- that's an endorsement.

My patience for games began to collapse in the PS2 era, and I mostly owned a PS3 and a 360 for the high-res arcade goodies Sega churned out (before forcing fans to quest through Yakuza to enjoy them). I don't mind a slick coat of paint and detail as long as the game is accessible, vibrant, and fast-paced.

Anything before PS3 is retro.

I’d say two console generations prior. Wii is slightly retro, GCN is pretty retro, N64 is really retro..

It’s a game design mentality. If the game was made in a way that they just don’t any more then it’s a retro throwback regardless of how old it is necessarily.

So there is kind of a cutoff in the late 2000’s when developers moved to middleware and production teams dramatically increased in size. That made a huge difference in game “feel”.

Some Wii games are definitely retro.

I feel retro both is the dawn years of all gaming, as well as being relative to oneself. With that said, I cut my teeth on gaming in the early-mid 80s, starting with the arcades (PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, etc.), then console gaming in the mid-late 80s formally with the NES (just missing having an Atari 7200 due to my brother overriding that Christmas wish of mine... thanks bro ❤️). I was a kid then, and a teenager into the 16-bit years, so that's all retro to me-- 16-bit and earlier, before the 3D revolution. It was my life, and shaped my life.

The denial in these comments is hilarious. I say once you can feel nostalgic about a game/console/time period, it becomes retro. I have accepted that Donkey Kong Country Returns is retro. The Xbox 360 is retro. Back when I was in my last years of college. Because 2010 was 14 years ago. Oh god.

@Ironcore I think that your point seems to perfectly illustrate my concept of "retro." When Vice City came out, the 80s were considered so "retro." When the film The Wedding Singer came out in 1998 - four years earlier - the 80s still felt "retro." I remember feeling nostalgic for the 80s starting around 1996.

It feels like each decade of the 20th century was so distinct that once they had passed they felt like they were in, er, the past. Starting around what feels like 2000 it feels like decade styles have been expanding to a degree. Sure, technology has changed fast and if you look back at the style of 2004 it seems quaint now... but at the same time it feels like 2005 wasn't so different from 2015 in some way, or that Vice City wasn't that long ago.

I don't know if I'm making sense here.

I follow the GameCenter CX's logic of anything that's over 20 years old is retro, but in that case, the PS2, GameCube and Original Xbox now go into the retro category and I feel old seeing as they were my systems during my university days!

I said 20 years in the poll, and even that feels too short. Halo CE is more than 20 years old.

I use the term retro when describing the kinds of retro games I like, which is usually 16-bit or earlier. Only because it's an easy description. Many modern games attempt to replicate that style, not only in graphics but in gameplay, and I would qualify that as retro in a sense. I feel like games from that era are designed a certain way with both technological limitations and the expectations of gaming culture in mind.

For me it's not about age. It's about design.

I feel like gaming needs a term similar how people describe the eras of Hollywood or Comic Books. "Generations" is good enough term, but sort of falls apart when when you start placing the non-mainstream consoles into the timeline (Also the lack of a concrete first and second generation doesn't help things either). The waters are murky because of how the generations overlap each other. Consider that the NES had new games being made for it until 1994 or how the PS2 kept going until 2012.

For me personally, retro is at least two to three generations old at the least.

I think "Retro" to me usually means NES to Dreamcast. But I think of retro as a specific time period in console gaming.

I also think "modern" started with the Xbox, and fully became so with the Xbox 360/PS3/Wii era. Console games merged with PC gaming, the genres solidified, and we lost AA games for the most part.

The PS2 and Gamecube straddle the line, PS2 had a decent amount of arcade ports and turn based JRPGs were still a relevant genre (PS2 was the last console Final Fantasy was a flagship bearer, and the console when Persona became what it is now).

But, the other reason is... visually and gameplay wise games have largely remained similar since the PS2, outside of resolution leaps, the same with controllers for the most part.

It's what you played as a kid. I dont feel nostalgic about something i played when i was 20, even though that was 15 years ago

@Purgatorium When I think retro, I also think of the 8-bit and 16-bit games of the 80s and 90s. That’s what retro means to me. Retro, because it’s the earliest more primitive design. Close enough to the beginning, if not quite the initial form e.g. Atari’s Pong.

Something to also consider:

Dreamcast is the last Sega Console.
Gamecube is the last Nintendo console that Sony/MS considered a competitor.
Xbox is the first Microsoft console.

Does it have an HDMI port?

Yes: not retro
No: retro

Any pixilated game with bright orange and green is retro for me. Even if it's a new release. I know many love the retro look, but I don't. I played thru it the first time and don't care for the graphic style now.

In a lot of ways the switch is a retro console so maybe it goes by tech? For me a console is retro when you can't buy games for it anymore rendering it obsolete rather than putting a timeline on it. Tbf I'm old and my first console was the vextrex so I'm sure younger people will have a different view.

Retro is not about a length of time that has passed. It is about an era, a style. I read this somewhere but if retro is based on a timespan that must pass, then Lady Gaga’s albums from 2008-2010 are classic rock. But classic rock defines a specific sound, a style of an era. The GameCube’s games are not of the same look, style or era of Atari, NES, SNES, Sega Master System, etc. The N64, PS1 are of their own unique era as is the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. I like to think of the Late 90’s and early 2000’s as the era that games still had a bit of arcade influence in their design. Beginning with the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii are the modern era as they still contain many gameplay styles in use today.

I think one of the things that makes it harder to define retro is that a game being even 10 years old use to...mean anything at all. In 2004 a 10 year old game meant SNES games compared to the modern Gamecube games. Donkey Kong Country is 10 years older than Half Life 2.

A 10 year old game now is a game from 2014, which means very little. Mario Kart 8 is a decade old, and is still more popular and relevant than most games now. Even games that haven't kept up the sales like Shadows of Mordor or Bayonetta 2 could've been made now and most people wouldn't notice a difference from modern games. Like...what would make them stand out? You can't even say because they don't take full advantage of Ps5 level tech, because that's true of most games on Ps5.

Different retro communities and people seem to have different ideas about what “retro” means. And I have no problem with that. If something of a certain age is unwanted to discuss at some place, there is certainly a lot of other places to discuss it. And bending the rules a little is usually not a problem either. I frequent a lot of different retro-communities and I do have strong opinions on a lot of things, including silly ones like how you define genres. But what is called retro or not isn’t something I think much about.

In general I think in terms of console generations, not whether a system is retro or not. For PC games it is more fluid.

The chiptune sound of retro 80s nostalgia:

Fight Dragons - Rewind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slwI6f4LjX0

I have a scale of:

• Current (this gen)
• Modern (last two generations, so back to Wii/PS3/X360)
• Retro (PS1-2, Saturn-DC, XB, N64-GC),
• Classic (SNES/MD)
• Vintage (C64/Amiga, Spectrum, Amstrad, NES, SMS).
• Relic (anything before that, so VIC-20, ZX81, Videopac G7000, Pong console etc)

Borderlines will blur at times, some will fall between the cracks - QL, C16/+4, Dragon, Oric, Enterprise, TI99/4A etc - and Vintage will expand as time goes by to encompass what was Classic as everything shifts back a tier.

I would say anything before the PS3/360 generation, because that's when online gaming and HD became normalised, as long with many other features that have remained largely unchanged.

cool topic!

i turned 18 in 2003, so anything before that is retro, and anything after feels like it came out yesterday 😂 and I expect everyone to agree with this assessment obv. 👍

@kkslider5552000

Yeah, I thought something similar when I read this subject. “Retro” is a word that signifies that something is not current, that it is a little cool for people into it and that it has a style or form that deviates somewhat from what is contemporary.

So if gaming keep changing at the slow rate it currently has for the last twenty years, then the word “retro” may change its meaning a little to just mean older and not different when the topic is gaming. That isn’t very strange as different words have different meanings in different contexts. Or perhaps another word suddenly takes off and replaces “retrogaming”.

@-wc-

The way I feel about it is that media and culture that are from 2000 and onwards are fairly recent of origin. And it terms of music and movies, only things created in the mid-60s and backwards are “old”, even though it is a bit before my time. But when discussing computer games, anything from the seventies and backwards are ancient relics that are inherently impressive, no matter their actual quality.

In my mind, anything before HD is retro.

Even some early 360 and PS3 games are starting to feel retro now, though.

I know it kinda trivializes the art form, but almost anything with pixel art.

I consider games like marbles and kick the can to be truly retro. You know, the kind of stuff that was around back when I was in my early 30s.

@OldManHermit

There seems to be a little less of that these days due to among other things, one Miyamoto's excellent electronic recreations of his own free-roaming childhood adventures.

But in my country at least (Norway), children are still allowed to roam free a lot when they are old enough to handle the traffic in their area. Whenever I read about the US or speak with Americans, I get the feeling that most Americans keep their children constantly supervised because of the mostly false media-created panic about strangers hiding on every corner.

As much as I like electronic gaming myself, it is quite melancholic to see how much time all kinds of screen devices have replaced time that kids used to spend on other things.

I feel happy that I grew up both in the "analogue age" and the "digital age" and got to experience both of them in my formative years. I also never owned any consoles myself as a kid, I only played them when visiting friends or borrowed theirs, and I am very thankful to my parents for that in retrospect, which both led me to read a lot and play and explore a lot outside..

I feel retro for me (I'm 35) is 16,bit and first and second gen 3d as well if you want with the n64 and gamecube era as like ps1 and ps2 games genuinely feel old as F however because of the art styles on GameCube Nintendo games they feel fresher for longer...also the wii for some reason feels more retro than the GameCube and I'd throw in the DS at this point... And strictly for gaming I consider genuine retro stuff from the 60s-80s as I was a 90s kid... People like to throw the word around for anything older than current which may be accurate..i dont know

POINT OF INFORMATION

Semantically, "retro" is not the correct word. Retro means "in the style of an old thing," so by definition, retro games are not old.

Basically any home console before the Xbox 360 and any handheld console before the DS. Specifically because hearing the 7th gen consoles being called retro like the Wii or the DS fills me with a sense of existential dread. I have tried to come up with logical justifications on my position of not calling the 7th generation retro, but ultimately I just have to be honest with myself and say that I just don't want that feeling of existential dread haha

@-wc- ya, saying old games are retro is meaningless, but it seems a combination of marketing and online gaming chatter has come to redefine it as anything distant and it’s just accepted.

New games can certainly be described as retro and it will carry meaning because of the their stylistic choice.

This site has also tried to use the unnecessary term ‘Neo-retro’ to describe new games with old aesthetics because retro has become another way of saying anything distant in gaming.

Retro for me is N64 and prior. Anything after still doesn't feel like it should be called Retro in my eyes.

So I don't care about relative age, it's all about how old it feels to me. And to me, N64 and older feels retro. Anything more recent than that doesn't feel retro so I don't consider it to be. Doesn't matter how many years old it is compared to the present, the GameCube onward will always be fancy and shiny and modern as far as I'm concerned.

@JDCII It just makes sense to me...other mediums?...a book is a book is a book, a film is a film is a film, for some reason, videogames don't get the same consideration. But, Tetris, for example, will always be Tetris and enjoyed essentially the same way forever, regardless of which version you're playing or how old it is. I wish we'd ditch the "retro" label. The more I think about it, the less it makes sense.

I feel retro is essentially just an ‘aesthetic’. One based less on the objective metric, ‘how old is this?’ and more on the subjective one, ‘how old does it feel?’

The Mario Galaxy 2 vs. Wii Sports example was quite thought-provoking. Wii Sports very much feels like a product of its time — poster-child of a bygone age — whereas Galaxy 2 feels somehow timeless (at least in my head, and surely in the heads of many others, too).

I’m sure you can find similar examples in every field of technology. I would not consider the Fender Stratocaster (first released in the mid-50s) to be ‘retro’, whereas it’s hard to think of anything more decidedly retro than the CASIO DG-20, released over 30 years later.

A Fender Stratocaster from 1961: Not retro

A CASIO DG-20 from 1987: Retro AF

The passage of time carries some things with it and leaves others behind. Those we look back on fondly are called ‘retro’. Those we look back on with contempt are called old-fashioned/obsolete/anachronistic/one of any number of synonyms (seriously, there are so many words for ‘antiquated’). And those things we’re still using, we call ‘timeless’. Or more often than not, don’t call anything at all as they’ve become such a part of our daily lives that it’s difficult to even imagine a time without them.

Anyway, Galaxy 2 is good, isn’t it? Regardless of whether you you consider it ‘retro’, it’s undoubtedly a stone cold classic.

After some thought, here's how I currently categorize the consoles:

•Paleolithic: Pong through Atari 5200
•Retro: NES, SMS, C64, SNES, GEN, TBX16, GB, GG, VB, SAT, PS1, N64, GBC

•Millennium Era: DC, PS2, GBA, GCN, OGXBOX, DS, PSP

•Early Modern Era: Wii, 360, PS3, DSi
•Late Modern Era: 3DS, Wii U, Vita, PS4, XB2013, Switch

•Supermodern Era: PS4, XSX, Steam Deck, [Switch Successor]

Also, I really like the phrase "legacy system" to describe something that is clearly old and out of print but not quite "retro". Like, the Wii is approaching 20 years old but it doesn't quite feel "retro" like the NES, GB etc, so I consider the Wii a legacy system.

Everything played on a CRT TV.. Before HDMI.

Pre-Year 2000, so I guess the Saturn, PS1, N64 era.

I think the console before the previous is acceptable.

But for me, it's 20+ years ago.

Anything prior to the PS2/GC/Xbox era, in my opinion.

In terms of handhelds, GBA-gen and earlier.

To me, Retro is the studio that made the Metroid Prime Series and the new DKC games

Everything will be retro once the Intellivision Amico shifts the entire paradigm and melts our brains.

@Mew
Honestly, I don't mind your "anything that can't output 1080p" definition. Maybe I wouldn't pick that specific point to divide it but I think picking something that defines "modern gaming" and saying retro are all the consoles that lack that thing? Not a bad shout

e.g. if you said retro is any console that lacked digital video output. That'd draw the line at Wii with the 360 being just barely over the line. And that sounds about right. Or you could draw the line at a digital store which would drag in the Wii and original XB but would skip DS. Which also fits somewhat

Of course anything 8bit/16bit.
I am okay with Nintendo 64/PS1 being called retro. Anything newer than those definitely not.
In no way at all is the GameCube retro….

If it's older than the last time I felt happiness. I'm 29 now so... yeah, 25 years.

I have a bad feeling I'm gonna be stuck considering 6th generation onward to be 'modern' for the rest of my days lol.

I think it comes down to what does the word mean to you? at this point a 25 year old who grew up with the Wii isn't wrong if he thinks THAT is retro. Does it refer to a specific period of gaming? A style of game or aesthetic? X amount of years backwards in your life?

Thanks to the co-opting of the term through pop culture and marketing for the last decade plus that term has always had some connotation of 80s and 90s look, feel and aesthetic; and that seems to be what is generally considered retro among the gamers I associate with (Aged late 20s to mid 50s). I am 42 and while I dont really use the term myself, when I hear it I think of NES-N64. My brain doesn't compute Ps2 and beyond "retro" but 2000 was almost 25 years ago [JFC].

Time is a crazy thing. And how we process it changes as we age. NES to SNES felt like an eternity when I was a kid. My XSX feels new still but Series X and Ps5 are in their fourth year already. Switch is 25 percent through its 8th(!!!!!) year. Xbox One/Ps4 are over a decade old and Xbox 360 is 20 next year; So the term is going to be in perpetual flux. I think you'll see a gaggle of new minds looking back on the retro brilliance of Bioshock and Gears of War in the next few years. If you're in your early 20s now, 2007 was an eternity ago.

I would consider everything through the 64-bit era to be retro. 128-bit and beyond is "modern" to me. Going back to a GameCube or PS2 game just doesn't feel nearly as antiquated as PS1 or N64--both from a gameplay and technical perspective.

I feel like everything since the Xbox/PS2/GameCube generation has just been refining those graphics that already had a decent level of realism. Many of them still hold up to this day, which is why Nintendo has been reluctant to throw them on NSO and is remaking or in some cases just remastering them. They haven't aged in the same way as previous generations. They also weren't on consoles that were missing some of the core buttons like a right analog stick or X and Y buttons. In that sense, I would sort of consider GBA and DS games to be more "retro" than GameCube.

In many games of the GameCube/PS2 era, even if the polygon count is lower, you have to look pretty closely to see the individual polygons in the models a lot of the time. I define the "retro" era as having pixels/polygons that are constantly visible to the player, and lacking support for wide-screen displays and standardized buttons layouts (4 face buttons, 4 triggers, two analogs, Start and Select buttons). Wii is a bit of an anomaly since they went for a radically different and more simplistic control scheme, but they did still have things like the Wii Classic Controller which had a more traditional scheme.

I'd argue the leap from N64 to GameCube is honestly more staggering than the leap from GameCube to PS5. Again, GameCube/PS2/Xbox felt like a baseline in a lot of ways where every subsequent generation has refined. But we've not really seen a drastic evolution ever since. From GameCube/PS2 onward, a lot of early 3D design quirks were pretty much ironed out such as bad cameras. First-person shooters from this era hold up better than N64.

I don't know if we had any full-fleged "open world" games yet by that point, but the graphical capabilities were definitely getting there. Games were steadily becoming more and more open, and companies were beginning to embrace online play for the first time.

Games felt like they just kept getting exponentially better each hardware generation, but the GameCube/PS2 era is where I feel they kind of hit a plateau. Games today are still great, but I don't think they're a massive leap in quality from that era, though. Games are as good now as they were then.

Retro doesn't simply mean "old," it means out-of-date, so pretty much any game from before controls were standardized along the DualShock gamepad qualifies as retro, to my view. So that's everything up to the PS2 and GCN generations.

Anything from those generations or later can be an old game, but because they're in effectively the same style as modern games, I don't think they can be considered retro.

@Not_Soos
A point of technical pedantry. It's a bit meaningless to talk about consoles in terms of how many "bits" they had beyond the SNES era. In the sense that it mattered the N64 technically had hardware support for 64bit calculations but using those features was generally not worth the effort

And yes, Sony and others marketed their consoles as "128bit" during the PS2 era but that was, well, marketing. For the most part once we hit 32bits that was more-or-less plenty for most things. So what they did is instead of chasing "bits" we instead started to see processors start to do more instructions at once. With the exception of memory because 32bits only allows you to address 4GB. 64bit allows you to address.... 16..... million... TB....

But yeah, in the sense that it was used in the early 90s? You would say that Nintendo's console progression in terms of "bits" would be:
NES: 8bit
SNES: 16bit
N64: 64bit
GC: 32bit
Wii: 32bit
Wii U: 32bit
Switch: 64bit

the TL;DR, "bits" are largely meaningless for gaming hardware and have been for a long while

I'm 53, so to me anything older than yesterday.

Anything that came out while I was born and throughout my high school years. So basically the NES- GameCube era is what I consider retro.

I can understand younger people seeing it as less but, as someone approaching middle-age, I think of retro being when I was a kid. We’re back in the ‘90s then.

Largely incremental IMO.

Though could see those young enough who began with X360/PS3 and later (when consoles first seemingly had to be online) choosing anything prior gens to be retro.

Coming from someone who began with ColecoVision.

It's an interesting point, particularly as I was flicking through the January 1999 issue of Edge magazine yesterday and it was obvious from the articles and the adverts that Retro gaming was really taking off. CEX had just opened a 'Retro' dedicated store and their advert interestingly had logos for not only Atari but also Super Famicom, Mega Drive, Neo Geo and even 3DO.

There also was an article called 'The Land before 3D' which looked at whatever happened to 2D games, which shows how quickly games, and perceptions of what they should be had changed in such a short time. There were quotes such as this one from Joss Ellis of Virgin, "If I showed a 2D game like Super Metroid to a group of kids, none of them would buy it. They'd be like: 'What' all this retro crap?'"

That game was less that five years old at that point! There had been such a paradigm shift in that point of time between the '3D consoles' and what came before, that SNES and Megadrive games were considered retro not long after they'd gone from the shelves.

We've not really had such a big change in the style of games since then, it's been a much more gradual change so it's much harder to pick a point in time when games or consoles would be considered retro. The change is still there, but pinpointing it is much more a matter of an individuals perception. In terms of the consoles themselves and the way that they look and feel, they've not really changed much in more than 25 years - they're boxy and you insert discs. Anything where you have to blow into a cart immediately feels more retro!

As a gamer since the early 1980s, I consider any system from the ATARI 2600 (1977) going forward until the Genesis (1990)/ SNES (1991) to be "vintage". "Retro" to me, would be any system from the PS1 (1994)/N64 (1996) until the discontinuation of the XB360 (2005)/PS3/Wii (2006) systems. As a small child, I started gaming on the 2600 and had just turned 12 years old in 1985 when I was able to witness firsthand the gaming glory that the NES became. The SNES arrived when I was 18 so most of my young adulthood was consumed by that system up until the PS1 arrived when I was 22. Now I'm 51 and I'm still playing. Not as much as I used to, but I'm out there. I have fond memories of the dawn of what is now referred to as "home console gaming" and back then as a 12 year old kid never in my wildest hallucinations did I ever think we would have what we have today.

Consoles I have owned: ATARI 2600, 7800, NES, Gameboy, SNES, PS1, N64, Dreamcast, GBA, Gamecube, PS2, NDS, Wii, PS3, Switch, PS5.

I would say anything prior to modern day graphics/control systems, which I think started during the PS3 era.

Very good question. The reason this is so hard to answer these days is that game consumption habits have changed. Minecraft, Fortnite, and GTA5 should be retro. In the 90s and early 2000s, if you were playing anything that wasn't released on the most recent hardware it was laughably out of date with the zeitgeist and you were clearly either a retro enthusiast or too poor and frantically saving up to move up in the world. I remember that odd feeling in the PS2 generation whenever I would indulge myself by re-playing FF8 or Banjo Kazooie; like it was some kind of kink to be able to still enjoy these minuscule polygon counts. And 2D pixel graphics? I wouldn't sink that low.
Now of course the landscape has completely changed. We have:

• A flattening curve of improvements gen-on-gen, e.g. with PS5 games being essentially PS4 games with shinier reflections. PS3 games still look pretty swish.
• The PC (which has no delineation between generations) getting almost every console game, and the Steam model of having a big ol' flat game library sitting there waiting for you. My backlog includes Bastion, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shadow of Doubt; they are all vying for my attention and must each make their own claim on my free time.
• Indies have changed the definition of what a great game can be. AAA graphics (which of course are linked to hardware) are no longer necessary for a game to be fresh, fun, or even best-in-class.
• Likewise the conversation about "games as art" is no longer even really a conversation. You used to have to do some real mental leaps to claim that Pac-man was art, or even worth playing outside of a smoky arcade. But The Stanley Parable? Okami? Braid? Ocarina of Time? These should be on high school curriculums! And if people are still playing OOT then suddenly Wind Waker and Twilight Princess don't seem quite so old.
• And of course we have "forever games" such as Minecraft, live service games, etc. These are able to thrive now due to the reasons above: changes in perception, 10 year old games still looking great, etc. But also because AAA game development has become so expensive (and games haven't really increased in price) that publishers want or need their games to have a long period of time in the revenue-making limelight. People still play Fortnite because Epic never released a Fortnite 2. Ditto with Minecraft.

Anyway there are a hundred other reasons why old games mean something very different now to back when it meant "pretty lame" to most people. Personally I would only use "retro" to refer to an aesthetic now, e.g. anything which looks like a PS2 game or earlier (which of course actual 20-year-old games tend to do).

I agree with the sentiment of a lot of people above that up until the early 3D systems it's still retro. I think there was such a massive jump to the GameCube/Xbox/PS2 era that a lot of those games still feel like modern games. I'm replaying some PS2 games at the moment and the only QoL features that I'm missing is better checkpoints, I think the industry has gotten a lot better at not wasting players' time. Otherwise, they could be modern titles mechanically.

I am starting to consider Switch retro now.

@OorWullie
Similar im 47, I would also add Dreamcast and dare i say Gamecube

I dislike the terminology on point of principle. It's just better to have a timeless mindset by default, as it impacts both my long-term mentality and my ability to enjoy my life.

Maybe I should just create my own definition for it then? Let's go with this - any game I don't like is Retro. Thusly, Elden Ring is retro

I would consider retro all generatioms up to N64. That includes Pong, Atari, NES, Master System, Tubographix, Genesis, SNES, Neo Geo, Saturn, PS1, N64, the Boys (GB, GBC and GBA and all related handheld by other manufacturers). I say this because: 1. Pixel 2D games are widely considered retro and 2. Most generatioms past GC/PS2/XBOX still hold up very well to this day. Considering retro what came up 10 years ago is not a good indicator by me (heck, DKCTF, MK8 and SSB came to WiiU in 2014 and these are still very modern games)

When I play "Viewtiful Joe" on GC, that`s not a nostalgic experience- it`s just playing a great game the best possible way. Playing "Rhythm paradise" on a new 3ds on the other hand makes me feel like visiting the past - I`m not used to play with touch screen and stylus anymore. "Retro" is an experience that connects you with the past that lets you feel a Style/vibe of the past that we now consider as unique and timebound. A brand new pixel game can make you feel this way. F ZERO doesn`t have this appeal anymore, now that we have F ZERO 99 for the switch. Double screens used to feel "Retro" before the DS and could feel like current and relevant again if someone would use them for new hardware.

I agree with the people saying PS1 / N64 is a good cut-off point.
How long ago doesn't really have much to do with, but rather the shift in how games were designed. The very next generation, you've got online-enabled, fully 3D systems, like the Xbox, Dreamcast, and PS2. The games themselves could be fairly similar to modern games, just with lesser graphics.
Unless we have another shift, anything PS2 onward may never truly be 'retro', with the exceptions of oddities like the Nintendo DS.

Everything up to gamecube, ps2 and original Xbox is retro we can throw in wii, psp, and Nintendo ds too, after this for me the consoles have been the same but with better graphics but not enough to make the older ones look too old hard to describe it's just a feeling until feels like there hasn't really been a new era or innovation to make the ps3 and Xbox 360 feel retro, this was actually hard something you think about when you take a shower or smoking a cigarrete while depressed, yeah I know my English has become really bad since finish my education 🤣

@devil76 Dreamcast perhaps as it's pre-2000 but Gamecube is too modern for me as its tech carried over to the Wii.

Anything post n64, ps1 is not retro and I will never classify it that way. Once online gaming came to consoles, they are not retro. Xbox, ps2, gc…are not retro.
As a gamer who had an Atari growing up, I think this is a good line to divide modern/retro.

Doesn’t mean that there are not retro games developed today, just that consoles stopped being retro during that time.

When the Wii launched I considered the Mega Drive and Snes as retro gaming when they were only around 15 years old. So the 360/PS3/Wii is definitely retro which yes means GTA V is retro even if it's mind blowing considering they still feel modern to play. It's down to slow advancements now for example the jump from Snes to PS2 is bigger in terms of graphics and the way the games play than PS2 to now is despite the much bigger gap in years.

It's largely by feel for me. Certainly GameCube/PS2 era is retro, but for the next generation it's kind of up in the air. I would say the 360 is retro, but not the PS3. Wii is somewhere in the middle; I don't generally consider it retro but I feel like it uses "retro" tech and some of the games I might say are, like Twilight Princess. I guess because it was developed as a GC game. Odd.

I prefer to go by years because games made at the start of one generation can be vastly different from games made towards the end.

Like for example, Oblivion is 100% retro but Skyrim really isn't, both were released on the same console but were made using different game engines.

I would say about 15-20 years is a good enough time frame to say it's retro.

Usually years so I'd say 15+ or console gens (I voted 15+). I mean game design or visual design wise it varies some try to be analogue or old school others still a fair no matter the resolution but that's not a lot to go on.

By generation I think it's fair as by years or 2 gens sure, sold at retail or retro game stores, makes sense, but if we went by just modern TVs and other factors then sure. Or just computer tower/monitor designs or other factors sure.

I don't usually say vintage but could. But retro I'd just say 2 gens old. I mean Wii had a CRT at the forefront of focus besides being in the HD era. So the 'white and tv screens' or the white console to look modern I think doesn't cut it much or other factors. It may have had the Apple inspiration but that's doesn't translate to other factors.

If we counted say the controls and such well to be real here, most games with an analogue stick were not fully the same yet. Even PS3 in some cases too. Like if God of War 2005 had analogue stick to dodge which Knack from 2013 does as well, Pitfall you use the right stick to move your hand to do any tools use or attack or something, other games use the right stick to attack. So it wasn't completely modern controls by there either.

Other games used the stick in different ways not just for camera it was more common in 6th gen to not have camera on right stick (it was in many popular games yes but in other games no it wasn't common the way the camera worked it wasn't finalised yet I can tell based on Stitch for PS2 it has a very similar to old racing games that sort of some sides view but no back view it just moves around the character but not like modern cameras do properly) as the standard then it was 7th gen where it was more common place yes besides Wii motion/Sixaxis being their thing and motion being 80s to GBC/GBA carts and so on.

Even if we count handhelds PSP looks modern but DS was designed like a PDA before the Lite version slimness and of course Gizmondo, Tapwave Zodiac and NGage were very PDA/Pocket PC or cellphone design, very thick.

Like I mean if we go era sure but I mean anyone that says oh it ends at Dreamcast uh Dreamcast was 6th gen start and even then besides the VGA port (even if sometimes relevant isn't unless a 2000s Netbooks or something besides some modern PC cases but usually is HDMI/Display Port or whatever DVI use) all consoles had a CRT even if Plasma was a thing or LCD as well, 480p or 576i was common then 720p/i or 1080i in games and also online Dreamcast had a Broadband modem which is MODERN not just a dial up modem. So to me any PS2/Xbox/GameCube don't count makes no sense by that logic as Dreamcast was pushing modern not just oh it was a 90s console so it's safe. XD

If were saying 7th gen as a push for online stores/services then I totally agree there by that logic and yes a push for the 2000s/Frutiger Aero (the very sci-fi or glassy bright colour 2000s style people may remember such as Windows Vista/7 Aero look, I still prefer older phone OS looks then today even Windows Phone 8.1 to the eh Android/iPhone look that's so bland and the space and icons it's disgusting) style as well then we got the more flat design style of these days but to me it was better during the 2010s flat design like Windows 8/Xbox 360 (not sure what else to give as an example) as it didn't make me still bored to death with it and I still knew what things were. Nowadays the streaming service look and navigation suck and no matter how they make the boring look bad navigation is still bad no matter if you have the bad style. That and the similarity makes it stand out in a bad way.

While flat logos or streaming service UI/OS design that makes me sick and laugh at the navigation design when old 2010s flat design I knew what things were and the navigation was better not every time I see the Switch/PS5/Xbox Series I just see the most boring design out there and the groups feature Xbox One pushed to all platforms in their recently, library design. It makes me sick. The only good the Xbox One gave from it's OS in that way was the silence feature PS5 uses now. Not the UI/OS visual design that's for sure especially now with more ads/less customisation OS look. On Xbox One it's painful to see the exact design Series S/X have and it run like garbage on a Xbox One X, let alone an Xbox One VCR.

Let alone the radio modems and such of Mega Modeom/Sega Channel or Satellview or others. Let alone Intevlision's option as well or Famicom banking/horse betting.

So if we cancel those out of possibilities it could be yes the vibe of the 90s aesthetic I get that.

Same way clothes or music was compared to anything goes or goes too quickly in a decade these days.

Should have never started using "Retro" to define the 8 and 16 bit eras. It's like calling something "old". Time marches on. EVERYTHING is old, and EVERYTHING is new. It's all relative. In 50 years, PS6 will be old. Then will we refer to it as "retro"? Should refer to these eras by more defined, specific names.

Honestly, I would consider gen 7 and back retro. The way I thought about it was that if I, for example, went to someone's house and they exclusively had a gen 8 console, I probably wouldn't bat an eye and it would seem normal, but if their primary gaming console was gen 7 (Wii, PS3, 360) I would probably be at least mildly interested as to why they haven't upgraded yet. Gen 7, at this point, hasn't been able to play truly modern, supported games for like 8 years, and it's outdated tech at this point. You can buy them at some retro games stores. They're retro.

Games or consoles don't suddenly change to "retro" when they turn a sudden age. The retro era is a specific period in time - the early days of video gaming when the technology was primitive.

The comparison with "Classic Rock" that someone made above is spot on. It's a fixed period in history. The boundaries don't shift as time moves on.

Playstation/Gamecube/Saturn them and before is retro

My metric: Anything older than me is retro

I go back about 2.5 console gens / "about 20 and some change+ years". IE, we're about halfway through PS5 now, so PS3/360 is the newest 'retro' and PS2/Xbox/Gamecube are firmly in it. A few years into PS6, PS4/Xbox One will be feeling a little 'retro'.

I think Wii/PS3/360 and before is retro. But, technically, that's only one generation before the switch, to blow your mind a bit.

@OorWullie Good point, I just play games on anything really. regardless of what they on. Old or New im all for it

Even though I said by console generations, I mean a fixed generation. That is the 16 bit era and prior. Before 8 bit, with things like pong, I regard as archaic. Anything 3D (N64, PS and beyond) is the same era because everything essentially plays the same.

@8bit-Man 100% agree! Retro is a specific period in time.

@inenai I like your thinking! Anything older than you is retro.