Before I begin, I’d just like to applaud the gaming blogosphere for their hard work in fixing the gamer’s taxonomy; Mitch Krpata famously knocked it out of a park almost a year ago when he examined the “hardcore” and “casual” descriptors on games. Douglas Wilson took a crack at the term “gamer,” challenging its use and its validity. Countless bloggers have questioned the definition of art, and how it relates to games. I can’t remember now, but some have even questioned the term “video game,” as this form of media doesn’t require video (like AudiOdyssey) or, err, games, really (Anthony Burch takes the piss out of a piece of Interactive Entertainment for calling itself a game, but if we don’t call it a video game, what do we call it?). Certainly, the entire industry and community is filled with terms that may have meant something once, but have since become obsolete or have fallen into misuse. While nobody has really adopted these terms, yet, it’s good food for thought; knowing the value of what we’re saying is integral for successful communication. For example, while I might still say “hardcore” or “casual” gamer, I am now fully aware of their limitations.
I’d like to nominate the next word for close scrutiny: retro.
Now, this isn’t an entirely useless word, when it comes to games; games that are from a certain time are retro, simply because they are no longer contemporary but back in style. It’s cool to have images of 8-bit sprites on your website, or Atari logos on your T-shirts. For younger generations, the simple act of playing vintage games could be considered “retro” (for those of us old enough to have played it the first time around, though, it’s really just “nostalgia” or, in some cases, “preference”). New games, though, don’t deserve the term. They are new games, with new ideas, and to essentially call them old is a disservice.
The worst way in which this happens has to be with games that operate on a two-dimensional plane, or with sprites instead of polygons. Braid is a wonderful example of a game that’s been called “retro” that entirely doesn’t deserve the moniker. To the credit of most literate game fans, I haven’t seen this game get called retro much, but I have seen it. What you have here is a wildly imaginative video game that does a pretty good job of transcending its genre with mind-bending puzzles, beautiful watercolor art assets and a clever (if a bit tacked-on) speed run leaderboard. Sure, it passes reference to retro games, but if anything, that’s just proof that it isn’t retro itself; how many old-school games that you can think of are making ironic postmodern references to their predecessors (as nauseating at that sounds)? I can’t think of any.
Another example that’s come up recently (for the third time, I guess) is Ikaruga. That’s a game that brings a lot of new stuff to the table: a vertical shooter that brings incredible 3D graphics that aren’t gaudy or inscrutable; a completely new “polarity” system that makes enemy bullets as beneficial as they are dangerous; and a bizarro plot, the likes of which I’ve never seen in another vertical shooter (or any other… err, media, for that matter). I just spilled the beans on why people call it retro, though; vertical shooter. Since it’s a genre steeped in tradition that dates back to arcades (make a game hard and give it zillions of points so people will feed it quarters and try to beat each other), it must be retro. This simply isn’t true. If that were the case, we’d call Chris Farley’s comedy “retro comedy” because he was just doing mild permutations on Three Stooges physical comedy. We’d call Quentin Tarantino movies “retro cinema” because they’re so heavily informed by Westerns and kung fu flicks and the nouvelle vague and whatever else he claims he loves. The thing is, we just don’t do this. We call the Three Stooges retro, we call Spaghetti Westerns retro, but we don’t call current things that are influenced by them retro. Why are we doing it for games? See also the incredible early 2008 Xbox Live Arcade game, n+, or the upcoming (and Montreal local!) Fez: they’re certainly retro-inspired, but to call them retro is incorrect, and invalidates the new, exciting innovations they bring to games today.
It gets more dicey as we get closer to things that actually are “retro.” Three recent games made me start thinking about the word retro, and really are the core of my argument: Pac-Man Championship Edition, Galaga Legions, and Space Invaders Extreme. Upon first glance, the retro moniker might make a bit of sense; after all, they’re using what are essentially the original sprites in gameplay that very heavily informed by the games upon which they are based. However, Pac-Man C.E. is, when you get right to its guts, as far as possible from Pac-Man as you can get; gone are the days of pattern memorization. This game starts slow, but by the end of its five-minute runtime (a new feature), it’s become a twitchy stressfest joy explosion. Similarly, Galaga Legions only looks like Galaga, and even then, only slightly; its use of remote satellites as the crux of its gameplay is entirely new. Also new: trapping bugs to make them fight for you. They’ve also downplayed pattern recognition in favour of an assault on the senses, rewarding twitch and improvisation in addition to committing levels to mind. Space Invaders Extreme takes one of the most simple games ever made and turns it into a maximalist circus that plays like a Basement Jaxx record sounds– it takes the monotonous pacing of the original game and flips it on its ass.
The point is, all of these games have retro-informed art assets, but they’re all new games—whether they’re new like Chris Farley and Quentin Tarantino are “new” or not, they shouldn’t be called “retro games.” Save that term for Galaxian and Pitfall and Duck Hunt. What most of these games have in common is that they reject a three-dimensional playfield, which is something that’ll never go out of style (until we have a true three-dimensional game display). A two-dimensional game plays to the dimensions that your television set can actually display; it doesn’t attempt to feign a third dimension with polygons and lighting effects and bloom and blur. Personally, I need to temper my 3D game-playing with doses of 2D games, simply because I get tired of parsing foreground from background. There’s no nostalgia in it; I just don’t appreciate the added challenge of imagining depth where there is none, all of the time. It pains me when people essentially call a game old because it doesn’t have that one feature that’s in most “cutting edge” games. Is a game retro if it doesn’t have online play? That’s in most current games. What if it doesn’t have branching narratives? Space Marines? Gamer points or trophies? Simply rejecting a recent development in games doesn’t automatically age or depreciate your game. So please consider this when you call something “retro,” and stop diluting the meaning of a word that means something that is outdated but has returned to “the norm.”
Wednesday, 19. November 2008
There needs to be a word for retro-esque, that means it’s LIKE retro games, but it really isn’t.
Otherwise, I do feel old when people use the word incorrectly; In the good old days (with teeth removed and stuff) I did play the atari, and NES, and they were good enough. Arcade games on the XBox have been amazing, but they do induce nostalgia, they’re not retro. Sorry, Rambling - No more sugar for me.
Keep it up!
Wednesday, 19. November 2008
Haha, how about “postretro?” Everybody likes post- words, riiiiight? :P
Wednesday, 19. November 2008
You might enjoy this article about the “retroness” of Mega Man 9: http://etelmik.blogspot.com/2008/10/mega-man-9-modern-meet-retro-retro-meet.html
Thursday, 20. November 2008
Good post, makes a lot of sense. One of the big issues is that retro is a poorly defined term in the first place. It’s easy to pick out retro now, but getting more difficult as the medium becomes older than say 30.
I was under the impression that retro only applied to art that referred to things before its time, though. Retro taken literally means looking back, and to me that makes something that refers to old things retro and old things just old.
Playing pac-man in an arcade in the 80’s wasn’t retro. Playing pac-man in barcade now is.
Either way it’s damn near being a critically useless term, using the retro = old definition gets everyone into the how old argument, which boils down to when a ‘retro’ gamer played their formative games or when a ‘progressive’ gamer feels games no longer contain relevance.
If we use retro as referring to old, we still have to resolve that first issue and additionally the problem of how much retro is retro enough. It could be pretty easily justified that any game that uses limited lives ever is a retro game because it depends and the coin-op mechanism that is no longer relevant.
More mature critical industries get pretty specific. Most work on Tarantino tries to find specific films he grinches from rather than using generalistic terms.
Semantics aside, I agree that the use of retro is intellectually lazy.
Also, holy quotes batman, you have like two per paragraph up in this!
Thursday, 20. November 2008
yeah, I need to lay off the quotation marks, it seems. It was even bugging me as I was writing it.
Whether the games that are old are retro or the games that namecheck them are retro is irrelevant to me, as long as it’s defined which one it is and isn’t both. The fact that they are BOTH called retro is what causes confusion, at least to me.
I am kinda diging on this post-something thing. Post-arcade? Post-retro? Post-coinop?
Thursday, 20. November 2008
I like post-coinop quite a bit, but for different reasons. I like the prospect of having a name for all of the games that are starting to do away with the arcade-centric conventions a la Fable 2 or Braid.
I surprisingly don’t hate neo terms in this context. Neoretro or neoarcade. As you point out, PacMan CE tries to capture some of the arcade experience but is by no means a derivative experience. No more than N or N+ is compared to lode runner.
But I’m blathering. I think of Braid as post-arcade and Mega Man 9 as neo-arcade (even though megaman wasn’t an arcade title it’s still locked pretty into the credits/lives style paradigm).
Thursday, 20. November 2008
Wow, great write up Dude! I definitely agree with you… and I feel more often than not the retro lable is applied to games with a visual aesthetic that flirts with the look of older games. But just becuase a game *looks* like another game before its time, doesn’t mean it is ‘retro’. Duhhhh.
Thursday, 20. November 2008
This is a very good point: I agree retro isn’t defined and if it isn’t can lead to arguments. Don’t want retro to become the new “emo”!
How about: “Retro games are games made with graphics, sound, and game design elements that are influenced by and in accordance with games that otherwise would be extinct?” I can’t nail it right now but it seems like the “step backwards” part is what makes it so; Castle Crashers is being referred to as such based on design choices (and whether CC is retro is almost debatable), but MM9 seems to be the only true “retro” game with its adherence to 8-bit NES capabilities.
Hmmm.
Thursday, 20. November 2008
What if games like Mega Man 9 were referred to as Anachro instead of Retro? Since they are current but fit into the paradigm of another time’s games, they’re somewhat anachronstic, no?
Friday, 21. November 2008
Well, Ikaruga did come out in 2001 (in the arcade), so given the speed with which our community’s attention shifts I think that actually could qualify as retro…
Pedantry aside, I agree totally.
Friday, 21. November 2008
I think I agree with Katrina that we need a word for “retro-esque”. Preferably not “postretro”. However, in defense of retro, I think most people do use the word that way. If someone were to say that “Everyday Shooter” has retro sensibilities, would anyone fail to understand what he meant?
I think retro is a useful term to separate games that push graphics and realism (like most 3D shooters or adventures) from those that look back at the style and mechanics of an earlier era. Until we find a better word, let’s not retire it just yet.
Friday, 21. November 2008
@chesh, fair point– maybe it’s my advancing years, but Ikaruga still feels “new” to me. Given that it’s on a second-3D-game-generation console, I find it difficult to consider a part of those formative years so much as a part of the “polishing” years we’ve seen over the past 2-3 console iterations. But, again, gettin’ old, right?
@Rob Zacny, you’re right. If you said it had retro sensibilities people would probably have an idea of where you are coming from, but not a complete picture; for example, I personally find that game very unpunishing and focussed on the experience of finishing levels/songs, and not so much a quarter-muncher. But, the thing is, there’s a cavernous difference (at least to me) between “retro sensibilities” and simply “retro.” Ditto retro-inspired; implying it is informed by retro games is more accurate than calling it a retro game.
I also agree that postretro is terrible, I was being a bit tongue in cheek with it. :) I think, if it can roll off the tongue better than it seems like it is so far, “anachro” might have some promise!
Friday, 21. November 2008
Was just thinking — since when does other media such as film, television and music ever get called “retro”. Even books, for that matter. Vintage and retro are terms generally used to describe clothing and interior decorating styles.
I usually use the term “retro” but I’m now wondering why. When I watch a film such as Dawn of the Dead from the 70s, I don’t call it a “retro” film, I call it old.
When reading 1984, you don’t call it “retro”, you call it a “classic” or “fuckin’ boring”. etc.
Well, that’s that then. I’m just going to throw the term retro and it’s application to a majority of media straight out the window.
Done and done. Thanks for bringing this up!
Saturday, 22. November 2008
The comparisons with other media are misleading. Videogames have a very brief history while film, literature, drama… pretty much everything else has a much deeper tradition from which to draw.
Nobody calls Chris Farley’s schtick retro because slapstick has been around since before we can remember, so it’d be a useless term. Same deal with Tarantino films: we can easily break down the influences that inform and animate his work, so we don’t need to say his work is retro. We have better terminology.
The problem we’re facing here is that most of us seem have labored under a misapprehension that we’re only now identifying. “Retro” is a devaluing term to describe genres that we never properly understood or recognized. As technology improved, more and more games started leaving behind their simplistic 2D roots and striving for greater realism. Three-dimensions, better graphics, physics engines, etc.
In my case, I’ll admit that this caused me to sort of underestimate those older games. They were the way they were because of limited technology and experience, I thought. Gaming would move away from 2D shooters and scrollers as fast as possible. God knows I did (nothing helps contempt for a genre like being exquisitely bad at it).
So now we have all these games that look toward these earlier genres and techniques, but we never fully appreciated these older games nor fleshed out a good descriptive vocabulary for them. They’re retro because people used to make games this way, with the unspoken assumption that these days they should not. However, that is being exploded, so we’re in need of a finer-grained critical language.