When Is A Game Considered "Retro"? 

The retro isn’t about age it’s about the technical limitations and how they have evolved. A good way to tell is by the “5 year rule”. If you get the best gaming machine from 1991 say a Mega Drive or SNES, and then compare it to the best from 1996, like an N64, the difference in capabilities between them is abysmal. However, the best computer from 2019 still kicks ass even today in 2024. It’s this decrease in every step of the evolution that determines the retro-ness. There’s something similar in computer electronics design called “Moore’s Law. It’s not exactly the same but the same principle applies. At some point in time, that “5 year difference” became “not that huge”, and that’s when games stopped being retro. To me, I’d say that’s somewhere between 2005 and 2010. I think that in 15 years time, these games will be called “vintage” or “classic”, but not really “retro”.

To add to your point about games “looking more retro” I think the less huge graphical leaps in between gens also plays a big part. The shift from the SNES to the N64, or especially the PS1/N64 to GameCube/PS2 saw HUGE leaps in 3D graphical improvements. Since then, we’ve seen less leaps and more subtle improvements in graphics, which is why I think it’s hard to see a lot of 10+ year old 3D games as retro. They still LOOK to modern, despite being over a decade old.

I think the era clasification is the best one. Games up to PS1, debatably PS2, feel like they were starting out, technology was clearly a major roadblock when developing. From PS3 onwards, it's clear that technology stopped being such an issue, the indie market started to be recognized as a thing and internet connection became standard.

To me i can understand some games 10 or older being retro with a huge exception. If a game is still being actively supported then it looses its retro status until it stops being supported for a while IMO

I think nowadays retro games can also be defined by the old aspect ratio on the TV (4:3). I know even back then some games did have widescreen support, but most games didn't. So I'd definitely consider PS2 era games retro now because of the old aspect ratio.

I think what makes "retro" its own kind of vibe stems from a mix of what stuff from a specific generation defines it and your personal experience with them. For example, when i replay games like Super Mario World, i do feel a bit of nostalgia for them but not like they're "old". They're just part of my childhood. My Club Nintendo magazines however DO feel retro to me because of how quick things changed since the late 2000s thanks to social media and how much more convenient it is to just upload or watch gaming news online nowadays. So it's almost like holding my own time capsule, even though the new issues got discontinued circa 2020. A memory that feels close yet distant since it'll only be tangible to me and the other few lucky folks who were there to enjoy it till the end of time

Nah. Retro is closer to 20 years.

My personal take is that retro gaming faded away when the power of the consoles became far less significant constraints on game design.

I think part of the reason a lot of people struggle to define what is and is not retro is because of indie games. You look at recently released indie games from 2023 like Sea of Stars or that uses pixel art and compare it with a realistic 3D game from 15 or so years ago like Metal Gear Solid 4, and you have to ask which game really looks older? Also you have older indie games like Cave Story that use pixel art and try to look retro, and then you remember that Cave Story was released in 2004 - 20 years ago! It makes the idea of 'retro' seem like more of an aesthetic than something tangible and definable.

For me, retro games are classified by the look, sound and feel. Thinking about how VGM used to be comprised of individual sampled sounds, and the gradual to using live music, although not exclusively. Taking into account consoles, visuals & music could actually help us to classify video games, and this is something I’d love to do using a machine learning model.

the fact that LittleBigPlanet can be even CONSIDERED retro is absolutely mind blowing.

It may be silly, but I'd bookmark the Dreamcast as the start of "modern games" & anything before it's release in North America to be considered "retro games". I think the whole era thing makes the most sense, because theoretically yeah, gameplay itself really stopped in innovation after the 6th gen, not to say that's a bad thing but to say we entered a different era of videogames. The 6th generation was the first time graphics were good enough that nobody had imagined they could be that good or get any better, & it was the first group of systems that could do things prior consoles really couldn't. The only thing that's really evolved since the release of the Dreamcast & the start of the 6th gen is graphics. I didn't really grow up with the 6th generation, but to me it truly doesn't feel that long ago, especially with major consoles like the Wii being essentially a beefier GameCube & also being the hottest product while I was growing up. Handhelds also retained the same graphics as the 6th gen until the Nintendo Switch, which also shows the 6th gen has basically become the standard for videogame consoles & we've just been perfecting it since.

7:57 is the take I agree with, it feels weird to lump in games and consoles from just prior to 2004 or even 2009 in with ones from the mid to late 80s, classing them all as retro

Retro in terms of the general timeframe according to Wikipedia ranges between 20-30 years old and little fun fact, GameCenter CX a Japanese video game show that got its start in 2003, goes by a 20 year rule where a video game system must be 20 years or older in order to be featured. In 2021, the show started covering PS2, GameCube, and GBA games so this year in 2024 they should be covering DS games.

The game has to feel and look retro not all games that are nostalgic are necessarily “retro”

Retro is becoming less as an indicator of how old a game is. It's more about a game with mechanics and gameplay from a bygone era. For example, I would consider arena shooters such as Quake and Unreal Tournament as retro compared to say Call of Duty even though COD is 20 years old now. I feel that retro games are now classified as "they don't make them like these anymore" if that makes any sense. Games with a timeless feel don't really feel retro as compared to games with outdated mechanics and gameplay

I agree most with the time period theory. We still call the same style of clothes "retro" clothes, we don't start calling skinny jeans "retro". When a new game that takes elements from "retro" era games, like 2d platformers or collectathons, they feel more retro.

Retro for me is an aesthetic brought together by visuals, sound and game feel. Lunistice is an indie that came out in 2022 but looks gorgeously retro. I also love the bloodborne demake.

0:20 you're confusing nostalgia with retro in this context, retro means games that released on old hardware. Nostalgia means having memories of existing media (example, some people might say they have nostalgia of Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Oddysey)

I think retro is clearly a gradient of some form, Pong is more retro than Atari Adventure, which is more retro than Sonic the Hedgehog, which is more retro than Luigi's Mansion, which is more retro than Call of Duty: Black Ops, which is more retro than Hades

Really glad I found your channel. You're a pleasant respite that helps my day. Thanks

It’s all a mindset thing, really. It’s all due to when you grew up with games. The Wii is a system I grew up with, but I also watched Classic Game Room. That show started in 1999 with a review of an N64 remake of Robotron 2084. At the time, that was modern. Nowadays, it’s not. It’s also a matter of how the game is designed. Something like a GameCube platformer feels retro enough to me. Metroid Prime feels continually old, not really retro. And Halo, which came out before Prime, is a game I recently played ON ORIGINAL HARDWARE and still it feels somewhat modern to me. It’s all about mindset. About game feel. About genre. About the person themselves. It’s a cop-out, but there is no one retro. It’s all about how the player feels about a certain game.

NES/SNES era are now vintage, PS2/GC are retro. lol

I think a game becomes retro when it becomes outdated by today's standards. Now, what a game becoming "outdated" means is up to personal opinion.

I think the term “retro” conjures up images of games like Mario 1 and Pac-Man and GB Tetris, so calling a PS2 game retro just feels wrong at first. But enough time has passed and games have evolved enough since then that 15-20 year old games can definitely be called retro.

What really drives home that you're playing a retro game is when you run into one of the many design decisions or features that you'd just never find in a modern game. About a year or two ago, I played through Kid Icarus on the NES and realized how long it had been since I'd needed to write down a password. People still make games with pixel art (although some of them are trying to look retro on purpose), but I don't expect long unintelligible password strings will ever make a comeback any more than I expect that we'll ever see a new console packaged with a controller that only offers a D-pad for movement.

I'd say a game becomes "retro" when the original version of that game is at least 2 console generations behind, but more realistically it's 3. I don't think it's based on the length of time. By that point backwards compatibility for those sorts of games would be out of the window for the most part, the tech used to support the game has come a long way to the point where they're just not comparable and there's a universal nostalgia to be felt for the games on those consoles. If we look at what exists now and go back 2 gens, the landscape would look like this: Sony - PS3 Sony handheld - PSP Microsoft - Xbox 360 Nintendo - Wii Nintendo handheld - Nintendo DS (if we're calling the Switch a handheld) If we go back 3 gens, it looks more like this: Sony - PS2 Microsoft - Xbox Nintendo - Gamecube Nintendo handheld - GBA If you ask me, 3 gens before really solidifies just how much further gaming has come no matter which starting point you choose to go backwards from. 2 gens back there's at least some room for debate. As an example, no matter how you cut it, going 3 gens back from the GBA leads you to a time before the original Game Boy, and that's CERTAINLY retro at that point.

I personally consider a game/console as retro whenever it turns 20. And this might sound weird, but even if a console is retro, that doesn’t mean the games are. For example, I’d consider the GameCube to be retro but not Paper Mario TTYD, for now anyway.

Good job kiro! Love these dives into these topics

I'm just glad these "retro" games aren't necessarily forgotten. They need more remakes, too!

new to the party but i love this presentation style, having the public conversation on the topic to then *become* the video is a very complete picture, there's so much value for me here in seeing other peoples different takes and get the same spotlight with eachother, it feels like breaking the echo chamber

The Era thing (8:00) and the "Once a game turns 10 years old it automatic turns intk a Retro game" are My Favorite Defenitions of what a Retro game is

I think that last perspective is the one that I agree with even though I didn't realize it until now. I only really do see games from a long time ago as retro. I mean I grew up in the '90s so I'm very nostalgic for the SNES and the N64 And I also have some nostalgia for the Genesis and PS1, but honestly sometimes I don't even feel like retro is like anything from before the PS1. Especially since growing up in the '90s that all seemed so new and fresh with the N64 in 3D.

I think we just need to move up the tiers a bit; Retro can be from 00-05 Vintage can be the 90s Ancient can be the 80s. Also I think the fact that with the advancement of online discussions and the fact that old games are constantly being talked about, games that used to feel old no longer do.

If you thought that was weird, Adventure Time is 14 years old and there are still people who think it's relatively new. That series was old enough to release games on consoles such as Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, and PS3, as well as multiple flash games that used to be on CN's website. The series came out back when stuff like Hulu and RU-vid were in their infancy and season 4 of SpongeBob SquarePants was still seen as recent. Even some movies that released the same year as AT like Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me got PS2 games late in that console's lifespan. What's even stranger were things that were 14 years old back then and how they were treated. Like you said in the video Nintendo 64 games were featured apart of the Wii's retro titles. Also Dexter's Laboratory was airing for a while on Boomerang (which was initially meant to be a channel for "Retro" cartoons that lost their relevancy on CN, until the mid 2010s) , with Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, I.M. Weasel, and The Powerpuff Girls also airing on the same channel. The following year would have TeenNick introduce a 90s block that includes Hey Arnold! as one of it's shows.

Maybe it’s my nostalgia talking but I feel like Super Smash Bros Melee was kinda the culmination/last hurrah of gaming during the retro era

Tbh, the last "Retro generation was the N64/PS1 era. After that id just consider everything "modern". The shift from the 5th gen consoles to the 6th gen consoles was a shift in to the paradigm weve been in ever since. Basically, i would just consider all those games you stated as being "old modern games"

very nice video. as it went on i realized that I also have no idea what makes a game retro

Any games released before I was born (2004) have a kind of retro feel to me.

i definitely agree more with the idea that we reached a point where retro doesn’t work to describe old games. i personally can’t see anything past ps1 as retro

I disagree with Minecraft being considered Retro now.

I think a lot of people are just in denial that 10 years should be considered retro because of the 3D aspects mentioned in the video. Even if a game still feels modern, all 10 year old games are retro in one way or another. I will say also that I feel the general rule of thumb is to consider the last major update as the pseudo-"release date" when talking about modern games, making Minecraft for example "only a few months old" considering 1.20 vs if Minecraft stopped updating at 1.7.4 which then would be considered retro. Another good example is how Mario Kart 8 doesn't feel old because of MK8DX and it's most recent DLC from just a couple months ago vs say Forza Horizon 2 which just feels ancient even though both released in 2014.

my guess is because videogames have come a LONG way from 2000 to 2010, but from 2010 to 2020, there wasnt as much improvement, so they look and feel just like modern games we play a lot today

Damn I really love this channel

i never thought of the term "retro" but i did though when its a time to call a game an old game and figure its about 10 to 15 years

If we’re going by the 10 year rule, that means things like the sims 4, Portal 2, and Mario Kart 8 are all retro games. Damn

I feel attacked by the thumbnail. That aside, love hearing your thoughts on topics like this.

For Minecraft specifically, I'd consider Minecraft version 1.0.0 "retro". Just not the newer versions. It's pretty specific to Minecraft though since it allows you to play on any version of the game.

I consider retro to be about 2 gens ago or about 15+ years ago

May your year be filled with happiness and good health !

I guess indie developers classified retro games as sprite base because a lot of indie games that are sprite based those developers call them as retro inspired games like Shovel Knight, Undertale, Cave Story etc

Man, little big planet is 15 years now!

I’m pretty happy to classify games as being retro as soon as they turn 15 years old. That’s just about the time it takes to go through 2 console generations. That way, a game won’t be classified as retro if it came out during the previous generation. It’s a benchmark that just seems to work out pretty well for me. Going by my own rules, anything that came out in 2008 or before would be retro right now, and knowing what games are included, I’m satisfied with 15 years.

I think a "retro era" is how I've always thought of it, without really thinking about it. For me, the 32-bit era - when games made their first steps into 3D, but were still largely following the same design principles as earlier generations - is the point where it still seems clear-cut. The PS2/GameCube/XBox generation is where it starts to look blurry to me, and I don't really consider PS3 or XBox 360 games retro at all, even after so many years passing. For me to think of something as "retro," it's as much about design philosophy and the landscape of the industry around the games as it is about their actual age. The industry changed a lot with the rise of widespread Internet access, and game design changed as games became more widely played by broader audiences. Both of these shifts came to a head at the advent of the PS3/360 generation.

I like to think of retro as us taking a retrospective of gaming and it being more about the advancements. We consider NES -> SNES -> N64 -> Gamecube as retro because there were massive leaps in technology between console generations. I remember thinking NES games were retro when my dad got a SNES as there was scrolling backgrounds and a lot more colors, but when I got an N64 I thought all those 2d games were old because we now had polygons, and then when I got a gamecube I saw N64 as messy and unrefined because games could finally look "real". I don't think we'd consider PS3, Wii, or Xbox 360 as retro as there wasn't a huge jump in tech to the next generation, yeah we could render more and textures were nicer but games leaned more on the artistry then the tech. The idea of retro may become a thing of the past as current generations have much less of a leap in tech with Playstation and Xbox releasing incremental upgrades to their consoles instead of 1 big jump every decade along with games constantly getting updates despite being decades old. I think the only way we'd see the previous and current generation as retro is if the next generations had massive changes along the lines of going 3d. Maybe if VR becomes the new standard of gaming then the idea of games where you control the character from a 3rd person perspective will be seen like how we see 2d sidescrollers as retro.

Length of generations is a factor too. The 7th/360/PS3 generation was VERY long and had significant overlap with 8th/PS4/One. 360 launch titles id consider retro during the 8th gen as many were either ports of previous gen games or only a small leap in fidelity, with almost no differences to gameplay philosophy, Call of Duty 2 or R&C Tools of Destruction come to mind. While later titles in the generation feel like they're borderline next gen games, Halo 4 or Destiny comes to mind. Gens from older generations were shorter so they felt like they got older faster, and in a way they did, the 90s was breakneck for innovations.

6:15 I was gonna comment this before finishing the video haha. Literally yes, thinking as retro as being about time instead of being about advances and evolution is a really bad perspective.

I feel like Retro is almost a signifier of the type of hardware the game is meant to be played on rather than the time it released at. For this example, I'd say that if the system has composite cable output and can be played on a 4:3 CRT TV, like the Xbox 360 or Wii, then the system is pretty open-and-shut "retro" since it still falls in line with the type of setup most people probably had for both their Genesis and brand new Xbox 360 for the longest time. While the Wii and 360 still both have modes for playing in 16:9, they have a foot in the door of the old ways for the most part. It's a period of flux where it was a mixed bag of hardware, before things became more standardized. While that means a 2013 game could technically be "retro", there's not much to do except maybe attribute a different phrase to it like "retro-millennial" and retroactively (ha) draw the line there before cutting the "retro" part off entirely by the XB1/PS4/PC gaming days.

The most reasonable explanation in my opinion is when a game is two console generations old. Like I would consider ps3 and xbox 360 retro but nothing beyond that

I believe it's all on looks and feel. NES, SNES, and N64 era games feel retro, and you can make that same feeling. Minecraft is a truly good example of making something feel retro by looks and feel. I suppose in 10-20 years some flash games will look "retro" and people will replicate that style.

I agree with the last point as seeing them as an era especially when you see a game like shovel knight, cuphead or sea of stars being tag with the word retro on their steam page or being marketed with that word in mind

Never would've thought that the games I've played over the years. Will make me feel super nostalgic nowadays, amd it still does today.

I remember having this thought on my mind years ago, using 10 years as a measurement on what is retro, when I suddenly wondered that if Sonic Colors is considered a retro game since it was old enough to be someone's childhood game growing up. I had that thought again recently with the Sonic Boom show and games.

I think "retro" is much more about the look / feel and the technical limitations of the game. I think the whole "retro" label made a lot more sense before the PS3 era, when games started looking more homogenized. When you say a game is "retro", you mean it has a certain look, it controls in a certain way, and it plays in a certain way. In my opinion, you can call Shovel Knight a retro game - but because "retro" has too much of a time connotation, we use "retro-inspired". As such, I think retro is at most up to GameCube / PS2, and then you get the era of "retro-inspired", if anything. As you mentioned, Mother 3 feels retro - that's because it's a game released for the GBA, which was a fairly limited console in terms of power.

This is a very interesting topic which I have the same question about. Persona 5 is a game that isn't considered retro but it released both on PS3 and PS4 at the same time, and the PS3 is considered a retro console by many

I believe when a game is considered "retro" is less of a set amount of time, but more of a spectrum. Not every game ages at the same rate, Some quicker & some slower. Like @zjzr08 said, even in the GameCube & PS2 era the SNES & Genesis were considered old. However, more modern titles like GTA:SA, Fallout 3, Bioshock, & others are considered Old, but not retro. I also believe that games can "Feel" more retro. This also effects the aging of games. I predict that Cuphead will be considered retro in about 15 years, whilst a game like Super Mario Odyssey will probably take about 20 years to be considered retro.

I believe one issue is when we lump all the generations together under one word (retro). We should come up with new terms to better define what era of retro gaming we're talking about. My brother and I talked about it and we had different solutions. He came up with more descriptive terms, like "3D retro" (describing the time period we're we went from 2D to 3D), or "HD retro" (when HD was the main evolution). I went for terms that borrowed from history and pop culture, like "proto-retro" (everything before the 80s) and Golden Age retro (most of the 90s).

I feel like we are reaching a point where whether a game is "retro" shouldn't depend just on how old it is, but also how much the industry has innovated and improved since it released. Part of the reason many 10 year old games don't really feel retro to us anymore is because they still hold up so well both graphically and in regards to gameplay, the industry has struggled to improve since then with the biggest innovations being almost entirely visual. The next big leap that might cause such games to feel old enough to be considered retro might be for stuff like VR to reach more mainstream accessibility and appeal. Basically, the experience doesn't feel outdated yet, so we don't see them as retro. In short, I'd say that 10 years is a pretty decent number for a game to begin to qualify as retro, but to truly be retro it also needs to feel like an outdated experience when compared to what's current. If it could release today with minimal changes and still hold up it's not retro, just old.

the fact plants vs zombies is considered retro (by age) scares me

As someone who grew up with minecraft, i can confirm i am NOT old!

Semantic Satiation is a term for the phenomenon where when a word is used so much it loses meaning. This is what i felt with this Retro doscussion.

I would consider any game prior to 2006 (The Wii and PS3’s launch) as retro

Think about houses, most people only recently considered 80's houses "retro" with everything made 90s onward still being seen as new

For me "retro" isn't the age but the time period, when those retro classics were firstly released and I don't care if some of those have been constantly re-released, I consider retro to be everything released up to 5th console generation and pc games released before year 2000

Even though I played some GameCube games when I was young, I still consider these retro. They're very playable but overall feel kinda old. I'm just dreading the moment when games like Mario Kart Wii and Mario Galaxy are considered retro.

If we take the stance that 10 year old games are retro, that means fnaf is a retro game If we take the stance that 15 year old games are retro, that means Minecraft is a retro game If we take the stance that 20 year old games are retro, that means Half Life 2 is a retro game. I definitely don’t think it’s a time thing, since none of these three feel they should be considered “retro”

I like that you pulled comments from the poll and id like to expand on mine saying that to me retro implies something that came before so if your game is the most recent one that cant be retro for example paper mario became retro the moment bug fables came out because its basically the same game but with modern qol and handling upgrades and the same with something like jet set radio and bomb rush cyberfunk

for me i think 'retro' is more of an aesthetic or time period than something continuous. the last SNES game to be released on a physical cartridge was fire emblem thracia 77 in 2000, then just a year later luigis mansion and super smash bros melee would get released on gamecube. i would be a lot more comfortable calling fire emblem 'retro' than those early gamecube games because i think gamecube games already look pretty modern to be honest. when game developers make a 'retro' style game, regardless if its now or in 10 or so years, its probably not going to resemble a gamecube game, but an atari, nes, or n64 game i think a better word to use here is 'classic'. cars for example actually have a legal threshold for what can even be considered a classic. depending on the state its usually 25 or 30 years (1994-1999), which sounds pretty fair for me personally, though you could make the argument that for video games it should be about 15 years since cars have been mainstream for about twice as long as video games have been popular

Really had me realize Arkham asylum’s gonna be 15 years old 😭

About the "Retro era" bit at the end... Most eras are very hard to pinpoint the exact boundaries of. I'd say that the only eras or ages we can definitively pinpoint an exact starting year are the Age of Exploration (1492), the Industrial Age (1830), the beginning of tanks and end of cavalry (1915-1918), the Space Age (1957), and the Information Age (1990), as those were mostly fairly recent and were huge revolutions, and even then the former two I'm not too sure of. Going back to the gaming topic, anything "released 2000 or earlier" would be excluding Paper Mario and Conker's Bad Fur Day, for example.

*Sanae slowly appears from the shadows*

assuming the thing that defines wherever a game is considered retro is the system leaps, functional/expanding homogeneity between design philosophies and the general age of the player. for something like the NES/SNES games from developers like konami and capcom might have made some games more difficult to justify the price of entry and to minimize returns. with console specs; some companies had to take up strategies to figure out how to make a game work in a 3D space, from things like directional movement, depth to more technical things like object/geometry culling (or specialized stuff like Sony's sound memory). on the graphical side, 16 bit is just more detailed and marginally less restrictive than 8bit games, though stuff like slowdown still exist. with 8 and 16 bit consoles, i doubt there was much comparative differences between them both that made one console stand out unless there was larger differences on a fundimental level (NES, Master System, Turbografix?). the Sega Saturn's release and Sony's entry introduced vastly different ways how a CD game can function. Square-Enix pioneered FMV video which arguably enriched them a lot. 32/64 probably got a bit chunky. PS2 probably a much more graphically-intense PS1. but then you had the emergence of the internet with the Dreamcast. before Microsoft came chugging in with XBOX Live. I'd probably say that by the time the PS4/Xbox Series came out, every game is either more graphically-realistic, has internet elements, or is a live service game. any nuances between individual console manufacturers are diminished to a severe degree; and the only thing they can tout is stuff like storage capacity, teraflops or whatever buzzwords. the only outlier is Nintendo, but that's only because their franchises are generally held to themselves and they don't consider remaining too far up to date with console specs until the kinks are sorted out by other console manufacturers+devs. (say, the Unreal Engine). Other than that. the final thing could be the storage medium+price and the secondhand market. you could probably get Mega Drive games pretty cheaply in the early 2000's. or even PS2, Xbox and 360/PS3 games. longer-supported games, as well as working on later consoles just makes individual games more gougy by larger chains. Gaming is probably more of a Network or Movie business now. instead of console exclusives, you might have manufacturers (or epic) pay developers. or just be SONY and buy Evo. think it happened with FF7R, and street fighter in the past.

Classic is 10 years, retro is 15, and ol' school are 20 Still, who really decides what is what... For me, asteroid on atari and SMB on Nintendo feels like two different eras, but it was only 4 years between them... Asteroid was 81, and SMB was 85...

The definition for "retro" gets longer and longer every year.

The PS4 is retro because you cannot tell me anyone was playing even half of the games that came out on it around 2014/15.

I tend to think of games that come on cartridges as retro and games on discs as more modern. I also really feel like games on say PS3 aren't retro because they use Blu-ray discs, HDMI, have patches, DLC, microtransactions and online multiplayer, all things which we're still commonly using today.

But hey That`s just a theory a GAME theory thanks for watching 😭

I feel the opposite about Mother 3 and Dead Rising. Mother 3's spritework and gameplay have held up fantastically and the game could easily have been released today, as proven by games like Eastward that take inspiration from it. Dead Rising's animations, character models and lighting are all distinctly early HD, because they're more detailed than the PS2 but don't reflect light realistically like modern games. Animations are a lot more complex now, where games will use an entirely different animation set for your character when you're in combat.

The reason why games from the 80s and 90s feel retro and games from mid to late 2000s to 2010s don't despite their age is because there has not been that massive shift in quality since the beginning of the Xbox 360/PS3 generation for those games to feel "old-school and retro", HD consoles kinda set the bar of how good a game can look and you can only improve so much from that and that quality shift from generation to generation can change a person's perspective on how old a game really is

I understand the point of this video and in some aspects I agree with you... But I don't have any problem acknowledging that yes, GTA V, The Last of Us, Dota 2, Skyrim, etc. ARE retro games. Same goes for pretty much everything released before 2014.

From my experience, you don't need something very old to be nostalgic, you just need the feeling that it happened a long time ago or that the thing reminds to you of something similar from your childhood.

I find “retro” to be more of the vibe you get from playing a game, mostly when it feels old. I agree with whoever said that it’s in relation to how much gaming has evolved since then. A GBA game feels retro because we can see how much portable gaming has changed an improved since the 2000s. However, GameCube, PS2, as well as early 360/PS3 are only just starting to be considered retro because the 3D landscape is evolving so much. Another viewpoint could be that a generation is “retro” whenever a mass number of people begin to get nostalgia for an older generation from their childhoods and thus the retro gaming market expands a lot for that generation. Looking at it this way, a game or console from 3-4 generations prior to the present generation would start to be retro. So today’s 9th generation finds the 5th and 6th generation to be retro, which checks out.

Great vid and question to be asking! I like the idea of retro as an "era" for older consoles. It doesn't make sense to go purely on look and feel. By those standards, Undertale which came out in 2015 would be considered "retro" before Grand Theft Auto V which released the same year

I think about it like this, in the 90s the 70s style was considered Retro but the 80s wasn't, so I would say it has to be 20 years to be retro.

Retro feels like anything on console before online play, for console and PC anything before major 3D acceleration became a thing

2:10 To be fair, that wasn't exactly remade like a traditional remake. It was a bonus disk for Japan-only final mix version, basically as a bonus DLC before DLC

Take a shot every time Kiro says "retro" in this video.

great video

2 console generations back is retro to me. That’s when the games start to feel a slight distance in the past

If someone could be born when the game released, then by the time they are about 15 then the game is retro, so around early Wii, ps3 and 360 games are within the retro games