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GLBRetro Onslaught: Exploiting Nostalgia in Gaming
0Article by Yuri Ilyin
Type 'retro' into the search box of any large social network, and a whole lot of groups or separate accounts dedicated to all things retro will pop out. Retro video games will account for a significant percentage of them.
Check Steam, and you'll discover 20K+ titles containing the word 'retro'. In most cases those will be new products.
Then we have GOG.com, aka Good Old Games, yet another digital distribution platform for video games (and films). It started out in 2008 as a subsidiary of the famous Polish studio CD Projekt (The Witcher series, Cyberpunk 2077, etc.).
In the beginning its primary goal was to distribute some older gaming titles adapted for modern machines. It was not before 2012 that GOG.com started featuring indie games and the newer AAA titles, in addition to the retro games.
Then there are websites like Indie Retro News dedicated to a somewhat marginal but steady community of the aficionados who keep creating games for the platforms and hardware the younger generation may have no idea of.
ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, - these home PCs surely are museum-worthy these days. Their computational and graphic capabilities are a joke. But still so many people are happy with that - and keep doing the lo-fi art and even games like it's still the 1980s.
Reference: Indie Retro News
There is nothing wrong or weird about loving retro things, and retro tech too. There is nothing wrong with preferring vintage games to newer titles either, for whatever reasons. But there are certain aspects of this phenomenon that make it quite peculiar.
Driven by Enthusiasts
To a great degree the 'retro' movement owes it all to fans. And in particular to those who decided they wanted to be more than just consumers.
In the late 2000s, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig published a book called Remix in which he postulated so-called 'Remix Culture' or 'Read-Write culture', as opposed to the default media culture of the 20th century, which he called Read Only culture (RO).
According to Lessig, Read Only is the passive way of consuming cultural products. Read-Write means active participation in the form of making derivative works, provided the proper legal framework for this exists.
And it's derivative works that enable retrogaming as a thing.
Emulators of various hardware and software platforms from the past (like DosBox or various gaming console emulators), or game engines built upon the older code that had been open-sourced by its creators (like John Carmack's engines powering id Software games).
One may take a look at resources like Doomworld.com or Doom and Quake-related groups on Facebook, and discover there is a very vibrant community of modders, coders and content creators, who keep tinkering with old games, upgrading the long-released code and producing maps on an industrial scale. In most cases those are labors of love, made outside of any deadlines and limited budgets.
Reference: Eviternity II mod for Doom II
And since the neural networks have become accessible to everyone, modders actively use them to upscale 'old games' textures (wherever possible). The results have proven to be stunning, while the original artwork style has remained intact.
In fact, almost every moddable game, for which the development tools had been made available, is likely to gain long-lasting traction. If the engine that powered it had been open-sourced, it will most likely spawn a large 'family tree' of derivatives:
Reference: Doom Engine (IdTech 1) derivatives
The Quake engine family tree is much larger, and a significant part of it is also fan-made.
There are communities that keep such old titles as Freespace 2 (1999), and keep improving it, graphically and code-wise. There are also quite a few highly customized and active multiplayer servers for another old space sim - Freelancer (2003), even though it is impossible now to purchase the client software legitimately.
Nostalgia Gets Monetized
The nostalgic feelings towards the old games may be the primary engine, but along this memory lane, quite a few shops have opened lately.
While in the past remaking or 'remastering' the older games was not part of the commercial mainstream, now it is. There is a whole industry of repacking the old products and selling them again. Take, for example, Bethesda Game Studios' fabulous RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Since its original release in 2011, there were at least three upgraded versions released - 'Special Edition', 'VR Edition', and 'Anniversary Edition'. Each time they were sold as separate products, although those were largely cosmetic updates.
Its predecessor TES IV: Oblivion has been remade with Unreal Engine 5 and released just a few days ago. A commercial product, too. The story remained intact, yet some features are reportedly paywalled.
Nightdive Studios has made a name for itself by obtaining rights to 'abandonware' games, updating them for compatibility with modern platforms, and re-releasing them via digital distribution services, supporting preservation of older games. Their in-house KEX Engine had been utilized for updating a number of 'boomer shooters' - Doom, Doom II, Strife, Blood, Doom 64, even Star Wars: Dark Forces. Quake and Quake II are in Nightdive's roster too. Those re-releases, however, didnt see any groundbreaking graphic improvements, which is typical for fan-made efforts.
A few years ago Blizzard Entertainment released a next-to-perfect remaster of their seminal RTS Starcraft. Significantly upgraded graphics, HD resolution support - and no serious change to the core gameplay.
Reference: StarCraft Remastered
However, it was followed with a lackluster and much-maligned remake of Warcraft III. In a very controversial move, Blizzard nixed the classic installers from its servers. Instead the people who paid for the original game years prior, now had to download the 20+ GB client that 'gracefully' allowed you to play in 'vanilla' mode. The players reacted with an overwhelming hate. The gaming press critics weren't too kind either. Blizzard was forced into the defensive stance, which added a lot to the companys woes at the time.
Late last year Blizzard shipped 'remasters' of Warcraft I and II, the 'earliest building blocks of the real-time strategy genre', as Eurogamer reviewer had it.
While it didn't seem to make the series' fans totally happy, at least there finally was a way to get the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) legitimately. The artwork remained largely true to the original, even if a bit oversmooth. Some people argued that the graphics were upgraded by the means of an AI, but officially all the artwork is said to be hand-made.
Overall the commercial remakes and remasters are the way for the developers and publishers to get into the gamers' pockets again for largely the same product: facelifting an old IP asset is way cheaper than to create a new one from the ground-up.
Inconsistent Demand, or Quasi-Lo-Fi
While remasters and remakes are very common these days, original commercial titles are not too rare either. Coming mostly from the indie developers, these games strive to emulate the feeling of the old times, rather than deliver a genuine experience of 320x200 pixels resolution, 256 colors and chirpy sound effects.
Among those stand out Selaco, for instance; a commercially released FPS heavily inspired by mid-1990s boomer shooters like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D.
Reference: Selaco
Then there is Legend of Grimrock, a thorough emulation of the classic 'dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder, Wizardry and early Might and Magic series. It was (and is) a class of fantasy role-playing games with grid-based environment and discrete, per-cell movement. Legend of Grimrock's graphics are, however, pretty modern.
Reference: Legend of Grimrock
A more peculiar example would be Ion Fury, another commercial 2.5D shooter based on the Build engine from the mid-1990s (it powered such games as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Witchaven, etc.). It was released in 2019, 20 years after the previous Build-based title emerged.
Build is as obsolete as Doom II engine, yet still the game proved to be quite successful. It won "Player's Choice Indie of the Year 2019" award at IndieDB, while its OST won the "Outstanding Achievement for old school composing techniques" award at Game Audio Awards 2020.
All those games have much better graphics than the genuine 1990s titles, of course. And that is what retro-lovers actually want: stylized, emulated, augmented products that both tickle the nostalgic feelings, yet don't look too rough and square-pixelated.
Interestingly, there is also a popular demand for good screen shaders that emulate CRT displays for the vintage games. The general reasoning holds that the artists of old always kept in mind the scanlines and chromatic distortions of the CRT displays, so the emulation wouldn't be 'complete' without them.
The offering is now vast for next to any kind of games: CRT-Royale for ReShade, a good looking one shipped with DosBox Staging - a modernized version of the classic DOS emulator, and more.
Reference: SimCity 2000 launched in DosBox Staging
This surely matters mostly for those who still remember how it was playing on CRT displays. In fact it does add some extra atmosphere to the retro games - and this holds true both for the actual titles from 1980s and 1990s, and for the more recent ones,
All in all, retrogaming is a way of nostalgic indulgence for the people in their 40s, give or take. A way to venture back in time, to the childhood days, when the world seemed so much safer than it is now, and the pains of growing up were yet to be known.
And yes, for many of us, gamers, it matters a lot. So a big thank you goes both to the enthusiasts and commercial developers who keep the old tech alive and kicking, and who show how much extra potential it had and still has.
