Retro Charm - Do you have it?

The first decade of the 21st century has brought us advances and developments that had a huge impact in the games industry - a decade that began with the removal of  the SEGA console just to see Microsoft's entry onto the scene a few months later, it also was the end of the 32-bit generation and putting the DVDs in our homes, which popularized the online games and expanded the market for higher values than those which occurred at the beginning. Curiously - and with a little surprise - was this first decade that emerged today are part of the video game industry, called retrogaming, demand for games of previous generations and for so many reasons attract a respectable amount of players.

 

 

In the games industry, we deal with products that are unlikely to find parallels in other branches of the arts and, more recently, the entertainment - no one will question the quality of a film produced in the 1930s, an album recorded in the 1950s, or from a book written in the 1780s. In the case of videogames, its dependence on technological developments mean that, from the quantitative point of view, a set of 1980 are considerably less attractive than a 1986, which in turn is technically at a disadvantage next to a title in 1993, while it pales next to a game of 2002, however, is reduced to insignificance by a title in 2010, nobody doubts it. However, the so called retrogaming assumes a major importance - not only there is a huge business of buying and selling games on 2nd hand which bypasses the publishers, as their potential profit has grown impressively - in addition to being launched and relaunched compilations and collections of games with ten, fifteen and twenty years, none of the current consoles method does not require evidence of previous generations in their distribution channels. Virtual Console, XBLA and PSN, all of which make it possible to download games from previous generations at affordable prices and the catalog continues to grow.

 

And what about new games with titles dating back to previous decades? Ninja Gaiden Sigma could easily have received another name, but chose the same name as the original '80s ? Fan-service?  A direct call to those who played the original 20 years before and now should lay hands on his successor? Ask yourself, then: if we have reached a level so high, why is it so important to have this next generation technology in a retro so advanced? Why so many players still have a fondness for games they played 15 or 25 years before ... or that in many cases, do not come to play but their curiosity led them to this for the current generation? There is a "retro charm"? There is something incomprehensible that leads to being more interested in a game released 15 years ago than a game released for 15 days? When it comes to games of previous generations, it is often the comments relate to an alleged "innocence" of the games industry "of the past" and that currently, the whole economy is driven by profit.

 

 

Totally wrong, profit always led the industry, videogames as we know them are, and always have been a product of our consumer society and was the profit of producers and publishers who allowed the videogames were no longer a hobby. Most fun games, is another argument often used - completely relative, 20 years ago the requirements of the players in those games were different and due to technical limitations, the formulas were much simpler. The market has changed and now, a game with an arcade-$tyle gameplay will have much less success than a game with a more elaborate narrative. Most difficult games - hard to prove. 15-20 years ago, we were different people, and certainly we played differently. At the same time, because they are technically more limited, it is possible that many games require more in regard to memorization - how many of us did not cast plagues because of a jump difficult to achieve or not to kill a certain enemy? However, our anger was always directed to the barrier itself, not the limitation of our character. And where to draw the line between a demanding game and a game badly designed?

 

It would be useless to try to explain rationally the privileged treatment that many games to give players of earlier generations. As in all human decisions - even more so when we deal with tastes - the reasons are as personal as numerous and virtually impossible to quantify. What has become easier to observe is that the sub-culture extended to the retro videogames, it was appropriate to their temporal and escalal noticed by the major producers and publishers, who were already beyond the reissue / remake or games with gameplay directly inspired by previous generations of titles and, in particular cases, reach the point of creating a game as if it had been developed 20 years ago, as is the case with Mega Man 9, a game of the first decade of the twenty-first century with all the features produced in the late 80s - and although such cases, show that there is public not just to play reissues and remakes of games with 15 or 25 years, but there is also the public as willing to invest in securities that follow the current formula of earlier generations ...

 

 

One more example of the diversity of tastes and preferences within the players, the prominence of retrogaming shows that as new elements and changes that are made in videogames, there are elements that will never be forgotten, while there are players who enjoy watching them - and this is one of the biggest benefits of retrogaming called for all players, to preserve what we have done well in the past to continue to serve as an example to the future.