How Did You Get Into Retro Gaming?
Oct 19, 2018 19:09:59 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Oct 19, 2018 19:09:59 GMT -5
As a kid, I would trade in or give away my old game systems whenever I upgraded. I’d even throw my N64 game boxes in the trash. But then I “woke up” to the world of retro gaming. This was a process with a few milestones I’d like to talk about.
This website is the greatest single factor that inspired me to get into retro gaming. When I found it in 2003 at age 13, it was called “Game Grandpas” (Ryan Genno, the webmaster, since changed it to “videogames101.com”, which would explain why I couldn’t find it for over a decade.)
It’s baffling how quaint the site looks today. The layout smacks of hand-jammed HTML, complete with tacky fonts and garnish color schemes. Even the writing seems amateurish. Some if it would even be downright blasphemous among today’s retro gamers, like:
Call it quaint if you want, but that site was the start of something big for me. Up to that point, my hobbies had mostly been temporary. Pokemon came and went. For a few years, Lego was my world, followed by Bionicle. I outgrew both. The Beanie Baby craze even swept me up in it for a while. But if you had told me that finding Ryan Genno’s website lead to a hobby that would show no sign of stopping even after 15 years, I wouldn’t have believed you. For me, there were three takeaways from Game Grandpas:
1) Gaming history
Up until 2003, the extent of my retro gaming console knowledge was confined to these consoles:
Atari 2600
NES
SNES
Sega Genesis
Game Grandpas was the very first resource where I learned about these consoles:
Intellivision
Colecovision
Vectrex
Turbografx 16
Sega CD
Sega 32X
Atari Jaguar
3DO
A few months later, I found The Video Game Critic, where I would spend hours reading reviews for games I had no idea existed. Adventure for Atari 2600. Night Trap for Sega CD. Bonk’s Adventure for Turbografx 16. This was an exciting time, since I knew so little and just wanted to soak up everything I could. Every trip to the thrift store was a treasure hunting quest. People gave away so much cool 8, 16, and 32 bit gaming stuff back then.
2) Taking Better Care of My Games
This photo of Ryan Genno’s Sega Saturn collection is the reason I started keeping my boxes and manuals:
3) Looking Beyond the Mainstream
I had played Bug on a Sega Saturn demo unit at the store around December 1995. I liked it so much that I asked for a Saturn for Christmas. I got a Genesis instead and was delighted anyway, but I think that experience planted in a seed in my mind, making me wonder: what did I miss out on? Even the Saturn logo carried futuristic and exciting connotations in my mind.
Teenage me learned the Saturn was: underrated (it had fun games even though no one bought them), exclusive (in 2003 we had no Steam port of NiGHTS into Dreams, or SSF or Yabause, or even a PC powerful enough to run those nonexistent emulators, so basically original hardware was the only option), and rare (desirable Saturn games often cost more than brand new retail games in 2003).
Up to this point, TV and magazines were where I turned to learn about new games. If they didn’t advertise them there, I just wouldn’t learn about them. I didn’t know any better. It never occurred to me there could be anything else. For me, getting into retro gaming was like learning that there was some kickass movie every bit as fun as Star Wars, but it only got a limited release in theaters, maybe few VHS tapes, and no DVD release. There wasn’t even a YouTube for someone to upload a bootleg copy.
And imagine my reaction when I learned some games never made it outside of Japan. This really flipped some kind of switch inside me. I swear Shining Force III Scenarios 2 and 3 are the reason I know almost 2000 kanji today. Getting my hands on this lost media became my crusade. I would devour pages and pages of Dave’s Sega Saturn Page, a site that chronicling the travails of being a Saturn fan in the late 90’s. It was like vicariously experiencing it with them.
This was where I discovered Segata Sanshiro. Teenage me couldn’t get enough of the sheer badassery in these commercials. He just strolls into a nightclub, judo flips everyone, then chastises them for not playing Sega Saturn. Why couldn’t the US get a cool mascot like that?
Most of the games in my collection came from eBay auctions for disc only copies. My disposable income was meager and I wanted to stretch it to get as many games as possible, so I just went for the discs. By 2008 my US collection was something like this and my Japanese collection was close to this. It’s not much, but I paid mid-2000’s prices for it all and still have most of them (the main ones I sold were Panzer Dragoon Saga and Guardian Heroes).
Some personal Youtube archaeology turned up these videos I posted in 2007 and 2008:
This video of NiGHTS especially brings back magical memories for me. I felt like I was experiencing a one of a kind work of art no-one else knew about.
House of the Dead was a long fulfilled childhood wish, too. I played it at an arcade in 1997 and really wanted a home version, but all I had was a Sega Genesis back then.
There’s something else about the Sega Saturn that epitomizes retro gaming for me: its emasculated 3D graphics. Yet something about the Saturn’s inferiority made it so much more special when it managed. The Saturn version of Quake isn’t very good for a 1997 game. For a Sega Saturn game, though, it’s a miracle. And many games’ design choices were apparently built around these limitations, like NiGHTS, with its 2.5D play field which downplays the cruddy draw distance. For me, this is a microcosm of the retro gaming mentality: the appreciation of graphics within the context of their unique limitations.
Closing Thoughts
In many ways retro gaming has become so much more accessible. In 2003, you couldn’t emulate Saturn games on a desktop PC (much less a cell phone). There were no Ever Drives or FPGA based game console repros with HDMI video. A cheesy site like Game Grandpas was perfectly fine because we weren’t saturated with YouTubers pushing out content rivaling professional TV studios. And let’s just bring up YouTube for a second, OK? I can remember wondering what a retro game must have looked like in action. If I was lucky, I’d get a tiny jpeg that might not even reveal that much. Now I can just type the game title and seconds later I’m watching it in HD. There wasn’t any digital distribution then, either, so 14 year old me was delighted to get Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 for Sega Dreamcast. Everyone hates it today, but I had never played Streets of Rage II or Shining Force before, so how could I have known the sound emulation was garbage?
On the other hand, prices for retro gear and games are RIDICULOUS in 2018. There are still deals but I think a few high profile eBay sales (like a copy of Track and Field for NES fetching 5 figures) and I guess just the winds of change have made more people view their old games as valuables they can flip for cash. So, between retro gaming in 2003 and 2018 I’m not sure which I prefer. I guess I’m just glad the hobby has lasted as long as it has. I still have cool stuff from my days of collecting back then. I’m glad I held onto it. It’s hard to say the same for a lot of other interests that just came and went.
This website is the greatest single factor that inspired me to get into retro gaming. When I found it in 2003 at age 13, it was called “Game Grandpas” (Ryan Genno, the webmaster, since changed it to “videogames101.com”, which would explain why I couldn’t find it for over a decade.)
It’s baffling how quaint the site looks today. The layout smacks of hand-jammed HTML, complete with tacky fonts and garnish color schemes. Even the writing seems amateurish. Some if it would even be downright blasphemous among today’s retro gamers, like:
(I give the Sega Saturn a) 53/100, (it's) an OK enough system for people who can't afford a Playstation or game collectors but casual players will hate system's interface.
Call it quaint if you want, but that site was the start of something big for me. Up to that point, my hobbies had mostly been temporary. Pokemon came and went. For a few years, Lego was my world, followed by Bionicle. I outgrew both. The Beanie Baby craze even swept me up in it for a while. But if you had told me that finding Ryan Genno’s website lead to a hobby that would show no sign of stopping even after 15 years, I wouldn’t have believed you. For me, there were three takeaways from Game Grandpas:
1) Gaming history
Up until 2003, the extent of my retro gaming console knowledge was confined to these consoles:
Atari 2600
NES
SNES
Sega Genesis
Game Grandpas was the very first resource where I learned about these consoles:
Intellivision
Colecovision
Vectrex
Turbografx 16
Sega CD
Sega 32X
Atari Jaguar
3DO
A few months later, I found The Video Game Critic, where I would spend hours reading reviews for games I had no idea existed. Adventure for Atari 2600. Night Trap for Sega CD. Bonk’s Adventure for Turbografx 16. This was an exciting time, since I knew so little and just wanted to soak up everything I could. Every trip to the thrift store was a treasure hunting quest. People gave away so much cool 8, 16, and 32 bit gaming stuff back then.
2) Taking Better Care of My Games
This photo of Ryan Genno’s Sega Saturn collection is the reason I started keeping my boxes and manuals:
3) Looking Beyond the Mainstream
I had played Bug on a Sega Saturn demo unit at the store around December 1995. I liked it so much that I asked for a Saturn for Christmas. I got a Genesis instead and was delighted anyway, but I think that experience planted in a seed in my mind, making me wonder: what did I miss out on? Even the Saturn logo carried futuristic and exciting connotations in my mind.
Teenage me learned the Saturn was: underrated (it had fun games even though no one bought them), exclusive (in 2003 we had no Steam port of NiGHTS into Dreams, or SSF or Yabause, or even a PC powerful enough to run those nonexistent emulators, so basically original hardware was the only option), and rare (desirable Saturn games often cost more than brand new retail games in 2003).
Up to this point, TV and magazines were where I turned to learn about new games. If they didn’t advertise them there, I just wouldn’t learn about them. I didn’t know any better. It never occurred to me there could be anything else. For me, getting into retro gaming was like learning that there was some kickass movie every bit as fun as Star Wars, but it only got a limited release in theaters, maybe few VHS tapes, and no DVD release. There wasn’t even a YouTube for someone to upload a bootleg copy.
And imagine my reaction when I learned some games never made it outside of Japan. This really flipped some kind of switch inside me. I swear Shining Force III Scenarios 2 and 3 are the reason I know almost 2000 kanji today. Getting my hands on this lost media became my crusade. I would devour pages and pages of Dave’s Sega Saturn Page, a site that chronicling the travails of being a Saturn fan in the late 90’s. It was like vicariously experiencing it with them.
This was where I discovered Segata Sanshiro. Teenage me couldn’t get enough of the sheer badassery in these commercials. He just strolls into a nightclub, judo flips everyone, then chastises them for not playing Sega Saturn. Why couldn’t the US get a cool mascot like that?
Most of the games in my collection came from eBay auctions for disc only copies. My disposable income was meager and I wanted to stretch it to get as many games as possible, so I just went for the discs. By 2008 my US collection was something like this and my Japanese collection was close to this. It’s not much, but I paid mid-2000’s prices for it all and still have most of them (the main ones I sold were Panzer Dragoon Saga and Guardian Heroes).
Some personal Youtube archaeology turned up these videos I posted in 2007 and 2008:
This video of NiGHTS especially brings back magical memories for me. I felt like I was experiencing a one of a kind work of art no-one else knew about.
House of the Dead was a long fulfilled childhood wish, too. I played it at an arcade in 1997 and really wanted a home version, but all I had was a Sega Genesis back then.
There’s something else about the Sega Saturn that epitomizes retro gaming for me: its emasculated 3D graphics. Yet something about the Saturn’s inferiority made it so much more special when it managed. The Saturn version of Quake isn’t very good for a 1997 game. For a Sega Saturn game, though, it’s a miracle. And many games’ design choices were apparently built around these limitations, like NiGHTS, with its 2.5D play field which downplays the cruddy draw distance. For me, this is a microcosm of the retro gaming mentality: the appreciation of graphics within the context of their unique limitations.
Closing Thoughts
In many ways retro gaming has become so much more accessible. In 2003, you couldn’t emulate Saturn games on a desktop PC (much less a cell phone). There were no Ever Drives or FPGA based game console repros with HDMI video. A cheesy site like Game Grandpas was perfectly fine because we weren’t saturated with YouTubers pushing out content rivaling professional TV studios. And let’s just bring up YouTube for a second, OK? I can remember wondering what a retro game must have looked like in action. If I was lucky, I’d get a tiny jpeg that might not even reveal that much. Now I can just type the game title and seconds later I’m watching it in HD. There wasn’t any digital distribution then, either, so 14 year old me was delighted to get Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 for Sega Dreamcast. Everyone hates it today, but I had never played Streets of Rage II or Shining Force before, so how could I have known the sound emulation was garbage?
On the other hand, prices for retro gear and games are RIDICULOUS in 2018. There are still deals but I think a few high profile eBay sales (like a copy of Track and Field for NES fetching 5 figures) and I guess just the winds of change have made more people view their old games as valuables they can flip for cash. So, between retro gaming in 2003 and 2018 I’m not sure which I prefer. I guess I’m just glad the hobby has lasted as long as it has. I still have cool stuff from my days of collecting back then. I’m glad I held onto it. It’s hard to say the same for a lot of other interests that just came and went.
