Your favorite video game is retro now

What is a retro game?

Back in the 2000s — at the height of The Angry Video Game Nerd’s popularity and the genesis of throwback games like Cave Story and Mega Man 9 — that question seemed straightforward. It was a term used to describe games from the Atari 2600 and NES eras. Two decades later, that question is much more challenging to answer. We are as far from the first episode of AVGN as that video was from the launch of the Famicom in Japan. Comedy videos are being made about how old Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is. Xbox is asking players on X (formerly Twitter) if they’re nostalgic about game franchises that all started in 2000 or later.

“Retro game” is still a term commonly used in the video game space. It’s the namesake behind magazines, Reddit communities, and even used to describe games intentionally made to look like they were pulled from an older console. What we actually consider retro is evolving, though. New games like Born of Bread and Akimbot are inspired by PS2 and GameCube-era titles like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Ratchet & Clank, instead of 2D side-scrollers from the ’80s. There’s a new wave of nostalgia rolling in for platforms that may not feel very old to those who grew up with them.

So what constitutes a “retro game” in 2024 when the bar is constantly moving? I spoke to multiple game developers in search of a more exact definition. That turned out to be somewhat of a fool’s errand. While there’s some general agreement on what makes a something “retro,” almost everyone has a different interpretation based on their personal experiences and nostalgia. The fact that “retro game” is so nebulous to define might just be what gives the term meaning to each of us.

What is retro?

Getting the basic definitions out of the way, Dave Oshry from Dusk and Gloomwood publisher New Blood Interactive tells Digital Trends that retro’s outright definition is “imitative of a style or fashion from the recent past.” From a scholarly perspective, Retro: