Games that are now retro as of 2024

Pissmaster

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As we all know, video games reach retro status after being available for 10 years. Enjoying retro games gives you the coveted status of Old-Skool Gamer, and the following titles are joining the pantheon of very old boomer games this year:
  • The Sims 4
  • Five Nights at Freddy's
  • Bloons TD5
  • Shovel Knight
  • Mario Kart 8
  • Destiny
  • Goat Simulator
  • Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
  • The Evil Within
  • Hearthstone
  • Wolfenstein: The New Order
  • South Park: The Stick of Truth
  • Dark Souls 2
  • Bayonetta 2
  • The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
  • This War of Mine
  • Octodad: Dadliest Catch
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS & Wii U
  • Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
  • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls
Please update your categorization respectively.
 
My Steam year in review.

50% of the games I have played this year were released 8 or more years ago.

33% of the games I have played this year were released in the last 1-7 years.

17% of the games I played this year were released in 2023. I think that would be Atomic Heart and probably Indie or AA games.

I was playing Deus Ex and Arkham Asylum. Thats some old skool shit.
 
I have this notion, and I know it's just me probably no one else will agree, but retro isn't just "so many years old". It takes a jump in technology or design philosophy, a paradigm shift, a change in the things that can be done or the way they can be done in that sets the old thing apart from things that came later.

Like, nearly if not all the games you listed there are exactly the same as the ones made right now. And so is everything made since the PS4/Xbox One era, maybe even part of the PS3/Xbox 360 era.
There's obvious shifts like I mentioned in every game generation before those, there's no need to even describe them. But you get to around the PS2 and it jumps to PS3 and it's the last time you can see a real widening of possibilities, and even then it was a much narrower widening than ever before. Ever since then, at most the textures and resolutions have become higher, and a few lighting effects that make no significant difference (despite all the fanfare made about them) have been added.

So I'd say nothing is ever gonna be really retro anymore, things will just be old. Unless something very big and very game-changing happens.
Which it won't.
 
If the game is still being sold in its original avenue, it cannot be retro. Steam games cannot be retro.

EDIT: I automatically draw the "retro" line at 15 years, though.
 
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When I say "classic TV", what immediately comes to mind, and what falls into that ambiguous area where something's old, but not really classic?
I don't think that analogy works. TV and movies are very static and very well-defined mediums. We're still using techniques from the early 1900s to make most shows nowadays. If you watch Citizen Kane, the dramatic shots in the movie influence pretty much all modern visual media henceforth. What makes something classic is a settled science of how old it is and how much influence it had in addition to how popular a show or movie was.

With games, there's way more variability and differences in the mechanics of each genre of video game compared to movies/TV, in addition to being a much younger field that thrives on multiple different interpretations of fundamental axioms of how to make a fun game (depending on genre, platform,etc). But there are epochs of graphical/programming/design paradigms which are tied to each generation of gaming console and how the games they support. Atari 5200 games, SNES/Genesis games, PSX/N64/Saturn games. PS2/Xbox/Gamecube games and PS3/Xbox 360/Wii games have very noticeable graphical and design hallmarks that differentiate one generation from the next.

Ever since the 8th gen, with the PS4 and Xbox One, that's pretty much gone away as game design is pretty much an afterthought in most games and the focus is on graphics, which we are at the descending end of the diminishing returns curve. Add to that indie games kinda doing whatever (for better or for worse) and you really can't use retro to define old games since retro always meant that this has the hallmark of a particular era in gaming. When a game from 2014 plays the same as one from 2024 (assuming they are the same genre and everything like that is controlled for), that concept can't really be applied at all since nothings really changed in terms of the core game design.

Thus, it's easier to call games from the 7th gen and before retro since they have actual design and graphical differences that make them stick out as something from the past whereas in that list of games you posted in the OP, I think only Shovel Knight sorta counts as retro since it is inspired by NES platformers and it is something that has a lot of the design hallmarks of the first wave of indie games of the late 2000s/early 2010s like Cave Story, Braid, Limbo, They Bleed Pixels, etc. There might be others but if you played most of those games newly in 2024, you wouldn't get the impression that they are a decade old now.

Edit: Looking at the list again, I think Octodad and Goat Simulator count as a retro games just because they do kinda give off that same pre-Gamergate indie vibe. I'm not counting any of the other indies out just yet, but for certain the AAA/AA games aren't retro. Again, they all look or play just like most modern games today.
 
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Yeah I think 10 years is far too recent for a start, and none of those games are really any different that what we have today. At least there was a huge jump from 1999 to 2009 for example so it made sense to call games made a decade ago retro then. The only game in that list that feels old to me is The Binding of Isaac but that may be because the original release is older than 10 years.
 
Retro is a meaningless term when anything that came out ten years ago would be right at home today, especially if not taking graphical quality into account.
 
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Notable games turning 30 years old in 2024:

Sony PlayStation (Japanese release)
Super Metroid
EarthBound
Mortal Kombat II (first console releases)
System Shock
Doom II
Donkey Kong Country
Tekken
NBA Jam (first console releases)
Earthworm Jim
Sonic 3
Virtua Fighter


Notable games turning 20 years old in 2024:

Nintendo DS & Sony PlayStation Portable
World of Warcraft
Half-Life 2
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen
Red Dead Revolver
Driver 3
Tales of Symphonia
Doom 3
Viewtiful Joe
Fable
The Sims 2
Star Wars: Battlefront
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
Counter-Strike: Source
EverQuest II
Halo 2
Metroid Prime 2
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
JFK Reloaded
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords
Gran Turismo 4


Notable games turning 10 years old in 2024:

Grand Theft Auto V
Shovel Knight
Dark Souls II
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Goat Simulator
The Elder Scrolls Online
Mario Kart 8
Tomodachi Life
P.T.
The Sims 4
Forza Horizon 2
Bayonetta 2
Assassin's Creed Unity
Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (:c)
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
 
Isn't 15 years the threshold for something to be considered retro?
I always considered it 20 years, which unfortunately means next year Xbox 360 is a retro gaming console.

I remember digging through yard sales and Goodwill type stores as a kid, finding these 2600 games that were like relics of the past that I had to have my parents tell me about. Someone is going to have that experience with a mother fucking Xbox 360.
 
I always considered it 20 years, which unfortunately means next year Xbox 360 is a retro gaming console.

I remember digging through yard sales and Goodwill type stores as a kid, finding these 2600 games that were like relics of the past that I had to have my parents tell me about. Someone is going to have that experience with a mother fucking Xbox 360.
relax
they'll get to experience it too eventually
it'll be really funny to think about but we'll likely never live to see it
 
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