What year does retro gaming end and modern gaming start?

[lmimmfn]

Had forgotten that that interview with Romero and Carmack was to happen, thanks for posting/reminding me, will watch that tonight.

I only realised a few years ago that Romero is now living in Ireland, which i thought was cool.

[Anthony Flack]

The generation after them rarely limited ideas - the new limit was number of polygons and/or frame rates, or the size of a game ...

The new limits very quickly became time and budget.

Small games still exist and small teams still exist - I'm currently working on one (modern) game in a team of 4 and another one in a team of 2 and a half. And games never stop evolving, I guess. There will be trends in gaming that will mark future games as belonging to a particular time period. But I do think that the PS2 era is where a lot of things moved to places where they kind of still are now. It doesn't really seem to me that a PS3 is much different from a PS5 in any way that matters. Yeah ok, it looks a little better.

I think retro is kind of a useless term once you start dealing with a history longer than a couple of generations. What I think of as the golden age was probably pre-1995, when innovations were happening all the time, technology was advancing year on year and genre conventions were still being figured out. When you could guess what hardware something was running on by looking at it.

[cwpab]

I must confess I lately find myself playing the Commander Keen series and especially the Dangerous Dave series instead of the Doom-like titles from ID.

I was so hyped with 3D games (or 2.5D) in the second half of the 90s that maybe I oversaturated of them or something.

[VincentGR]

I must confess I lately find myself playing the Commander Keen series and especially the Dangerous Dave series instead of the Doom-like titles from ID.

I was so hyped with 3D games (or 2.5D) in the second half of the 90s that maybe I oversaturated of them or something.

For a week now, I do the same.

[cwpab]

I must confess I lately find myself playing the Commander Keen series and especially the Dangerous Dave series instead of the Doom-like titles from ID.
I was so hyped with 3D games (or 2.5D) in the second half of the 90s that maybe I oversaturated of them or something.

For a week now, I do the same.

That sounds great! Which ones are you playing the most and liking the most?

I played a lot of Dangerous Dave and Commander Keen series over the last years and finished 5 of them. Here's some advice if anyone wants to try:

1) Keen 4-6 are considered better, they control better. You can try those if you get too frustrated with 1-3, where the jumpinng takes some time.

2) Dangerous Dave 1 and 2 are both GREAT and FUN games, but very different. 1 is a classic platformer with awesome Romero level design and 2 is like a 2D Doom with infinite ammo and a cool single weapon: the shotgun.

3) Keen games let you save between levels from the game itself, but Dave games don't. I recommend using this version of DOSBox to save on the Dave games between levels: http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (I say between levels because you don't want to kill the challenge by saving after every jump, right?) In any case, please note sometimes Romero goes nuts with the difficulty and in those cases, you might allow for some artificial "checkpoint" mid-level if beating a level is too hard without snapshots.

[VincentGR]

Finished a couple of years ago "Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion"
Also Pharao's Tomb, Bio Menace (all chapters), Artic Adventure and Monuments of Mars.
Now I am at Dangerous Dave Pack starting with the first.
Never had a DOS machine back then.
The games are awful, controls are a mess and the CPU is changing speed in game.
Besides that, they are cute and I play.

[cwpab]

Haha, I don't think the games are that awful, man... I mean the Dangerous Dave games require precision. Remember to save between levels. Getting angry is part of the fun.

The first 3 Commander Keen, however... That could be open to discussion. The jumping and inertia can be hard, but I persevered and finished a couple of them. The third one is masochist, though.

[Bryce]

Can I just say, that this is by far the dumbest question that I have ever seen on this forum. Retro / vintage etc. doesn't have a start date, it's a moving target and extremely subjective. Retro gaming for an 18 year old could be anything before the PS4, or for someone like myself it could be anything before 16bit. So I'll add the question to my "Yes, there is such thing as a stupid question" list, along with:

How long is a piece of rope?
How many drops are in a glass of water?
What time is later?

and of course...

What's the difference between a duck?

Bryce.  

[cwpab]

That may be valid for music or movies, but not for games.

Because games changed radically in the 90s, and therefore many people define "retro" not as "something 10 years in the past" (otherwise games from 2013 like "Rage", by ID Software/Carmack and a game I just learned it exists, woud be vintage just like Monkey Island was in the year 2000), but as "something with simpler controls and shorter, more action-oriented challenges".

With movies, you watch a 70s movie and in the end you have watched a movie, the hobby is more or less the same. But try playing Spiderman (PS5) and then Breakout.

[Anthony Flack]

That's why retro is an increasingly poor choice of word when something's been around long enough. But vintage is a different matter. 

People who are into cars decided some time ago that "veteran" = before 1918, "vintage" = 1919-1930, "post-vintage" = 1931-1949 and "classic"  = 1950-1969.

The early decades of gaming were distinct, not the same thing as an 18 year old with a PS3. It's more descriptive to talk about the 8 bit and 16 bit era, as imperfect as those designations may be.

[cwpab]

I find it a bit worying that not much has changed in popular art and games in the last 15 years. And since 2000, only smartphones and HD graphics come to mind. I can see 2100 people calling these decades "the samey era".

[lmimmfn]

I find it a bit worying that not much has changed in popular art and games in the last 15 years. And since 2000, only smartphones and HD graphics come to mind. I can see 2100 people calling these decades "the samey era".

I dont agree with that whatsoever, in the past 15 years you've had fantastic single player games with brilliant narratives:
1 Deus Ex
2. Bioshock
3. Spec Ops - The line
And many others like e.g. the recent Baldurs Gate 3 which I've spent well over 120 hours on.
Most of the above I will admit are older and gaming is in a crap place atm but games like Baldurs Gate 3 just completely shine through and make you ignore most of the crap.

That'd my view, I realise everyone else's view might differ.

[cwpab]

I find it a bit worying that not much has changed in popular art and games in the last 15 years. And since 2000, only smartphones and HD graphics come to mind. I can see 2100 people calling these decades "the samey era".

I dont agree with that whatsoever, in the past 15 years you've had fantastic single player games with brilliant narratives:
1 Deus Ex
2. Bioshock
3. Spec Ops - The line
And many others like e.g. the recent Baldurs Gate 3 which I've spent well over 120 hours on.
Most of the above I will admit are older and gaming is in a crap place atm but games like Baldurs Gate 3 just completely shine through and make you ignore most of the crap.

That'd my view, I realise everyone else's view might differ.

Not sure if you're replying the wrong message, but read my text again. I don't talk about quality, I talk about lack of changes in art (including video games as interactive art) that makes something from 2010 feel the same as something from 2025.

[eto]

I find it a bit worying that not much has changed in popular art and games in the last 15 years. And since 2000, only smartphones and HD graphics come to mind. I can see 2100 people calling these decades "the samey era".

I have the gut feeling we will se a big change soon...

In my experience the introduction of (really) new capabilities spawns creativity - and introduces new gaming genres.

Usually it was just that hardware was finally "powerful enough" to no longer limit a certain idea. In the early 80s the arcade machines were powerful enough and developers created almost all 2D genres that we still see today. This lasted 'til the PCs were powerful enough to render 3D worlds.

Since the PS3 era no new generation of PCs or consoles introduced really new capabilities. Sure, new generations were faster - but not "fast enough" to get fundamentally new capabilities.

And we see that on the games side. Every new game is just a reiteration or combination of already existing ideas. (okay, not completely: VR, Wii and mobile games introduced new ideas). It's just bigger, better, faster and more, maybe "seems" more intelligent. Online gaming is bigger, more polygons are rendered, raytracing makes scenes look realistic, interactions are more complex - but the underlying game idea is still the same.

However 2024/2025 might be the start of a new era. I'm 100% sure the next generation of consoles will include AI chips - and it will be interesting how they will be used - they might be a literal game changer. Maybe a totally new way of interacting with a game - or the game could adapt to the players way of playing in an undetermined way.

It could also be used to make people more addicted to games. If you make a "friend" online, who lures you into spending more time with him on quests - and you don't even realize that it's a bot.

Or it's the end of gaming genres. AI might be powerful enough to kill online gaming - e.g. when it's impossible to distinguish between an AI controlled bot and a good player the bots will ruin the game for human players.

[ZorrO]

For me, the clearest bounder of change interactions in games is not transition from 2D to 3D, nor improvement of resolution screens or textures. But change to do games that cannot be played with a joystick with 1 fire. PSX pad has cross arrows and 10 buttons. You can't play this even with 2 or 3 fires. That is difference between simple early games and more complex a new type of games.

[cwpab]

And what about movies, music and other forms of arts? Hasn't anyone noticed some kind of a Groundhog Day feeling? All I can hear is reggaeton and autotune, but it's been like that for 10+ years. And you can watch a 2010 series and it feels fresh.

[Bryce]

Games don't need to have made a quantum leap to be considered "last generation". I asked my son and his friends (all between 12 and 14 years old): For the older ones Tomb Raider is retro, but the younger ones even considered Call of Duty and GTA already as retro. Anything that ran on a pre-PC computer is archaic for them and belongs in a museum. I showed them a C64 Breadbin and one of them asked if an archaeologist had found it next to the pyramids!
My son said retro for him is anything where the jagged edges are visible in the graphics. He's still a fanatic retro gamer and often spends more time playing on the Retro-Pi, Nintendo DS or even a Gameboy SP instead of his Nintendo Switch! 

As for music: If you only listen to mainstream / radio music, then yes. It's been the same crap for years. Try wandering outside of that comfort zone and you will find a lot of very good, innovative independent bands creating great new music that will most likely never get played on the radio.

Bryce.

[andycadley]

And what about movies, music and other forms of arts? Hasn't anyone noticed some kind of a Groundhog Day feeling? All I can hear is reggaeton and autotune, but it's been like that for 10+ years. And you can watch a 2010 series and it feels fresh.

I think that's just called "getting old"

[Anthony Flack]

If anything with visible pixels is retro, then my declining eyesight should mean that nothing is retro soon enough. 

[cwpab]

Back to the games and since we're comparing modern to retro, I must recommend Portal (2007) to every CPCwiki user (or guest) reding this topic.

I basically never play post 2005 games and rarely play post 1997 games lately, but this one is an exception. It has the simple structure of retro games and the 3D possibilities of modern games.

It was designed by a girl 2 years younger than me. I didn't play it back in the day because back then I started going full retro and didn't trust modern games, especially when there were memes about it everywhere and it kind of became tiresome before you even saw the game in action.

A mistake. Not because thousands of people who play a game are stupid or annoying, it means you need to ignore it. The game is super fun to play with a very well designed dificulty curve, and the dialogs with the female-voiced robots are hilarious (for example, there are some cute little robots that look like oversized white toasters or radios with oval shapes, and you can pick them up or simply "kill them" by making them fall or shoot each other. You don't encounter them until stage 12/18 or so, and they're constantly speaking to you in a hilarious female robotic voice. When they find you they say: "There - you - aare". And when you finally kill them (their goal is to find you and kill you with machine guns, lol), they say: "I - don't  - blame - youuu...".

Go play this now if you haven't, seriously. I wish all modern games were like that.

[lmimmfn]

Back to the games and since we're comparing modern to retro, I must recommend Portal (2007) to every CPCwiki user (or guest) reding this topic.

I basically never play post 2005 games and rarely play post 1997 games lately, but this one is an exception. It has the simple structure of retro games and the 3D possibilities of modern games.

It was designed by a girl 2 years younger than me. I didn't play it back in the day because back then I started going full retro and didn't trust modern games, especially when there were memes about it everywhere and it kind of became tiresome before you even saw the game in action.

A mistake. Not because thousands of people who play a game are stupid or annoying, it means you need to ignore it. The game is super fun to play with a very well designed dificulty curve, and the dialogs with the female-voiced robots are hilarious (for example, there are some cute little robots that look like oversized white toasters or radios with oval shapes, and you can pick them up or simply "kill them" by making them fall or shoot each other. You don't encounter them until stage 12/18 or so, and they're constantly speaking to you in a hilarious female robotic voice. When they find you they say: "There - you - aare". And when you finally kill them (their goal is to find you and kill you with machine guns, lol), they say: "I - don't  - blame - youuu...".

Go play this now if you haven't, seriously. I wish all modern games were like that.

While RPGs and may not be your bag, Dragon Age Origins and Baldurs Gate are some of the best games since then.
I would say Battlefield 2 from 2005/2006, my favourite game ever but its best online and unfortunately it's time has passed. Probably the only and last game I have 1000+ hours played. An innocent time before family 😀