First of all, sorry for the weird double title, but after you read this post, you'll hopefully understand why I gave it this title.
#Retro games are very popular these days. I'm not only referring to re-playing the classics from your childhood, but also tons of indie games are released with the trendy retro tag by either having limited graphics, just like back in the day, or by trying to bring back the feeling from these days by getting heavily inspired by those games. The retro and pixelart feature so many games, that I hardly can scratch the surface of what games there are. Shovel Knight is a great example of retro done right, by taking good elements from past games and building on top of this foundation, also Cuphead, one of the big surprises of 2017, is in my opinion heavily influenced by this trend. And I'm not even starting to talk about the huge success of GOG.
I can't really tell what mad this so popular, one possible explanation goes back to Nintendo's Virtual Console, which was released for the Nintendo Wii in late 2006. I'm not sure if they just wanted to make some extra money by selling old games, or if they actually knew how big this got. For sure, they knew ten years later, when they released the NES Classic and it got sold out immediately and then earlier this year, with the success of the SNES Classic.
Nintendo is really doing well, selling back the childhood to its costumers. This leads me to the question: how is it possible that people pay again for the same games they already have (or had), especially since there are emulators (I know that this is legally speaking a grey area, but that never kept anyone from using them). As my first sentence of this paragraph suggest, Nintendo isn't just selling a product, they are selling a feeling, namely this nice nostalgic feeling of your childhood. I guess that lot of people who are my age (around 30 years old), who grew up playing with the Super Nintendo are looking back to those carefree and happy days of their childhood and want to recreate the feeling of those days, in contrast to their stressful lives today, full of responsibilities and deadlines. Personally I'm no exception, but later more on that. Of course there is a lot of idealisation happening, not only about the games, but also about the time in general. Usually when you play a game from your childhood disillusion comes quite quickly, since not all games hold up by today's standards and some of them turn out to be rather frustrating (although I guess that's also a good motivation for some). From my experience in retrospection everything seems better than it actually was, but still the “feeling” from back in the day is quite strong and can not be so easily debunked as being an idealisation.
Source: Flickr
Having said that, now I'm taking a ten-year step forward. When we are talking about retro gaming, we usually speak about games from the 80ies or 90ies, occasionally maybe also about the early 2000s, but if I'm talking about games from 2007 it would not really be considered as “retro”, even though it is now 10 years ago (which is quite a lot, if you think about how young the whole gaming industry still is) and even though in 2007 a lot of great games were released, some of them still are influential today (maybe that's the reason why they aren't considered retro). Call of Duty Modern 4: Warfare for example made progression systems with unlockables ridiculously popular, so much that today it is impossible to image a “big” multiplayer game without it. Apart from Modern Warfare, that took the Call of Duty to new dimensions also other great titles like Bioshock, Half-Life 2: The Orange Box, Crysis and a personal favourite of mine: Hellgate: London were released, new franchises like Gears of War and Mass Effect and Assasin's Creed launched. All in all it was a great year for gaming.
But not only this: it was also a great year for myself (at least in my memory): I graduated from high school, I got my first car (well, technically it was my mother's, but still), it felt like the whole world is mine (especially after my graduation, but when my military service started and I had to join the army they gave me a harsh reality check quite quickly :D ). And the music, not only the music that was released in 2007 (Arcade Fire — Neon Bible, Interpol — Our Love to Admire, Editors — An End has a Start, Radiohead — In Rainbows and Bloc Party — A Weekend in the City, just to name a few), but not only that I discovered so much older songs as well, which were the soundtrack to my 2007. Especially in the first half of the year, it felt like I discovered a new band or a new great song almost every week. I also joined Last.fm exactly 10 years ago. I really would say that 2007 and 2008 were the defining years of my youth (I guess I'll write something about 2008 next year) and yeah, thinking back of those days makes me happy and it gives me joy to reminiscence about how things were in those days. But at the same time I know, that my memory is idealising a lot of things: it seems like everything was perfect and easy, but I know that it wasn't. Graduating was actually surprisingly easy, but being in the army wasn't always a walk in the park (even though I liked it in the end: it was unlike everything I every did before and unlike everything I'll ever do again).
I think that all those good memories I have from 2007 heavily influence my perception of the games released in that year, even though there were objectively great and boosts my opinion of them even more. I mean it does the same with music, and not only the music that I mentioned above, also the mainstream pop sounded (and still sounds) better: not too long ago I listened to Fergie's 2007 album The Dutchess only to compare it with her 2017 album Double Dutchess and yeah, the old one is much better in my opinion, even though they are very similar in style and sound. I think this happens to a lot of people, even though they are usually not so aware of it. And that's also the explanation why in a medium like computer games, which always tries to be cutting-edge, there is this large movement of people who are praising and homaging the past so much.
To answer the question I raised in the title: the term “retro” can less be defined by a certain time period (especially since it would be constantly moving), but retro is an idealisation of the past, where the bad parts of the past are unintentionally left out and only the good parts remain in your memory.