There are some absolutely incredible games being released today.
Games are bigger. They’re prettier. They have massive worlds, ridiculous amounts of content, online multiplayer, ray tracing, gigantic stories, and budgets that probably rival the GDP of a small country.
But sometimes I don’t want any of that.
Sometimes I want to turn on an old console, grab a controller, and just play a fucking video game.
And that’s why retro games just fuck.
You Turn Them On and Play
This might be the biggest thing I miss.
Put the cartridge in.
Turn the console on.
Game.
There’s no 80GB update.
There’s no account you need to create.
There’s no battle pass popup.
There’s no daily reward begging you to come back tomorrow.
There’s no store tab reminding you that the $70 game you just bought would really like another $19.99 from you.
You turn the game on and start playing.
What a concept.
They Had to Get Your Attention Fast
Older games didn’t always have hours to convince you they were fun.
A lot of them had to get straight to the point.
Think about games like Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Mega Man, Contra, Tetris, Street Fighter II, or Mario Kart.
You understand what you’re supposed to be doing almost immediately.
And more importantly?
You’re having fun almost immediately.
There’s something beautiful about that simplicity.
Then There Were Games That Were Just Pure Fun
Not every game needed to redefine the industry.
Some games were just built around the idea of:
“Hey, this shit is fun.”
And honestly, I miss that.
Take Fighting Force on the PlayStation.
Was it the greatest game ever made?
Probably not.
Did I give a shit?
Absolutely not.
You picked a character, walked around, beat the absolute shit out of people, picked up weapons, smashed things, and kept moving.
That’s basically the game.
And it was awesome.
It was like taking the old-school side-scrolling beat-’em-up formula and saying, “Okay, but what if we did this in 3D?”
That’s all I needed.
Tony Hawk Was Basically Its Own Era
Then you had the old-school Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games.
Goddamn.
Those games had everything.
Great gameplay. Ridiculous tricks. Secret areas. Collectibles. Awesome levels. And, of course, soundtracks that permanently burned themselves into an entire generation’s brain.
You could sit down intending to play for twenty minutes and suddenly you’re spending the next two hours trying to nail one ridiculous combo.
And the controls were just so damn satisfying.
You didn’t need to actually give a shit about skateboarding, either.
Tony Hawk made skateboarding games fun for basically everyone.
There’s a reason people still talk about those original games.
SSX Tricky Was Ridiculous—in the Best Way
And then there’s SSX Tricky.
This is exactly the kind of game I’m talking about when I say retro games just fuck.
It wasn’t trying to be a realistic snowboarding simulator.
It was loud.
It was colorful.
The characters were ridiculous.
The tricks were ridiculous.
The courses were ridiculous.
Everything was turned up to eleven.
And that’s exactly why it worked.
You could launch yourself off some enormous jump, spin approximately 47 times, pull off something that would turn a real human being into a fine red mist, land perfectly, and keep racing.
That’s a video game.
SSX Tricky understood that sometimes realism isn’t the goal.
Sometimes the goal is simply to make something that’s really fucking fun.
I’d love to see more modern games embrace that mentality.
Limitations Forced Developers to Get Creative
Retro hardware was incredibly limited compared to what developers have today.
Tiny amounts of memory. Limited storage. Limited colors. Limited audio. Limited processing power.
And somehow developers looked at those limitations and said:
“Fuck it, we’ll make something awesome anyway.”
Some of the most recognizable characters, soundtracks, mechanics, and visual styles in gaming history came from developers figuring out clever ways around hardware limitations.
They couldn’t brute-force everything with more RAM and a faster GPU.
They had to get creative.
And I think that’s a huge part of why so many of those games still have so much personality.
Pixel Art Still Looks Damn Good
I’ll take good pixel art over mediocre realistic graphics any day.
There. I said it.
Games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Super Metroid, Castlevania, Pokémon, and countless others still look fantastic because they weren’t necessarily trying to imitate reality.
They developed their own visual identity.
Good pixel art doesn’t really become outdated in the same way that early attempts at photorealism do.
It’s a style.
And a good style can last forever.
The PS1, PS2, and GameCube Era Was Something Special
And retro doesn’t just mean NES and SNES anymore.
Yes, we’re old.
The PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, GameCube, and original Xbox are all retro now.
And that entire stretch of gaming was fucking fantastic.
This was an era where developers seemed willing to try damn near anything.
A 3D beat-’em-up like Fighting Force?
Sure.
An arcade snowboarding game where you’re doing completely impossible tricks?
Absolutely.
A skateboarding game that somehow becomes one of the defining franchises of the generation?
Why the hell not?
You got weird games.
You got experimental games.
You got licensed games that occasionally had absolutely no business being as good as they were.
And you got games that probably wouldn’t survive a modern AAA executive meeting.
The GameCube especially will always have a special place for me. I’ve already written about my love for that little purple lunchbox, and I could probably write another ten posts about it.
But that whole era had a certain personality that I really miss.
Games Didn’t Need to Last Forever
This is another thing I’ve grown to appreciate.
Not every game needs to consume my life.
Sometimes a game can be six hours long.
You beat it.
You had fun.
You’re done.
Maybe you play it again someday.
That’s okay.
A game doesn’t need an endless roadmap, seven seasons of content, daily challenges, weekly challenges, login bonuses, and a Discord server explaining what’s coming over the next three years.
Sometimes I just want to beat the game and go do something else.
Or, in the case of Tony Hawk, spend three hours trying to beat my own stupid high score.
And Yes, Nostalgia Is Part of It
I’m not going to pretend nostalgia has nothing to do with this.
Of course it does.
Turning on an old game can instantly take you back to sitting on the floor in front of a CRT television with a controller in your hand.
Certain startup sounds alone can trigger memories.
The Game Boy ding.
The PlayStation startup.
The GameCube intro.
Hell, even blowing into a cartridge—even though apparently we weren’t supposed to be doing that.
And sometimes it’s not even the console.
It’s hearing a song that was in an old Tony Hawk game and immediately being transported back 20+ years.
Those memories absolutely influence how we feel about these games.
But nostalgia isn’t the only reason they’re still fun.
If it were, we wouldn’t have an entire generation of younger players discovering old games and indie developers intentionally building new games around mechanics and visual styles from 20 or 30 years ago.
There was something genuinely great there.
Modern Games Are Incredible Too
This isn’t some “old games good, new games bad” rant.
Some of my favorite gaming experiences have come from modern games.
Modern developers can build things we couldn’t have even imagined when we were playing an SNES or PlayStation.
But bigger doesn’t automatically mean better.
Sometimes all those extra systems, massive worlds, progression mechanics, stores, currencies, crafting systems, and endless content actually get between me and the thing I wanted to do in the first place:
Play a game.
Retro games remind me how little you actually need to make something fun.
Fighting Force didn’t need 400 hours of content.
Tony Hawk didn’t need a battle pass.
SSX Tricky didn’t need realistic snow physics.
They were just fun.
Retro Games Just Fuck
Maybe it’s the simplicity.
Maybe it’s the pixel art.
Maybe it’s the creativity that came from hardware limitations.
Maybe it’s the PS1 graphics that looked incredible to us at the time and now have approximately six polygons per human being.
Maybe it’s hearing an old Tony Hawk soundtrack.
Maybe it’s launching your snowboarder into the stratosphere in SSX Tricky.
Maybe it’s beating the shit out of everyone in Fighting Force.
Maybe it’s being able to play for 20 minutes without the game trying to sell me a skin.
Maybe I’m just getting old.
It’s probably a little bit of all of it.
But every time I go back and play something from the NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, N64, PlayStation, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox, or GameCube era, I’m reminded why I fell in love with video games in the first place.
They didn’t need a roadmap.
They didn’t need a battle pass.
They didn’t need 4K textures.
They just needed to be fun.
And goddammit…
Retro games just fuck.
What retro game do you always find yourself going back to?
And don’t just give me the obvious classics. I want to hear about the weird shit too—the Fighting Forces, the SSX Trickys, the random PS1 game nobody else remembers.
Drop it in the comments. Give me something old to play.
