this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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I hate to break it to you but... It's been over 20 years. It's more retro now than the SNES was when the 360 came out.
You're a generation off: It's more retro now than the NES (US release) was when the 360 came out. We crossed that threshold about a month ago.
You're hurting me.
This episode is 30 years old.
No u
Shit, that saying is over 20 years old.
YOLO is now old enough to legally drive a car.
Please stop...
I first heard that one over 15 years ago.
You know that 'Cleopatra is temporally further away from the Great Pyramid' thing?
Grand Theft Auto V's release date is closer to Half Life 2's release date, than to the present.
Grand Theft Auto 4's release date is closer to the release date of the original Starfox or Street Fighter 2, than it is to the present.
And you don't even want me to do any date comparison for the following:
... Let's do the time warp Againnn!~
Spock - Civilization 4 (2005)
It's never too late to find a time warp to go back a few decades. The holos just don't hit the same
Wow the diminishing returns between that time really comes into focus.
The line between 4th and 5th gen (SNES to N64) was enormous, 5th to 6th was pretty significant, 6th to 7th was noticeable, and it's been 20 years of small improvements since then.
There is a noticeable difference in graphics from 7th to 9th. But 8th felt like a half step. And it doesn't feel like there are noticeable improvements in any graphics, physics engines, lighting or anything else since 2020 when 9th gen started. This cant be said about any generations up to 8th.
I mean yeah. There isn't that much of a drastic shift in game design, except for the bleeding of RPG mechanics into more genres, more roguelite mechanics in indie games (choose one of 3) and having equipment systems in multiplayer FPSes. The biggest hit of 2024 was basically solitaire.
It's hardly that much more different.
Wheras, going from snes through ps1 to xbox 360, things went from 2d (and extremely crude 3d) to textured 3d with jank controls to high fidelity games with standardised controls. Not much changed after that. The huge "innovations" of VR, motion controls, are basically niche due to economic factors, so people aren't exactly having commonplace motion control VR experiences that put them in the game and comparing that to ducking behind cover in gears of war. They're comparing making cover in Fortnite with ducking behind cover in gears of war.
Right. I bet more people play SNES than Xbox now as well.
SNES is far more accessible due to ease of emulation and small game sizes, so makes sense!
Perhaps I'm in a minority but when the PS3 and 360 first debuted I did not consider even the NES to be "retro". I would have applied that term to the likes of an Atari 2600 or colecovision.
The NES and Atari are separated by mere 6 years. The NES and Xbox 360 are separated by nearly 22 years. That's how much the perception of graphical advancement has decelerated. Sure we keep making leaps on graphical fidelity, but ever more in areas that are less and less noticeable every time.
Me then: "Haha 'time marches on' what a cool phrase"
Me now: "Yo, time, can we maybe slow the pace or take the break?" Time: "No. Only march on." Me: visibly aging
I already have Father Time beating my ass before I even started playing Hades II lmao
Frankly, the reason this is shocking to people is that games, graphically and mechanically, made leaps and bounds from the SNES to the 360, and gave largely stagnanted from the 360 to now.
A LOT of people have completely failed to grasp how much technology has stagnated in the last 20 years.
Yeah, my smart phone with Internet access basically everywhere begs to differ.
Phones didn't changed fundamentally since 2015.
Saying technology hasn't progressed in 10 years is a very different statement than technology hasn't progressed in 20 years.
Phones, as we know them today, entered market much later than consoles or PCs.
My point is that eventually we hit the ceiling of progress. PCs and consoles hit their peak 20 years ago while phones did 10 years ago. Things haven't changed in a while for both of them and it doesn't feel so far that there will be major progress any time soon.
The Iphone entered the marked in 2007, before that is what entirely possible to connect a PDA to the internet via you dumbphone (using IRC from my palm pilot in the 90s surely felt cool...)
My phone can literally be used as VR goggles and stream HD video pretty much anywhere in the country. But smart phones existed in 07 and PDAs existed in the 90s. Yeah, no difference between these things. lol.
Ah... you mean its better at providing a more potent form of a digital drug? Ok...
I feel like y'all are just being contrarian doomers. Listen, I get it. The ruling class of billionaires use technology for nefarious purposes to control us and extract every penny of money they possibly can by selling our attention spans in ever increasing ways. I'm not saying they don't. I'm not saying we live in a utopia. I'm just saying that there have absolutely been a lot of technological improvements in the past 20 years.
Folks saying "actually PDAs had internet access in the '90s" are, fuck, not even missing the forest for the trees, they're just covering their eyes and refusing to acknowledge that they're surrounded by trees.
We've got driverless cars. Yes, they're far from perfect, and I wouldn't really say they're adequate, but we do have honest to god driverless cars. Electric ones too! And they aren't just a gimmick, they really do give gas cars a run for their money. 3d printers are a home commodity now much like traditional printers have been in the past. CRISPR lets us modify genes. The idea of watching a 4k video on the Internet in 2006 would've been crazy. AI has improved a lot, and I don't even mean the modern generative AI like LLMs or Stable Diffusion, even prior to that machine learning was a huge thing.
Relevant XKCD.
That was released in 2014. You know what I can do now with my phone? I can take a picture of a bird and search to see what kind of bird it is. Reverse image search has been around for a while, but it used to just find things that were mostly pixel for pixel matches. Now it's much more capable.
May your optimism last.
The first smartphones were released in 2007....
You don't think there's any difference between today's phones and the 2007 ones? Not in cell coverage either?
Not in terms of navigating a city, which have had universal coverage since the flip phone days.
Also, just an FYI: GPS has had global coverage since the 1970s and doesn't require a cell signal at all.
Smart phone advancements have been incremental since they were released, very little had changed in terms of basic functionality. The biggest difference is that you can listen to music while your getting navigated now.
Dude, take the rose tinted goggles off for a second. I had a GPS navigation system for my car early on, around ~2010, maybe a little earlier, that thing was shit. It could hardly figure out where I was in the city. It would very often snap to the wrong road and I'd have to reboot it. Today, it's simple. I just pull out my magical everything device and use an app. Technology has progressed A TON in 20 years.
Yes. that is why smartphones replaced integrated navigation about 15 years ago. It's OK that you were a late adopter, but that doesn't change what happened. I was happily using google maps to navigate with my phone on a little holder on the dash and actively making fun of people like you by 2010.
It was actually kind of funny to have better navigation and a better stereo in my 1993 Ford Ranger with a quarter million miles on it than dumbasses that bought new cars in 2010.
Why are you being so condescending about this and making so many assumptions about me? I wasn't a "late adopter." I was a teenager. I didn't have a smart phone. I didn't have a "new car in 2010" nor a built in navigation system. I was using a standalone TomTom GPS in highschool in a 1996 Honda Accord. That was 20 years ago. Technology is significantly better now.
Sorry you are so butt hurt about making dumb choices 20 years ago.
Again, I was a teenager. The TomTom was a gift. Sorry they didn't give me a damn iPhone, I guess? 🙄
I don't understand, is that from now?
Yeah, but the SNES became retro the moment the PS1 came out. That leap in tech was ridiculous.
*crumbles into pieces like a Dry Bones*
I don't believe you.
You didn't hate that at all.