When ‘next-gen’ becomes ‘current gen’ (as we see the PS5 now), then the previous ‘last gen’ (ie. PS3) becomes retro.
Reminder to anyone who disagrees with the above, the PS3 was released 18+ years ago. You’re just old, like me - embrace it.
"What do you mean, there's a WPA?"
spoiler
DS and DS lite can connect to WEP or open networks
Retro isn't a number. It's two disconnects. There is always something new - innately distinct, previously implausible, promising of future trends. When new things change enough, stuff that existed beforehand becomes old - tangibly dated, behind the times, automatically uncool. When that new stuff in turn becomes old, the old-old stuff becomes retro - distinct from merely out-of-fashion, illustrative of shifting perspectives, capable of being judged on its own merits.
This is why it's possible to make brand-new games that are still "retro games." The indicators of a particular era no longer feel poor-quality or unpleasantly limited once they've lost direct comparison to modern novelty. Low resolution is a style choice now that it's plainly not performance-related. Limited color is an affectation. 3D can be taken for granted, so games doing it badly are doing it on purpose.
I say all this to argue: the 360's not retro because it's not even retro. It's just fucking old. The last big disconnect was in that era. GTA IV looks like an upscaled PS2 game and GTA V still feels like a mid-budget PS5 game. PBR shading, local lights-- I don't think GTA V specifically had screen-space reflections, but it was definitely A Thing by then. Volumetric fog was in PS3 launch titles.
Christ, even retro-as-a-style has its inflection point in the 360 era. Cave Story was a big fucking deal. XBLA gave small indie games a taste of revenue. GBA homebrew shifted neatly to shoving emulators on PSP.
It is increasingly difficult to make any game that was unprecedented ten years prior. The toolkit gets wider and wider, but even a sudden massive increase in rendering power wouldn't allow much that we haven't expertly faked. VR would be different if anyone starts buying it. I feel like the PS4 came and went without any distinguishing features whatsoever. (I don't even remember if it was the bold black rectangle or the italic black rectangle.) Contrast this with how Super Mario Bros launched against an Atari that boasted several sprites, and then the NES's last official game was on shelves beside Tekken 2.
The counterargument to this might be that anything without live-service gacha bullshit is now old. In which case... burn it all down and start over.
Retro-as-a-style used to be the ONLY meaning of "retro." It was something new that was made to look old. When it comes to games it usually just means "old" now. I personally consider the 360 and PS3 to be not retro because the general conventions of how they control and the way they were online and capable of getting updates is pretty much identical to today. They're old, all right, but other than having less polygons and post-processing effects they're not different enough from the games of today, as you said. The Wii is something of an anomaly and different enough that I'd consider it retro.
I wish this anime could stop reminding me that everything I know and love is dying faster than I can.
You can die faster...
I tried that and it hurts.
Granny you are 1000 years old.
When I say "retro game" I mean pre-disc era.
Dreamcast isn't retro?
Dreamcast gets the special distinction of being retro futurist. Criminally ahead of its time.
So the switch?
Has a hardrive
O shit guys, my entire steam library is disc-less
if the switch 2 uses discs you would be correct
Hot take: No console with significant connectivity requirements can ever be retro. That’s pretty much everything in the last twenty years.
Not until graphics are significantly different enough, anyway. Arkham Asylum could pass as a modern game with a lower budget. No PS2, OG Xbox, or Gamecube game can be mistaken for a modern game, though.
I was going to quibble with you regarding the OG Xbox and PS2, but then I looked up their release dates. I feel so goddamn old.
NGL, I don't feel like the Xbox 360 or Wii are really "retro". A lot of the games still hold up decently well from a visual standpoint imo. Obsolete? Sure. Old? Sure. Retro? Nah.
I think the GameCube generation is the border of "retro". That's where you still had some games that looked old (like Animal Crossing), but you also had games that still look relatively good (like Pikmin). Imagine calling Crysis "retro". That's the same generation we're talking about.
I'm also saying this as someone who remembers the N64 fairly well.
Sorry my dudes, the xbox 360 was also part of my childhood
Nah, no copium here. It's mainly just an observation about how "retro" tends to be a couple generations behind whatever the current generation is, and in the past, that's been very obvious on the basis of graphics capabilities. However, while we have a lot of fancy new rendering tricks and significantly more powerful hardware, most Xbox 360 games still hold up decently well. As such, imo, Xbox 360 will become "retro" if/when VR takes off or a brand-new rendering technique (like gaussian splatting) becomes commonplace. I think that's what it'd take for me to see it as "retro".
The Xbox 360 had 512 MB of RAM that it shared between its CPU and GPU. I have 128x that amount of RAM in my PC right now. That's the same multiple as the difference between the 360 and the N64.
Imagine calling Crysis “retro”.
This is a video that came out back in 2007. He is using 2x of the highest end GPU you could buy at the time in SLI to run Crysis at 720p with an average of 27 FPS:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSI9nvIXaF4
Meanwhile here is a demo using the highest end GPU you can buy right now to render a forest at 4K resolution and 60+ FPS (16x more pixels and more than 2x the fps, if we're keeping track):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8
Most of the maps in Crysis were a few hundred feet across. The forest map in the video above is 4 square kilometers.
Crysis is retro my dude. It is as old now as Super Mario World was when it released.
This is a good example of how powerful hardware is now and how games that run like shit don't have much excuse other than horrible management.
The engines themselves have gotten better at pushing pixels too.
Remember all the hype about Euclideon "infinite detail" stuff back in the early 2010s? How they had a data structure that pre-sorted their voxel data in such a way that they could switch between rendering big and tiny voxels depending on the player's point of view, seamlessly and in real time?
We have that now, just with polygons instead of voxels, which actually makes it even more technically impressive since Nanite has to maintain the mesh's coherence (though I guess in some ways Nanite is a bit worse, since there's only so much it can reduce a mesh before it disappears, whereas you can just keep making voxels bigger and bigger).
This is one of the things that makes the forest demo above possible (if you look at the asset on FAB you can see they list Nanite as a requirement).
You are right, it's all very impressive tech, but most UE5 games still suffer from TAA. Maybe at 4K+ it looks great, but at lower resolutions it's like the screen is coated in a thin layer of Vaseline. The push for realistic graphics, left graphical fidelity behind.
as SMW was when Crysis released*
I mean, the 360 can run GTA 5...
And skyrim! Anything retro can't do that
Yeah Skyrim was only released 14 years ago! Wait-… wait, oh no 👴 ⏰
some games that looked old (like Animal Crossing)
There's a good reason for that one: the first animal crossing game was originally made for Nintendo 64, though that version was only released in Japan. GameCube got a port of it and that port (plus some extra features) is what released in English.
Xbox 360 is 20 years old as of Nov 2025.
i feel like we have the terms vintage for REALLY old stuff, retro for quite old things, and then there's a term missing for stuff that's from ~1990-2005-ish, which is what the xbox 360 and wii fall into.
you can associate the periods roughly with materials: vintage is solid wood and steel, retro is thin wood/wood veneer and thick beige plastic, and the new category is thin black/white plastic
~1990-2005-ish
1990: Mega Drive, SNES, Neo Geo
1994: Sega Saturn, Playstation
1996: N64
1998: Dreamcast
2000: PS2
2001: GameCube, Xbox
2005: Xbox 360
2006: PS3, Wii
Those are all consoles normally considered retro, except for maybe that last gen. I think the era that's missing a term is 2005-2015, but there's actually not a whole lot happening in those years. PS4 and Xbox One? The age of cheap gaming PCs?
agreed, anything that came after whatever was current when I was born is new and everything that happened before I was born is prehistory :3
Woof c:
Pup would love to play with vacuum tube stuff tho c:
Retro means Atari !
2012 laptops are still very modern and people calling them old are mean :(
Given how maimed the modern laptops are, I'm willing to consider "modern" a slur for laptops. Give me back my Ethernet, video outs and all the USB!
Give me back my Ethernet
Some ThinkPad: I have Ethernet
Buyer: Cool! I am choosing you!
Package arrives
Unpacks
Buyer: What the... there's no Ethernet!
Some ThinkPad: Look closer! There's even Ethernet icon!
Buyer: I see that, but there's just...
Some ThinkPad: That's it! ThinkPad Ethernet extension port. You didn't say "RJ-45".
I have a laptop for uni work that I bought in Jan 2011. It's got Lubuntu running on it and most of my work is done on Google Docs... so I'm not seeing the benefit of upgrading really.
It works.
use libreoffice
I've got it installed, but in fairness the nearly-fourteen year old laptop takes a fair while to start the application now.
I'm not a huge fan of Google as a company, but Google Docs is a fairly decent cloud-based app that's largely agnostic to the low specs of my laptop.
yes exactly!
stop being mean to my thinkpad friends! (those being, friends with thinkpads, and laptops themselves, which are automatically friends)
Where my X230 people at?
Idk I use a T440p :3
Not a joke: When I was playing the Wii for the first time I legit thought "Damn, when this becomes retro Ima feel so old."
Prophetic.
Although the graphics looked old even when it came out.
I put the line of retrogames with consoles with hardrives and dlcs.
I like this drawing
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