After that, it folds back in on itself. Perhaps that's because those systems marked an end to consoles and PC gaming feeling like a rare thing instead of simply A Thing That Was Everywhere. Perhaps it's just that 'retro' was established by people more or less my age, with the word generally harking back to a largely imagined mid-90s golden age that still seems like yesterday. Oh yes, we can say, like grizzled veterans, still mentally poring over the Argos catalogue in front of Saturday morning cartoons, we fought in the first console wars. We saw life in VGA, and it was Good.
Games like Super Mario World and Street Fighter II have never really left the geeky public eye thanks to endless parodies and references, in much the same way that Space Invaders and bloopy-bleeps still represent gaming to the mainstream, despite being almost 40 years old.
It certainly doesn't hurt that the games of the 8-bit and 16-bit era have such incredible charm with their pixel-art style and cleanliness, while early 3D games have aged about as poorly as yoghurt behind the radiator. It's so much easier to hold onto the warm fuzzies when looking at a picture of something like A Link To The Past than, say, the original Tomb Raider, complete with smeary textures and a Lara Croft model capable of putting peoples' eyes out on the street.
But really, I think what it comes down to is a matter of scale - that games and gaming and consoles and everything that went with it were, until the turn of the millennium, not simply entertainment products but a whole world in and of itself. The consoles and games you had. The ones your friends had. The ones you lusted after.
The big decisions like Sega vs. Nintendo that weren't simply a question of a few exclusive games, but philosophical decisions of choosing a side. You were a Nintendo Kid or an Amiga Owner or a PC Person Who Will Be Validated in the way that you're simply not when you buy a PS4 or an Xbox One these days, and if you were in any of the scenes, chances were that it dominated your perspective to a far greater degree - even if not enough to be taken in by things like, say, the Nintendo Cereal System.
These days, games are different. Everybody plays, something at least. The industry is too big and too wide-spread for it to feel like your own little world; too many games shooting down the pipe for many of them to embed properly in the same way that playing Zelda for the hundredth time or inventing new ways to defeat Super Mario World while blindfolded allowed. Who has the time for that when there's some flashy, must-play AAA release every week, instead of a handful of games competing for one, or maybe two presents a year? As any kid who ever got more than one NES/SNES game at once knows, there's no better way to not appreciate what you have.
But of course, there are exceptions. It seems unlikely that a whole generation won't grow up looking back as fondly on Minecraft as their predecessors did on Lego, just as Blizzard will likely be able to coast forever on the years of fuzzy feelings generated when World of Warcraft was an institution instead of simply a game and nobody who played Pokemon will ever not instantly be able to tell their Hitmonchan from their Hitmonlee, even if trying to cooly feign indifference.
There'll always be nostalgia. There'll always be something new to base it on and bounce it off. It's only natural that its focus has moved, and that the older you get, the harder it is to feel that same burning passion that locked something like Mario forever in the gooest part of your brain but makes something like a new Assassin's Creed feel like just another game. At least there's one compensation - nostalgia doesn't fade, it only grows stronger. Somewhere in my head, it's always Christmas Day, circa 1992, ripping open a copy of Street Fighter II for my SNES.
That was a really good day. I hope everyone has at least one Christmas like that.
