Retro games

A game has an intended way to be played, and then there is the way a speedrunner plays it. Speedrunning is the practice of finishing a game as fast as possible, and over the past two decades it has turned dusty classics into living competitions. Titles that were finished and shelved decades ago now have …

Books sit on shelves for centuries and films survive on reels and in archives, but video games are a fragile form of culture. They depend on hardware that breaks, formats that fade, and code that was rarely designed to last. A great many games from the early decades of the medium are already difficult to …

Close your eyes and think of an old video game, and the chances are you hear it before you see it. The bright, bleepy melodies of the eight-bit and sixteen-bit eras are as recognisable as their blocky graphics. That sound has a name, chiptune, and like the pixel art it grew up alongside, it has …

Online play won the convenience argument a long time ago. You can team up with a stranger across the planet without leaving your chair. Something gets lost in that arrangement, though, and anyone who grew up passing a controller back and forth knows what it is. Sitting on the same couch, shoulder to shoulder, shouting …

Pixel art should have faded out years ago. Hardware caught up. Studios can render millions of polygons, light scenes in real time, and capture every pore on a character’s face. Yet small, deliberate squares of color keep showing up in new releases, on storefronts, and on the screens of people who were born long after …