It's amazing how much retro gaming has been used to sell games. The first part is articles written about nostalgia.
VG: Classics
Mech RTS games
Best Rare Games. This list includes games like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. It's multiple pages and I have archived all of them.
Tetris Sequel for Gameboy found
Elder Scrolls turns 30, and PC Gamer celebrates
Grandia Collection coming out
Yuji Naka learned to port and make games by porting Ghouls and Ghosts to the MegaDrive. This gave him the skill to program Sonic.
The 32x Castlevania that became Symphony of the Night
How the PS2 totally beat everyone else. It's a short read. It's also wrong.
10 Sega Classics on the Switch
A look back at European magazines talking about consoles
A look at Shigeru Miyamoto’s thoughts on game design 17 years ago.
Trip Hawkins talks about how he nearly got various companies united against Sony in the 90’s.
The best games for MegaDrive by year
Every game in the videogame hall of fame
_C: Konami
Top 10 Konami characters. I wish there was a Goemon collection with translations for the Japanese only games.
Best Konami games
Castlevania Bloodlines is 30 years old
10 Konami arcade games
The classics are told with a bit of nostalgia. Look at how the PlayStation is given a narrative of dominance. They did sell more consoles, but no where near the amount claimed. But this is the narrative, and it must be told this way.
But it gets deeper as you realize that this nostalgia is big money. Museums are being made to tell stories about videogames.
_C: Museums
The Strong Museum has 12 candidates for their hall of fame this year. Games like Myst, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and Metroid are up for the vote.
Nintendo museum is delayed
There is an entire industry selling games and products for classic gaming.
VG: Classic Indies
Grind is a Doom FPS style game for Amiga
Earthion is being released on modern consoles, PC, and MegaDrive. A SHMUP that pushes the console to its limits.
Super Mario if the CD Drive was real
Castlevania Revamped is a PC edition of the game with various upgrades.
Super Metroid port to MegaDrive is called Space Hunter
Virtual Reality from the N64
A ROM hack of Light Crusader gives the player a double jump.
Otogorisou has been translated to English. It's a Famicom visual novel game by chunsoft.
A Sega fan game maker is making his own game.
Breath of Thunder is coming out for several consoles including Virtual Boy
A rogue squadron style star wars game for the Dreamcast
An NES edition of SEGA Bass Fishing
Hard Knight and Haragon are new games for the Commodore 64
Toaplan games are heading to Steam. Truxton 2!
Sunsoft shows off games on Switch
CI: Classic Ports
You can now watch movies from the Atari 2600
Demons of Asteborg was made for the MegaDrive. It's being ported to the GBA and Neo Geo
Surprise Attack, the Konami arcade game, is being released to Switch and PS4
Check out that videos on Atari. I saw a similar set up for the TI99 a few years ago and was blown away. The guy showing it owned a retro computing store, and knew tons of people making ports and physical parts for old computers.
It's really hard to differentiate fan made fun stuff from people doing it professionally. For example, the company that made a game is releasing an open source version of it.
_CI: Freestars from Star Control
Star Control II is being released for free with a new name
Here is a Tweet about it.
Then we have a fan making ports of games, and then his own game which may or may not be sold.
_CI: FPS Dungeon for MegaDrive
Guy who created the Final Fight Mega Drive edition is making an FP RPG for the console
We have footage now
There are companies like Atari and Nightdive studios which only make modern ports for games.
_CI: Atari
Interview with the CEO of Atari. He wants to under promise and over deliver
Talk about Atari buying Nightdive and Digital Eclipse and how it's worked out
_CI: Nightdive
An interview with Nightdive studios and their CI port work
Dark Forces Remaster!
Nightdive studios publicly asks to port No One Lives Forever
I really want that port of No One Lives Forever. I had the demo, but never bought it. So a modern port would be great.
Physical stuff like toys, and computer remakes blur the lines just as quickly as the software side.
_CI: Physical bits
Commodore 64 keyboard revamp
Virtual On is getting a pedometer
What do you do with your mini console? Play it on a mini monitor!
How to modernize your console collection in a really convoluted way
You can now add a second screen to your steam deck. DS games will be much easier to emulate.
A look at the Atari 400 Mini
Altered Beast gets a toy line
That's a fan based company making toys for sale. The Atari 400 mini is especially cool to me because a friend is really into it. I got him a full sized XL once through my retro convention connections. He lost his 400 in a fire and still missed it.
If I taught videogame history I would include a class where students had to make games for old school consoles. Sure they start at QBASIC but Assembly, C, and C++ would be taught along with using level editors and stuff like SCRUMM. Let them slowly build up to the modern engine to see and understand the history.
There is so much Classic Indie work being done that it would be easy to set up and begin working.
That's cool. I did one in college on computer architecture, we had to design a dumbed down 8-bit computer from transistors. I'd done a ton of programming in my life by then, and that was still really interesting.
Good ol' Verilog.
We had to write a program using our CPU's ISA that generated the Fibonacci Sequence once we had our hardware simulation working. Only a few people actually completed everything in that class.
I can't remember what exactly we used but we did have to do a bunch of different programs for it. There weren't that many op-codes it didn't have to do a ton. I took the class in the summer because I knew the professor, a white guy that could teach well. I think at one point I took every class he offered as electives. There were only like 8 of us in the class and I got paired up with a real oddity, it was a 14 year old kid that was taking random college stuff in the summer. I think the professor paired me up with him since he knew me from other classes and that I'd treat the kid okay. Kid was smart and actually wanted to learn so it was a win for me really. We finished everything in the class, and I spent way more time working on that than I'd expected. I went in wanting some easy hours.
Was definitely one of my favorite classes in college. Advanced computer architecture was also great. Learning about things like out-of-order execution and data forwarding was fascinating.
I remember doing something in PicoBlaze assembly for one of those classes and thinking it was the greatest thing ever when I could make something 1 clock cycle faster by using a different instruction.
Now all I think is variants of "let's do this in Python (wasting billions/trillions of clock cycles) so I can get it done quicker and go on to doing something else."
That would be so much fun.
This is why I like emulators and stuff.
Was with you until this. Where the fuck did that come from at all other than bitter soying?
It's well-established across many sources that Sony basically ran away with the video game market at an astronomical scale once the PS1 launched and maintained an iron grip on it for the next 10 years thereafter with the Japs firmly in charge. The only struggle Sony had in that first decade (non-handheld-wise) was getting the PS2 into gear (because with many of its major titles not releasing until 2001, customers were reluctant to invest in the new console given Sega's recent flops). Any narrative other than that is wishful revisionism at best and shameless lying at worst.
There are no consoles in the history of video gaming that have had more blatant lies told about them in order to discredit their otherworldly success than the first two Playstations, and likely originate from some butthurt salesmen who struggled to shift their company's offerings (and at least in one instance, a poorly-translated IGN article from 2000).
Total myth, from its launch in 2000, the PS2 had already outsold what the GameCube and Xbox would sell in their life time before it had even been on the market for 18 months. By Summer '02, the N64 (32m) units would be outsold. Six months after that, the PS2 would reach 50m units, outselling the SNES, and by the end of 2003, it had outsold the NES at 62m units worldwide.
Sales reached 150m by mid-2010, well before the PS4 came out. Sales were consistently high for over a decade, and it took the Nintendo DS about 10 revisions and pandering to China to try and weasel its way into the #1 spot.
More untrue slander, because every console that sells a lot of units will have a lot of shit on it. The Switch has around 5,000 titles on it at last count, ergo, how come I hardly ever hear about the ~4,800 or so that aren't lavished with praise?
And lest us forget, the Wii had such unforgettable bangers as:
Yakuza, the 94th best selling PS2 title, shipped 100,000 more units than Pikmin, the GameCube's 16th best-selling title did. And the former only came out a year before the PS3 launched, whereas Pikmin was a Day 1 GC launch title and had a full 5 years on the market before the release of the Wii. That's how much bigger software sales were for Sony than they were for Nintendo in the 2000s.
Worst urban myth in the history of video gaming. Someone happened to read an IGN article of how early Japanese consumers were using their PS2s in the week or so after their launch and decided to turn it into slander without even contemplating basic logic.
The cheapest DVD player in 2000... would have been a used DVD player, or a new entry level model. Or even a rental. No-one in their right mind would have gone miles out of their way to buy a $300 games console where 90% of the functionality they'd never use just to watch a few movies they probably already had on VHS and unless they were a discerning cinephile, would not have cared in the slightest about the quality, resolution or aspect ratio differences between VHS and DVD.
Everything advanced so quickly around the time the PS2 came out regarding DVDs. Sure at launch it was the price of a DVD player but for a very short time. It wasn't even a year before DVDs were ubiquitous at rental places and DVD players were a fraction of the cost of a PS2. Yeah, I recall watching some movies with friends on a PS2, but that was so we could watch in their room where the game system was and not like having to be a teenager hanging out with parents. It was a nice feature to have, but yeah almost no one bought them as a DVD player primarily.
I agree over all, though I want to point out that market forces in other countries are not the same as what happened in US/JPN. In AUS for instance, it took quite a bit longer for the price of DVD players to come down, making the choice of a PS2 to keep the kids happy as well might have seen some more sales. Though in the long run not enough to effect global sales, AUS is a tiny market after all.
Thanks again! Appreciate the work you do to make these compilations
I think it shows my personality that I make these lists for myself. I hope you enjoy it.
Wait, is there an issue with retro games? Because a lot of them are still pretty damn good to this day.
Also, Grandia has a collection out right now on the Switch. This is just a rerelease of that on the PS4. And the PS2 sales numbers are accurate. The high sales are because of what was reported in that article, but more in the later years of the PS2. The reported countries couldn't afford later gen consoles so they just kept buying up PS2's. That's also why we had releases of FIFA all the way up to FIFA 14. 7 years after the PS3 launched and the same year the PS4 launched.
Nothing wrong with retro games. I just put them separately from modern games. There is a market for it, and a lot of companies that work in the Classic Industry.
The top selling game is GTA San Andreas. It continued to sell for the PS2 at WalMart until the Revamped trilogy was released. So it would be a good indicator of PS2 sales. About 22 Million have been sold. That long tale does not add up to the sales claimed by Sony.
Dark Forces remaster got me to drag out my old CD and play it a bit again. That and Rebel Assault II that I need to try. Two oldest games I have and still own. Rebel Assault II is the first game I remember buying brand new in it's fancy box and not some bargain bin disks or downloads--having held on to some birthday money for over a month to get it. I'm pretty sure I "borrowed" Dark Forces from my cousin at one point and have had it for nearly 30 years now. That game holds up so well and there's a modern engine recreation for it, so I don't even need a remaster.
Never heard of the 32X Castlevania before.
Sega seems to lose a lot of Castlevania. There was a Saturn port of Symphony of the Night that needs tons of fan improvements to work well. Also, the Dreamcast Castlevania has a playable demo, but the game never released.
Lost. 💀
Seconded, and they also did not mention Total Annihilation.
Yeah, that really stood out to me as well.