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The boxes were stacked en masse outside our door, addressed in my mother-in-law’s exquisite handwriting. We had been warned. Our friends had also experienced the phenomenon of aging parents cleaning out their homes, such that a treasure trove of objects we forgot we were storing at their place would suddenly reappear in our lives. It was like tumbling into a time capsule, pulling out old school books and photo albums, mixtapes and comics. Then we opened the box marked “Video Games.”
A Sega Genesis. A Sega Saturn and Dreamcast. A Nintendo 64 and a DS. PlayStation 2. A few ancient handheld games, and a Gameboy that still turned on, its tinted screen ghostly green, faded with age. There were clusters of cartridges, some still in their original cases, others with continuation codes or cheats scratched lovingly in pencil onto the back pages of well-thumbed manuals. Giddy with excitement, we raced to the living room to plug it all in. A few modern HDMI converters later and the consoles were reborn. Amazingly, everything still worked.
It was a thrill to rediscover play as I was—as it was—in 1989. The surprise of returning skills I thought were long gone, a rusty reflex of mashed button combinations that apparently never left my fingers. The pixelated characters, familiar maps, the chirpy 8-bit soundtracks reminded us of game studios now shuttered, with the designers, developers, and artists who built the worlds of our childhoods. Still, the ACME Detective Agency (Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?); Cerulean City (Pokémon Red); and Chemical Plant Zone (Sonic the Hedgehog 2) were unchanged. It was incredible to encounter them just as we had left them, perfectly preserved like a digital Pompeii. I soaked happily in a flood of familiarity, buoyed by warm memories of hours spent with my brothers mastering a level or discovering hidden prizes and Easter eggs.
But flipping on an old console and cradling a familiar controller in your hand is not merely a question of nostalgia. As I soon realized, it was a reminder of everything we have lost and should fight to regain. Because in the intervening decades, I wasn’t the only one who had changed.
Remember when playing a game was just playing a game, not imbibing “content” or a franchise? Since those early titles first graced our screens, the video game industry swelled to many billions of dollars, consolidating around major players like EA, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo who soon ruled the roost. Play transitioned to online systems or platforms, whether console mediated on Nintendo’s Wii or Sony’s PlayStation, or through PC portals like Valve’s Steam or Blizzard’s Battle.net. With few exceptions in the indie game crowd, now it’s all about connected play, app stores, content, and updates pushed over the internet. It seemed like progress at the time, but under these new techno-economic conditions, the games changed too.
Maybe that’s why it felt like such a rush in today’s subscription-saturated age to just play your own media, 40 years later. The peace and contented satisfaction of insert cartridge, flip Power, press Play. None of the planned obsolescence that renders old systems mute or forces yet another purchase of a required upgrade. No fumbling against low disk space or a download bar frozen midupdate. No portal going down, no publisher inexplicably removing the game from their servers. Pay once, in the 1980s, and play forever. Into the next millennium, even!
It was also refreshing to play a game for the purpose of just playing a game. As the video game industry ballooned alongside the data economy and consumer world of smartphone apps, the tracking and gamification that kept the tech industry afloat after the Great Recession invaded games too. Pop-up ads or in-game purchases to unlock a feature. Achievement counters, micro-transactions, DRM spyware, locked accounts. People who played this also played that; what’s trending this week. Enough bells, whistles, and notifications to transform any sought-after world of fantasy, strategy, or imagination into a Las Vegas casino.
These shifts didn’t just capitalize on gameplay: They changed gameplay at a fundamental level. Gaming became the backdrop of our lives. Whether picking up weapons in a shoot-’em-up or lining up shiny tokens for prizes, play became ubiquitous, reflexive, frictionless. Games prey on our psychology, our reflexes, our behavioral ticks, leaving us as zombified and responsive as if we are all NPCs: the non-player characters that animate the background of an immersive world.
Small wonder that gaming on a device that never experienced the internet felt nothing short of liberating.
I realized that I was so used to console-locked systems, I truly believed you had to have a Nintendo system to play a Nintendo game. … I had internalized anti-competition moves from the 1980s as natural, obvious, even technically necessary.
Not everyone lucks into a dragon’s hoard of old hardware. The console museum we reinherited showed up only a few months after I assembled my first handheld game emulator. Called “PiBoy,” its 3D printed plastic case, few small buttons and parts, rubber game pad, and screen felt a lot like a Game Boy under my hands, with only a little extra heft thanks to the Raspberry Pi 3B inside.
At first I was just excited to dive back into my old favorites like Tetris and Dr. Mario. But it turned out that the emulator could take any old game. Bubble Bobble, Donkey Kong, and Choplifter all on one handset? Sign me up! I cruised the online ROM forums and soon my PiBoy mushed together classic options from consoles like N64, generations of Atari, even old stand-up arcade games.
It was disorienting to experience all those titles on one box. I realized that I was so used to console-locked systems, I truly believed you had to have a Nintendo system to play a Nintendo game. That was obviously not true at all. I had internalized anti-competition moves from the 1980s as natural, obvious, even technically necessary.
Our kids were just as curious about what Mummy and Daddy were up to as we were proud to show off our mad (albeit ancient) skills. I was worried the games would seem antiquated, clunky, as uncool as their parents. But my youngest quickly racked up a stacked Pokédex in Pokémon Red/Blue on the PiBoy, while my eldest rifled sagely through the 1,300+-page Encyclopedia that accompanied Carmen Sandiego, surfacing long enough to ask me where the Soviet Union was. That’s when I really noticed how much the world had changed, and it wasn’t just geopolitics.
“Is that Sonic from the movie?” “Is that Ninja Turtles from the movie?” “Is that the Ghostbusters from the movie?” Yes, yes, and yes, kids. So why did Sonic start as a game then get a movie, while Ghostbusters started as a movie that then got a game? Why did the Ninja Turtles start as comics before they got a cartoon with toys, and only then getting a video game and then a movie? Why did all these characters get a reboot? Were the new stories like the originals? Even more insulting, why didn’t Golden Axe II get one single movie, let alone a remake? In their opinion, we are all poorer for it.
What they were really asking was this: What was the world like before everything walked a well-trodden path to a well-managed “property” replete with games, sequels, and toys? I found myself trying to explain what it was like to experience a fresh creative idea take its first tentative steps into the world, moving from one medium into another without a clear sense of what would happen next, unsure if a follow-up video game or comic would even be a good idea. Imagining a pre-franchise world was just as difficult to them as thinking outside the console box was to me. Through gaming, we had all somehow internalized the rules of the economic game.
The rules also changed what we thought media was. Our kids got used to the idea of physical media being, well, physical: something you own, attend to, and care for. Fetch the game from a shelf, slot into console, return to store in its box. We didn’t realize how unusual this had become until they popped Untitled Goose Game into an (offline) Nintendo Switch in front of their very confused cousin. “What is that?” The cousin pointed at the cartridge and its slot. “Our Switch at home doesn’t have that!”
What sweet summer children we all have now, tiny masters of the subscription service. A trail of consumer blood leads from the Switch via Wii U, 3DS, the original Wii Shop Channel, and all the digital game stores that Nintendo shuttered when they zeroed out our digital purchases with only a tone-deaf tweet thanking fans for their support. Recently, Sony PlayStation announced they will stop selling CDs, restricting access to movies and digital content already paid for. The darkest pattern of all is our kids growing up in a world where “digital” means someone else owns it, while they pay repeatedly for incremental access—and eventual loss.
Peals of laughter ring out from the couch as they dive into one cooperative game after another, their blocky characters bumping and tumbling into one another on screen. If I hadn’t lived through it myself, I would have thought it impossible to believe that there were once heated debates about video games’ negative effects on children. Now it just looks like wholesome play.
Wholesome because their digital fun stays entirely on the box. No captured clicks, exposed routers, or home IP addresses. We even installed the Java version of Minecraft on a local server, so no one would feel the need to pay $2 to Microsoft for their character’s nifty digital cape. And when my kid filed away a Charmander on the PiBoy, not a single company noticed or promoted paying extra for a chance at a shiny digital Charizard card.
Our retro-systems also digitally air-gapped them from whatever was seeping into their friends’ homes through “connected” games and Roblox obsessions. On the playground, their friends compared in-app purchases bought with their allowances the way we used to brag with each other about getting a new game, mastering a level, or finding a hard-won cheat code. Now, it is all about in-game purchases, a new form of digital conspicuous consumption invisible to adults, yet stratifying the virtual worlds to replicate offline social distinctions among their friends.
Wholesome, too, because these old games weren’t saturated with pop-ups, notifications, ringing sounds, and other dystopian attention hacks imported from Las Vegas by way of Silicon Valley to increase profits. The new stuff seems enjoyable on the surface: at least, kids get hooked and come back for more. But that isn’t because of the story or the challenge. It’s because their perception, their attention, even their social worlds have been expertly hacked. Even today’s baby toys are a minefield of miniature Skinner boxes, training infants to expect mini dopamine hits every time they hit a manically flashing button to hear a randomly selected twinkly tune. Say what you will about Golden Axe II, but it was not designed to turn its players into the next generation of bottomless scrolling human mines, primed to swipe and click their way through endless streams of “content” in search of random micro-rewards.
What started as a trip down memory lane revealed something deeper. Retro tech is not about nostalgia. It’s about resistance. Evading the technologies of capture, attention hacking, and dispossession. Resisting the forced hardware upgrades, the shuttered platform logins, and myriad forms of “progress” sold to us as the next new thing to appease the shareholders. Escaping the extreme gamification of everything in a marketplace ruled by attention and mass manipulation through micro-doses of dopamine. Today’s economic landscape has transformed us gamers from main characters into the NPCs populating someone else’s investment game.
It’s not just video games. Increasing numbers of young people are ditching their smartphones, turning to records, tapes, and CDs. People are also finding and restoring old games and consoles. Many of these “Zillennials” were born long after those systems were abandoned, so the games do not evoke reminiscences for them. Retro media offers us all escape from what our digital world has become, the systems that keep us entranced and docile, tethering us all to a machinery of disconnection.
To be sure, antique consoles and records alike bear the stamp of cutthroat market competition of their time. VCR versus Betamax, Nintendo versus Sega, even the iPod versus Zune: These competitions shaped media, markets, and regulations. Still, returning to these devices today brings a flood of relief and curiosity. A sense that we can still restore the powers of creativity and play that make us human.
We are grateful that we can still show our kids a world in which a video game is not a honeypot. Amid our retro devices, cartridges, and emulators they too can learn what it is like to own digital things, to play for the sake of playing. To experience losing themselves pleasurably in a game without being robbed of their autonomy or their allowance. After all, if we want to resist the enshittified paradigms around us, we can’t just shake a fist at the sky: We have to show them a better way.
Leaning into what gaming once was, returning to that world played by different rules, reminded me of what gaming could still be. Not merely a backward glance at what we have lost, retro games offer a blueprint for what we might build next, the forms of play we should fight to preserve, the creativity we might still access without the bells and whistles in the way, the rules of the game we might prefer to engage. And along the way, we can still enjoy some good old-fashioned fun. 
This article was commissioned by Mona Sloane.
