Retro Gaming Gets Hot

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, retro gaming is big business, according to a recent article in The Rocky Mountain News. The story talks to Nintendo, Namco and the maker of those all in one controllers that feature games from old systems like Atari. Lin Leng, who's working on the latest Pac-Man game, summarizes it best: 'The games today are hyper-realistic, photo-realistic and take a long time to complete, an average of 20 hours of gameplay,' he said. 'But with Pac-Man you just jump in and play and you get a quick fix. It also brings back childhood memories for some of us.' There's also an interesting sidebar to the story talking about Invader, the Parisian graffiti artist tagging famous locations around the world with images from Space Invaders. The author's website has the full interview with Invader posted in his weblog."

Retro Lover

[CommanderData]

I'm glad that some companies have figured this out! I love the latest and greatest games as much as anyone, but my heart still belongs to good old 2-D action games. Ah the memories of dimly lit arcades where you could go and bask in the warm glow of electronic sex, erm I mean video monitors...

Emulators like MAME [mame.net] and ZSNES [zsnes.com] are a blast when you just need a quick game to let off some steam or kill some time. When on the go the old Gameboy Advance really has you covered with tons of classic games available as well.

Most definatly alive

[z0ink]

Classic gaming has been huge for years. It's unfortunage what happened with the "Great Arcade Flop" in the late 80's. If you are a real geek there is no doubt you've heard of CGE [cgexpo.com] or the Classic Gaming Expo. They are boasted as the "worlds [...] largest event paying tribute to the people, systems and games of yesteryear."

Re:No Shit

[UserGoogol]

The word Atari predates the videogame. It's a term from Go. [wikipedia.org] It means the situation where a group of stones is one liberty away from being captured. Thusly, if you aren't directly in the videogame industry, you can probably use the word as much as you want.

Re:legalities of emulators

[Peale]

Never. They've already tried.

Not sure what court it was, but emulators were declared *legal.* Copies of the ROM images, however...

Evidence that you're right

[Atario]

The Classic Gaming Expo [cgexpo.com] has gotten bigger and bigger over the years. They've had to seek larger facilities; in fact, this year, as a result of this expansion, they're holding it in San Jose rather than Las Vegas. And since I live in the Bay Area, I'm currently rubbing my hands with glee.

HEE HEE!

Zelda I on gamecube

[caitsith01]

At the moment there is a deal floating around where you get the first 4 Zelda games (full versions) with a new Nintendo Gamecube. Pretty cool.

Further, if you get a copy of Animal Crossing for GC and perform various bizarre Japanese tasks you can get full, working versions of:

- excitebike
- wario woods
- donkey kong
- tennis
- golf
- baseball
- zelda ...and several more. It's quite cool, there's a built in NES emulator.

Proof of Hotness

[Anonymous Coward]

Retro Gamer Magazine [livepublishing.co.uk]

Retro gaming is back!

Re:No Shit

[iamdrscience]

Well, there probably was no agreement between Infogames/Atari for the band to be able to use the name, but that's immaterial because they don't NEED one anyways. Two companies can have the same name as long as they operate in different industries (and/or in different geographic areas). It's just like how Apple was allowed by the Apple record label (home of the Beatles) to call themselves Apple as long as they stayed clear of the recording industry (and then were sued when iTunes came out). There's a multitude of other examples. If you were to flip through the yellow pages for a couple different states you'd find hundreds of companies with the same names that have no legal ground to sue each other.

On a related note, I remember my brother talking about how in Czech Rupublic there is a beer named "Budweiser" seperate from the American beer company. They won the right to the name because their use predated it in the Czech Republic. Budweiser (american Budweiser), I believe is still sold under a different name though.

Re:legalities of emulators

[jkeyes]

Not sure what court it was, but emulators were declared *legal.*

Until they realized they could patent the concept of emulating their own systems and then sue the emulator creators for violating their patent, or at least it's coming. They've already got a patent on GBA emulation so any GBA emulator free or not could be killed at Nintendo's whim, they already stopped a Tapwave emulator (if I recall correctly), nifty eh?

Re:What's with Nintendo?

[dancingmad]

Uh, the Gamecube is not tanking. It's second overall in the world, in front of the Xbox hypocritical /.'ers love so much. Way ahead of the Xbox in Japan and making quite a bit of money there. Plus a lot of games on all three consoles sell the best on GC (Soul Caliber 2).

Secondly Nintendo is never been over a quick buck. Mario Bros 2 USA was just a Mario packaged version of Doki Doki Panic. They whored out Nintendo characters for awful CD-i games. Nintendo characters used to be on Shasta (yummy ;D) and I just saw them the other day on popcorn.

Might I remind you of Nintendo Power, an advertisement Nintendo fans pay for?

Re:Bunch of suckers

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're not.*

*Depending on where you live.

Re:Anyone find these gadgets to be useless?

[SirDaShadow]

I'll be more interested when one of these devices offers a faithful emulation of Baby PacMan

Ask and yer shall receive

Visual Pinball Tables [pinballsim.com]

Re:legalities of emulators

[svallarian]

The patent only covers GBA emulation on mobile devices. Not PCs or Xboxes. (or dreamcasts -- the best emu platform ever)

Just to keep someone from cloning GBAs.

I wonder if the patient covers the new DS though?


Steven V.

Re:Games don't have to be old to be good.

[Kiryat Malachi]

Haven't played Gish, but ChronicLogic's other game that I've played (Bridge Construction Set) is *awesome*.

Introversion's "Uplink" is also a lot of fun. And I see that they're in the process of a second game; probably have to buy that one too. Uplink is a "hacking simulator"; best part is that like in the real world, it has a GUI and a CLI, and some things are *much* faster once you learn the CLI. Second one is called Darwinia, and appears to be an RTS - a sentence I like from its website is "combining fast paced action with strategic battle planning, the game features a novel and intuitive control mechanism, a graphical style ripped from 80's retro classics, and a story concerning a tribe of video game sprites trapped in a modern 3d game world." How can you not like something involving retro sprites in the 3d world?

Indie games publishers put out some really good stuff sometimes.

Re:Retro Gaming *Gets* Hot?

[Anonymous Coward]

The company was Elephant, and their slogan was "Elephant Never Forgets."

Their ads were always on the back cover of "Enter," the early-80s computer/technology mag. [teamknightrider.com]

Re:Emulators...

[bcrowell]

By coincidence, I just hit this story after a really fun evening of fiddling with a TRS-80 emulator that runs on Unix. (For you young-uns, that was a computer made by Radio Shack back in the 20th century.) People have (probably totally illegally) posted the roms, and disk images of lots of the software. What a blast from the past! The Dunjonquest games are just as much fun as I remember.

A really cool thing about those old games was that a lot of them were written in BASIC, so you got the source code automatically when you bought the game. You could study it, modify it, etc.

It's also really amusing seeing if my brain can dredge up all the old technical knowledge from ca. 1980. I was trying to figure out why one of the games wouldn't run, studying the source code and trying to remember this insane technique they'd use for embedding Z-80 machine code in a BASIC program. Well, it turns out that enthusiasts have scanned the old manuals!

Let's just hope the people who run the download sites don't get sued for letting people copy the roms and apps. (But I do own a TRS-80, so at least I can contain I have a right to make my own "backup copy" of this stuff, right? :-)

Re:Games don't have to be old to be good.

[clandestine_nova]

I actually purchases Gish - it's rather disappointed, mostly because I managed to beat it fairly quickly, and I had no real incentive to play the other modes. The two player modes are faulted, because of the maximum number of keys that can be held down on keyboards. So two player is fun, but you'll end up with one person being stuck moving only one direction. The game's physics are wonderful, though, and the game is quite fun to play if you don't mind spending a quick $30.

PacDasher

[oranda]

Check out a free Java implementation [sourceforge.net] of the classic arcade game. Best with Java 1.5.

Bug reports to [e-mail]

There is an emulation of Baby Pacman and others!

[antdude]

DrMrLordX, please see these links:

1. http://www.pinballsim.com/ [pinballsim.com]
2. http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/pinmameguide.htm [mameworld.net]
3. http://www.vpforums.com/ [vpforums.com]

Remember, this a virtual pinball machine customized by people to match the real thing. At least, you don't have to repair these emulations. ;)

Also, you need Windows for them. I'd love to see MacOS X and Linux ports.

Re:Retro Gaming *Gets* Hot?

[ncc74656]

I remember buying 5.25" floppy disks with Lifetime guarantees. I forget the name of the company, being pretty young back then, but they used to have an elephant head on their logo. I guess maybe they figured people might take the term "lifetime guarantee" seriously.

They just didn't make clear that "lifetime warranty" referred to their lifetime, not yours. :-)

BTW, here [cyberden.com]'s an Elephant disk sleeve.

Re:Retro Games Music

[crabtech]

You mean this? [bucknergarcia.com]