What is retrogaming?
Retrogaming is also known as classic gaming or old-school gaming. Retrogaming is the hobby of playing classic video, computer, and arcade games. Retrogaming often has community ties to, but is not the same as, indie gaming, the hobby of playing games not published by any commercial publisher.
These games can be played on their original hardware, or on modern hardware via emulators, programs that duplicates the functions and appearance of one system on another system, so that the second system behaves like the first. For example, a Nintendo Entertainment System Emulator is a software program that will allow a modern home computer to run the software programs of classic Nintendo games, emulating the Nintendo System. Retrogamers might also play classic games using game ports, in which the game software is adapted so that it may be run on systems other than that which it was originally intended for. Through porting, the software of a classic game may be adapted to run on a Windows or other home-computer operating system.
Popular retro games include those published in the 1980s, on early gaming platforms such as the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, or the Commodore 64, or arcade games by Konami, Atari or Sega. Many early games were attributed to individual developers, and these developers have fan bases in the retrogaming community. Eugene Jarvis, responsible for the classic arcade games Defender and Robotron: 2084, and Dave Theurer, the creator of Missile Command are two popular game developers.
Retrogaming is a niche, but popular hobby. The hobby is the subject of several online magazines, such as Retrogamer.net, and blogs, such as Racketboy.com.
Retrogaming is the term used to describe the act of playing older video games in contemporary times. Retrogaming may take three main forms: vintage retrogaming, retrogaming emulation, and ported retrogaming. The actual era covered by retrogaming is somewhat loose, with some people considering it only to be the very earliest games, before the 1990s, while others would consider games from the 1990s to fall into the same category. Vintage retrogaming is when players actually track down original equipment and games to play on. Some vintage players hunt down old arcade games, many of which can be found for fairly cheap through various outlets that dispose of outdated hardware. Other vintage players hunt down older home systems, such as the Commodore 64, the Amiga, or the Nintendo Entertainment System, and collect games for those systems to play. An emulator is used to run a game written for an older system on newer hardware, without changing the fundamentals of the game. There are a myriad
