Pity Greg Canessa, Xbox Live Arcade group manager. Handed the challenge of Nintendo's "virtual console" and downloadable retro classics, Mr. Canessa is left with a hopeless PR task and so claimed recently: "A lot of those Nintendo games, you know, aren't gonna hold up. " It is a contention that has been dug up with wearying predictability. We have all heard this kind of thing: "retro games are only good for novelty value", "were good for their day", "standards have changed", "it's just nostalgia", "a fad", and "you're wearing rose-tinted specs". These can all be filed under "non-argument".

The straight-face test

Mr. Canessa again: "To be honest with you, a lot of those games are fun in your head when you think, 'Oh, yeah when I was 12, this was really fun,' and you have these great nostalgic reasons to play them. Then you do play them, and they're just not very fun anymore. But, there are some games like Joust or Gauntlet or Pac-Man that are as fun today as they were back then. " No industry figure should be using words in this way. The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and countless other 8 and 16-bit classics regularly top fans', critics' and developers' best-of lists: where was Joust? If this pronouncement was intended to be serious, and the point is apparently that Super Metroid, Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 do not stand up as well as Gauntlet, this is a straight-face test failure.

How retro can you go?

Nintendo's competitors are in reductionism mode. Mr. Canessa must recognise that Microsoft has the short end of the retro stick in pitching Gauntlet against the Japanese giant's hall of fame. As Sega signals its intention to offer Mega Drive games through Nintendo's virtual console, it is clear that retro gaming has the potential to be a huge market � not just a throwaway side project (the emulation scene, eBay and retro corners of independent games stores also evidence this). Indeed, Mr. Canessa acknowledges Midway, Konami and Atari's support for Xbox Live Arcade, stating "We have a retro coin-op category within Arcade� and we're doing a lot more in that space. " Of course, this creates a major gaming headache. Don't like retro games from the 1990s? Mr. Canessa offers retro titles from the '80s as the alternative, seemingly trying to have it both ways. This, in addition to sweeping claims about gaming epochs not being any "fun", leads to the questions: are retro titles fun or are they not? And it's surely not a coincidence that the era just denounced was the one in which Nintendo redefined gaming? At any rate, these comments illustrate an attitude in the wider community, with some gamers turning their noses up at retro titles.

Fancy pictures

A tedious obsession with graphical prowess is the straightforward explanation for retro games being sneered at. Many are the number of "gamers" who have actively derided the 8 or 16-bit generations for their supposedly primitive graphics, acting like snotty kids being dragged around a museum by their parents. These are the types of players who only (consciously) joined the games scene when new technology brought greater realism. In recounting the experience of browsing a nameless high-street games store, one letter writer to GameCentral overheard the devastatingly moronic claim by a shop assistant: "If retro games are so good, why do they keep making new ones then?" This is the "Beatles were a boy band" of videogames.

Retro-gate

The denunciation of gaming past is condescending: it implies that gamers in the 8 and 16-bit years put up with supposedly shoddy design, but nowadays we know so much better than to accept such technically inferior rubbish. This lacks perspective. The retro generation did not "make do" with what they had: the technology was cutting edge. Yet even titles from the early 2000s do not escape the fanboys' ire, as they were � yes � good for their day. Still, the fanboys do display some studied disingenuity: the "standards have changed" sidestep has let them dodge the open-wound-like weaknesses of countless over-hyped, under-designed big titles � from ropey guns-and-graphics first-person shooters, to laughably ambitious and fundamentally broken God games. All of this is little more than an attempt to cover-up the fact that standards have not changed, it is not just nostalgia and nobody is wearing rose-tinted specs: rather, those games were badly designed in the first place, but gamers got caught up in the hype. Graphics erode over time, throwing into relief the gameplay within. Then there is no denying what everybody can see clearly.

Tied in knots

The problem is that as soon as you start arguing in terms of "new" games versus "retro" you have already messed up. The dilemma: where to draw the line? At what point do standards move on, games are filed under "retro" and are treated as nostalgic relics of the bad old days? 20 years ago? 10 years, maybe 5, or perhaps last year? Taken to its illogical end, all games made prior to today do not stand up to "today's standards" � since the technology is only ever moving forwards, today's titles will be inevitably surpassed tomorrow.

But this is all just based on technical stuff, and is akin to claiming the new Star Wars films are superior to the originals for the reason that they are shot on digital video, with perfectly choreographed lightsabre duels and advanced CGI effects. All very flashy, and all very derivative of older, more enjoyable space sagas. And while we're not on the subject, I guess old bands like The Who and The Clash do not hold up to today's standards of hackneyed student guitar group mediocrities Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand.

Universal standards

"Standards" do not change over a few years, and a good game is a good game whether it was released in 1986, 1996 or 2006. Great design is not exclusive to any year, nor can it be written off by limp clichés about "rose-tinted specs". Instead of panning retro games, why not just play them and enjoy?

Nick Bennett
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