Retro gaming is witnessing a resurgence at the moment, and with good reason. There’s a lot to love about retro games, but at the same time a lot of us forget what those games were like back in the day. Worse, today’s gamers – those who weren’t raised on the Atari and the Commodore 64 – never experienced the classics the first time round.

When we think about retro gaming, we usually tend to think about classics like the first Super Mario games and old school Legend of Zelda. We forget about flops and the glitches, and let’s not even talk about that time my SNES cartridge glitched out and wiped my save on Secret of Mana after 100+ hours of gameplay. I still have nightmares.

And so with that in mind, let’s take a look at just a few of the things that today’s gamers don’t always remember about retro gaming.

• The graphics are terrible

There’s no easy way to sugar coat this one. When we think back to the retro games that we used to enjoy in our youth, we have a tendency to remember the graphics as better than they were. Part of that is because the resurgence of popularity in retro gaming has led to many of the classics being updated for a new market. A great example of this is Crash Bandicoot, which looks very different in the PS4 remaster than it did in the original 1996 release.

• Some games had no graphics at all

Because graphics were difficult and time consuming to make, many of the earlier games had no graphics at all and were entirely text-based. Still others did have graphics but required input from the user, which is why I spent half of my childhood typing variations of “unlock door”, “open door” and “use key on door” while playing Hugo’s House of Horrors. 

• Sometimes you had to enter the code yourself

Granted, this lost popularity pretty quickly for obvious reasons, but back in the day you could find the programming code for entire games printed out in specialist magazines. If you had a home computer, you could type out the code from the magazine and hit the run button before playing the game on your machine. Of course, if you made a mistake when copying out the hundreds of lines of code then you’d be out of luck and have to start again from scratch – unless you fancied the task of debugging it.

• They were incredibly difficult

The original Donkey Kong was notoriously hard to play, with very few people able to reach the “kill screen”. Then there are games like Mike Tyson’s Punch Out with its virtually impossible boss fight, and Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, in which you’d die after two hits. In fact, the latter was so difficult that the game’s developers gave out trophies to anyone who could prove that they’d completed it.

• You often couldn’t save

Memory and storage space was at a premium on early consoles, while others didn’t have any storage space at all. That means that some games didn’t allow you to save, while others required players to write down lengthy passwords and to manually re-enter them every time they wanted to pick up from where they left off. Some games (I won’t name names) gave out codes to take you back to whatever stage you were at but wouldn’t save your items and power-ups, making it impossible to continue anyway.

• The only walkthroughs were via phone lines

Long before GameFAQS and IGN, and even before physically printed official strategy guides, your only option when you got stuck was to call a premium phone line and to ask a telephone operator for the solution. Of course, if the game didn’t have a hotline and your friends didn’t have any ideas, you could get stuck in the same place for months on end. My uncle’s still plagued by the memory of being stuck on a scree slope, even though he can’t remember the name of the game and as far as Google is concerned, it never existed.

• Indestructible consoles

Say what you like about retro gaming, the manufacturers knew how to make a good console. Best Cartridges tended to be much more durable than CDs and DVDs, which were vulnerable to scratches and snapping, and the consoles themselves could be thrown out of a moving vehicle and would still work just fine when you plugged them in. Could you say the same about your PS4?

• Two words: LAN parties

Online gaming was reasonably popular as early as the 1990s, but internet speeds weren’t the best and connections were often patchy. Plus if someone needed to use the telephone, you’d have to log off the dialup. LAN (local area network) parties were a decent workaround, but they required people to gather together in a specified, real-world place. Imagine that: having to actually socialise in person with the people you’re playing with. It was a simpler time.

Conclusion

Retro games had (and still have) a lot to offer, but at the same time it’s important to remember their limitations. The key is to accept them as they are, warts and all, and to enjoy playing them because of their limitations and not in spite of them. 

The good news is that the occasional glitch is a small price to pay for some of the greatest games ever made, and there’s a whole world of retro gaming out there just waiting for you to discover it. Happy gaming.