mjkerpan

The SNES Playstation was always planned as an intergrated unit: Nintendo was planning to sell an addon called the SuperDisc, while Sony had the right to sell an all-in-one version. Nintendo's unease with having granted the right to build such a thing was one reason that they backed out of the deal. The fact that Sony was supposed to get most of the licensing revenue for CD-based games was another factor.

While there are certainly modern games that will be considered classics and still worth playing ten to fifteen years from now, I'm not sure if they will be considered "retro". Games changed a lot more from 1996 to 2006 than they have from 2006 to 2016. I suspect that the overall changes from 2016 to 2026 will be even smaller. Thus, I suspect that games from today will look a lot more like "just another backcatalog title" than like some glorious reminder of a bygone era.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions. It's really shocking just how close to death video games came in the West after the Atari bubble popped.

Were there any English-language magazine coverage of the console scene between 1985 (when the original Electonic Games folded) and 1988? Is a huge chunk of the 8-bit era basically undocumented or am I missing something? Modern reviews of old games are nice, but it would be nice to know what people thought at the time.

Sadly, proper GOTY-style all-inclusive editions are actually getting rarer. As game companies continue their war on used game sales, even when such things are released, they often just include a single-use code for a one-time download of the extras. For collectors, it's a bad scene.

At least for Gamecube and PS2, the platform specific magazines are a good option. I have no idea what the situation for Xbox was, though according to Wikipedia, OXM did at least a capsule review of every single Xbox (and follow up) release right up through 2015.

I've played just about everytbing except Neo Geo, Saturn, and Dreamcast. I've only owned (and still own) an Atari 2600, a Genesis, a Gamecube, an Xbox 360, and a PS 3.

There's a little retro games store in a nearby town. It sells consoles at games at reasonable (player-oriented) prices and is the world's most awesome hole in the wall. I need to make another trip there soon.

Hi, I'm Mike from Boston. I'm 30 and I've been gaming for 25 years. I found this place looking for vintage game reviews and decided that I just had to join. I look forward to learning a lot!

I was mainly a PC gamer during the 90s: my folks wouldn't buy me a console. I would borrow friends' copies of CGW and PC Gamer and all was good. In the early 2000s, I picked up a Gamecube and dutifully started reading Nintendo Power, which I quite liked. These days, I like Retro Gamer a lot: its coverage of game history and of homebrew for old systems is superb and it's well worth the cost to buy as an import.