There’s a lot of misconceptions and misinformation about retro games. What are some things that people often believe that aren’t true?
For starters, here’s some that get at me:
“Doom running on a pregnancy test” is a misconception that too many people take literally. Doom has never been installed on a pregnancy test. Foone, the creator of the Doom pregnancy test, simply put a screen and microcontroller inside a pregnancy test’s plastic shell. Notably, this was not intended to be taken seriously, and was done as a bit of a shitpost.
The original PS3 model is not the only model of PS3 that can run PS1 discs. In fact, all PS3 models can run PS1 games from the disc.
The Video Game Crash of 1983 was not worldwide. It was essentially only contained to North America. The video game industry in the rest of the world was thriving.
Donkey Kong Country 2’s subtitle is Diddy’s Kong Quest, not Diddy Kong’s Quest.
GameCube and Wii discs do not spin counterclockwise.
The Wii Sensor Bar does not have any sensors in it. The sensors are in the Wii Remote. The Sensor Bar is just infrared LEDs.
Can you think of any other retro gaming misconceptions?
A couple of easy ones would be the misconceptions around Saturn and N64 and their overall success. Saturn was quite successful in Japan up until late 1997, enough to afford it ample third party support through to Dreamcast’s launch. Over 300 games were released on Saturn in Japan in 1997 alone. Meanwhile, Nintendo almost sold as many N64s in North America as it did the SNES, but it was absolutely a flop in Japan relative to its predecessor.
Otherwise: 3DS halves the resolution of games in 3D mode 3DS actually doubles the resolution of games in 3D mode, using the full 800 x 240 for 400 x 240 per eye.
1994’s Sega Saturn was the last system to do hardware sprites 2004’s Nintendo DS was the last system to do tiled hardware sprites with two 2D graphics engines
Game Boy Advance and N64 contain dedicated audio hardware Audio must be programmed in software on both N64 and Game Boy Advance
Xbox 360 introduced large game patches to video games Microsoft charged developed tens of thousands of dollars to release patches for their games, and patch sizes had to be kept small. It wasn’t until 2013 where this limitation was lifted.
I’d forgotten about the backwards compatibility, I guess at a stretch GBA does give developers access to the four channels that Game Boy had, which the best GBA composers used to enrich their audio.
Many seem to think the only reason people play old games is nostalgia, either for the games themselves or a different era. While this element undoubtedly exists, I think it obscures another, far more important factor. Video games of the eighties and nineties, and probably a few years either side of that period, were the result of an especially creative movement in Japan. Like Classical Hollywood in cinema, this movement led to a golden era. There have been similar moments in the history of music, painting and literature.
Perhaps we are too close to the dawn of the medium to fully comprehend what happened? Still, I believe people will be playing, appreciating and referencing these games forever.
The language of videogames was born in the arcades, but it was definitely being perfected on the 2D plane during the 16-bit era. If not for the full press on 3D, and the press of the time constantly denigrating the 2D games of the 32-bit era, that golden age probably would have continued properly until Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/Gamecube when 3D truly came of age at home.
There are a lot of people today that really look down on the days prior to 3D games. They have no reference point for what made that era so special, and how hand drawn sprites of high quality moving with fluid animation was a thing of beauty to behold back then.
16-bit, and to a lesser extent 32-bit will always be my favorite eras of gaming. That’s the language of videogames that I love the most, and it started with the arcades in the late 70’s.
Luigi was found in the files for Super Mario 64 in 2018, solving the mystery behind the famous “L is Real 2401” texture exactly 24 years, one month and two days after the game’s original release. An untextured and uncolored 3D model of Luigi was found in a leaked batch of Nintendo files and was completed and ported into the game by fans. Luigi was not found within the game’s source code, he was simply found as a WIP file leaked from Nintendo.
I thought that when people were talking about backwards compatibility with PS3 models they were referring to the emotion engine chip that is present in early PS3 models, which makes it backwards compatible with PS2 games.
3DS halves the resolution of games in 3D mode
3DS actually doubles the resolution of games in 3D mode, using the full 800 x 240 for 400 x 240 per eye.