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Gaming companies are often looking for a way to take the latest technologies and incorporate them into their games, but actually, there are plenty of simple games that don’t use the latest technology that prove very popular.
“Retro” doesn’t necessarily mean old – it has become a style. Hotline Miami was released in 2012, but with blocky graphics and top-down gameplay, it looked like it belonged at least 20 years in the past. This didn’t matter, people were drawn to a lot of the elements of the game, and the style that it had. AI and graphics may be developing at a rate of knots, but you’ll find that loads of games are successful and popular even if they push the technical boundaries.
Card games and table games invented hundreds of years ago are still very popular, and have gone through an evolutionary period from being played in person, to being played on computers in the 1990s and then on smartphones, tablets, and other devices.
The simplicity of casino games such as an online roulette game is part of the appeal for some, not everybody wants to play a game where there are a lot of rules to learn. Roulette is a perfect example of a game where players can learn the rules in a matter of minutes and be able to play the game and understand the full concept of the game. Roulette’s mechanics (a spinning wheel with a ball that lands on a number after each spin) are so simple to gain an understanding of.
Table games went through evolution to be playable digitally, so when roulette was turned into a digital game, the spinning wheel was swapped for a digital depiction of a wheel, of course, with the outcomes decided by a random number generator.
Many retro games have a similar level of simplicity, but even games with such a simple mechanic can be pretty advanced in their own way. Tetris is an example of an old, retro game, that seems simple but actually has a huge number of different potential outcomes. Fit the shapes together and make a solid line to make it disappear…the concept couldn’t be more simplistic. Play the game though, and there are actually loads of different possibilities and ways it can pan out. Some people have even set world records playing the game for 24 hours at a time.
Games with limited memory space to work with are often among the more inventive games. To work on an early console a game would have to have manageable graphics and audio. Some of the iconic early soundtracks that got stuck in your head were actually just 30-second loops of music because the game’s storage couldn’t handle more.
Games have had to be clever and niches like racing and fishing games have proven to be popular, and even the early fishing games had a story and enough gameplay features to stay intriguing, even though we hadn’t reached the modern age of super cheap flash storage.
Early games got the maximum out of their computing power (well, at least the successful ones did) and proved that a good concept could make a great game even before we had the technology that is in the PS5 or new Xbox consoles.
Simple and retro games don’t tend to have very high demands on your computer, so most modern PCs, emulators, or consoles can run them with ease. Tech has come such a long way in the last 20 or 30 years that the games that used to be pretty advanced are miniscule and not a challenge at all for most basic computers.
The SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) back in the early 90s had cartridges running the games, and these were between 0.23 MB to around 4 MB, to put this into context, that is less space than is required to save a high-quality MP3 file of a song and goes to show how little space developers were working with then. Roms now tend to run with great ease due to the power of new computers. In fact, Android phones are very good at running old games once made for consoles.
Gaming has been a popular hobby for decades, and there are thought to be thousands of games released every year now, through independent publishers and bigger game studios. Not so many games were made in the 1990s, for instance, but there were still hundreds that people can now go back and explore, and many have been remastered for the current generation of consoles or to download on PC.
Gamers who prefer driving games can go back and see the evolution from 2D graphics through to the incredible lifelike experiences seen today. People can find hundreds of FPS games, strategy games, and any other genre imaginable when looking for retro games or simple games made now, but in the retro style (like Hotline Miami). Gaming options are almost endless now.
