Are Retro Games Better Than Modern Games? (No, But They're Better at One Thing)

Are retro games better than modern games? No. Let's get that out of the way early, because anyone who tells you otherwise is arguing from the heart rather than the evidence, and I say that as someone whose heart is entirely on the side of the old stuff.

Modern games are bigger, prettier, smoother and kinder. They save your progress without being asked. They explain themselves. They don't throw you back to the start of the level because you blinked at the wrong moment, and nobody has to blow into a cartridge. By any measurable axis, the new generation wins.

And yet the question won't go away, because people keep asking it, and people don't keep asking questions that have simple answers. So what's going on?

It isn't about quality. It's about the promise. Every game is a deal between the designer and the player. Modern big-budget games mostly promise scale: a world to live in, a hundred hours of it, a map thick with icons. Old games mostly promised something much smaller and, in its way, much stranger: this is the whole thing, and you can finish it.

That's the part I think people are actually missing when they say retro games were better. They're not missing the pixels. They're missing the contract.

Old games were legible. You pressed start and understood the rules in about ten seconds. Move, jump, shoot, don't die. There was no tutorial because the first screen was the tutorial. Whatever the game wanted from you, it asked for immediately and without ceremony, and everything after that was just you getting better at one clear thing.

Think of it as a system with a very short specification. Modern games are brilliant, but a lot of them ship with a specification the size of a tax code, with currencies, menus, battle passes and upgrade trees, and you spend the first hour reading the documentation. Old games had a README of one line. Some of us find that restful.

Old games ended. This is the big one. A game from that era was a thing you completed. You beat it, or you gave up, and either way it was done and it was yours. It didn't track your daily login streak or tempt you back with a seasonal event. There was no "live service". The game was a finished object, like a book or an album, and finished objects have a strange quality that's hard to find now: they let you stop.

For people who've reached the stage of life where the evening gets about ninety minutes and then someone needs a lift to somewhere, that matters more than any graphics card.

And they were yours. You owned the cartridge. It ran on a machine that sat under the telly and did exactly one thing. Nothing needed updating. Nothing phoned home. A game was a physical thing you could lend a mate, lose behind a sofa, and find again two years later still working. That's a very different relationship from a licence to an account on someone's server, and I think part of the pull of retro is simply how much more honest it was about what you were getting.

Then there's the filter. Here's the uncomfortable bit for the nostalgia crowd, me included. The old games we remember are the survivors. Thousands were forgettable, broken or cruel, and they've quietly disappeared from the conversation. Memory flatters the average. When you say "they don't make them like they used to", you mean the ones you kept thinking about for thirty years, which is a ferociously selective sample.

But that cuts both ways. The ones that survived survived because they're good, and the best of them hold up without any sentiment at all. Nobody needs rose-tinted glasses to enjoy a tightly designed arcade game. The design is the design.

So what's the honest answer? Retro games aren't better. They're built on a different promise: small, clear, finishable, and entirely in your hands. Modern games keep making the bigger promise, and keep keeping it, brilliantly. But the smaller one is still worth making, and the number of adults quietly hunting for exactly that is a lot higher than the industry's marketing departments would like to admit.

A novel about this

I wrote a whole book on that feeling. System Restored follows Derek Cooper, who has just turned forty, lives surrounded by a collection of vintage consoles, and is not entirely sure what the next decade is for. Then he finds a listing for a machine he thought was a myth: an arcade cabinet called Time Portal, made by a defunct company called Dolos.

He gets it home. He restores it, piece by blown component. He becomes slightly obsessed. And when he finally beats the high score, the machine doesn't say "game over". It sends him to 1981, on a real-world quest across Britain, with the clock running.

It's a time travel adventure for anyone who has ever stood in a car boot sale at seven in the morning, looking for one particular cartridge. Retro gaming as identity, nostalgia with a soldering iron, and a hero who has to work out whether the past was ever as good as he remembers.

Short answer, in the end: no, they aren't better. But I'd happily lose an evening arguing the point.