Why Retro-Looking Games Get So Much Love

As a young and fair-weather gamer, I loved playing Super Mario Brothers because it was my older brother’s favorite game, and I wanted to be just like him. I can still hear the 8-bit theme song in my head, and I’m guessing you can too, if you played Mario as a kid. 

“Bah dat dat doo dat dat doo,” goes the classic, repetitive, 1985 jam. The ubiquity of those notes in many of our childhoods was as constant as a hug from grandma, a pack of Gushers after school, or Saturday morning cartoons. Retro games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and The Legend of Zelda are comfort food for gamers. 

Chris Schranck, aka FutureManGaming on Twitch, says, “I think a big part of playing retro games is just the feel of the game.” Schranck, 33, played Mario as a kid in Missouri so much that his mom set an egg timer to limit his gameplay in the mornings before school. He’s currently playing Batman: Arkham Knight.

“Playing retro games,” says Schranck, “you’re happy to be feeling like a kid again. As an adult, you have all these responsibilities and anxieties, and if you can just find a way to forget about that, even just for 15 minutes, it can help. I think if you can find something, anything, that can help you feel good, that’s a good thing. Retro games evoke these happy memories. Being a kid, opening up that new game or console on Christmas. How it looks, the beautiful pixel art. It’s the nostalgia, and remembering being young again.” 

Amanda Lim, a 25-year-old competitive gamer in Singapore, also loved Mario as a kid because it was “cute and fun.” But she prefers FPS games these days and is currently playing Valorant. GameBoy was a pivotal part of her early gaming years. “Some people’s passion is being a gamer,” says Lim, “and gaming doesn’t restrict to age limit.” 

Michael Fraser works with people struggling with video game addiction, but he’s a proponent of healthy gaming. He’s currently in a Donkey Kong–playing phase with his 13- and 10-year old children. “That was my favorite game when I was their age,” he says. “I do think there’s a nostalgia to playing. The look, the music, and the feel of the game.”

Playing older games—or games made to look retro—transport the gamer. “It takes me back to a simpler time when games were two-dimensional, the music was simple, and yet it was still a lot of fun to play,” says Fraser. “My daughter made a certain move on the third board of Donkey Kong that I forgot all about, and memories flooded through my mind of when my friends and I first discovered that move.”

Donkey Kong and other video games from childhood have a way of sticking with you, like the waxy sweet smell of a fresh Fruit Roll-up. That’s evidenced in the games hitting the market today—“old-looking” games are finding fans in 2021. In the same way that cell phone apps are designed to be addictive and resemble the psychological mechanisms that draw people to slot machines, new games designed to look like 8-bit or 16-bit games are created to sate your appetite for nostalgia. 

From the visual outset, the concept of nostalgia seems obvious. You see a game you played as a kid—or a game that looks like one you played as a kid—so it triggers happy memories. But let’s pull back the curtain: Why does your brain want to play this game, exactly? 

SohoMD cofounder Jacques Jospitre Jr. says retro games have a dual appeal: Intrinsic and extrinsic properties that explain their popularity. “The intrinsic aspects have to do with classic gameplay that makes it a timeless experience, like chess,” he says. “Along with the extrinsic aspects of the game, where it’s associated with positive past experiences, in terms of people and places, making it a trigger for positive emotions. Some combination of both factors is what is driving the renewed interest in the genre.”

“Retro gaming may trigger nostalgic feelings, emotions, and thoughts,” explained Michael Feldmeier, a psychiatrist at Level Up Mental Health. “This is a great example of what happens when the memory system and the rewards system of the brain work together. A positive memory can be triggered by a sound, a smell, a certain image, or a thought. This in turn triggers a person's reward center in their brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter involved in pleasure and salience. People can gravitate towards retro gaming as they are seeking a known trigger for a positive emotional response.”