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Retro Gaming Gets Hot
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, retro gaming is big business, according to a recent article in The Rocky Mountain News. The story talks to Nintendo, Namco and the maker of those all in one controllers that feature games from old systems like Atari. Lin Leng, who's working on the latest Pac-Man game, summarizes it best: 'The games today are hyper-realistic, photo-realistic and take a long time to complete, an average of 20 hours of gameplay,' he said. 'But with Pac-Man you just jump in and play and you get a quick fix. It also brings back childhood memories for some of us.' There's also an interesting sidebar to the story talking about Invader, the Parisian graffiti artist tagging famous locations around the world with images from Space Invaders. The author's website has the full interview with Invader posted in his weblog."
I'm glad that some companies have figured this out! I love the latest and greatest games as much as anyone, but my heart still belongs to good old 2-D action games. Ah the memories of dimly lit arcades where you could go and bask in the warm glow of electronic sex, erm I mean video monitors...
Emulators like MAME and ZSNES are a blast when you just need a quick game to let off some steam or kill some time. When on the go the old Gameboy Advance really has you covered with tons of classic games available as well.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Classic gaming has been huge for years. It's unfortunage what happened with the "Great Arcade Flop" in the late 80's. If you are a real geek there is no doubt you've heard of CGE or the Classic Gaming Expo. They are boasted as the "worlds [...] largest event paying tribute to the people, systems and games of yesteryear."
Steal This Sig
The word Atari predates the videogame. It's a term from Go. It means the situation where a group of stones is one liberty away from being captured. Thusly, if you aren't directly in the videogame industry, you can probably use the word as much as you want.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Never. They've already tried.
Not sure what court it was, but emulators were declared *legal.* Copies of the ROM images, however...
Not sure what court it was, but emulators were declared *legal.*
Until they realized they could patent the concept of emulating their own systems and then sue the emulator creators for violating their patent, or at least it's coming. They've already got a patent on GBA emulation so any GBA emulator free or not could be killed at Nintendo's whim, they already stopped a Tapwave emulator (if I recall correctly), nifty eh?