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Bayonetta creator Hideki Kamiya wants us to drop the "retro" game label
07.08.2023 - 16:19 / rockpapershotgun.com / Hideki Kamiya
PlatinumGames co-founder, Bayonetta director and celebrated Twitter shoutyman Hideki Kamiya would like the "retro" game label to go out of fashion. His argument is that calling something "retro" is inherently condescending - each game has its own particular achievements and qualities that deserve to be understood in terms of more than just nostalgia cultivated by a novelty-driven industry. After all, Johnny 90s Developer didn't spend months knocking together a bespoke cover system or fancy artstyle so that you could badge it "quaint", "old school" and so on, 30 years later. Assuming you can still access the game at all.
"I don't like the word 'retro game'," Kamiya told VGC in a wide-ranging interview also notable for some chunky insights on onomatopoeia in Japanese manga and its US adaptations. "I'm obviously not a native English speaker so it might be something I'm interpreting from a Japanese perspective, but hearing the word 'retro' from a Japanese viewpoint, suggests more of a 'fad' brought back from a past era and reskinned for the current era."
"So I prefer the terms 'old games' or 'classic games', because they show more respect to those games of the past. I love games from all generations, and just because the game is 'retro' doesn't mean it's retro, because it's the same game that existed years or decades ago - it still exists and it's still playable and it's still an experience that's very unique in its own right - so there's really no need to refer to it as 'retro' because it still does have special memories and experiences that stay with you after all these years."
Kamiya illustrated his criticism with reference to Platinum's own vertically scrolling schmup Sol Cresta, fifth in a series that dates back to the late 90s, which released as part of the studio's "Neo-Classic Arcade" range, and features an outlandish formation system. "We didn't make Sol Cresta to imitate the games of the past and bring back nostalgia, it was more than that. We wanted to make a vertical scrolling shoot 'em up combined with our desire to introduce unique concepts in each of our games."
I'm not wildly keen on the "retro" label either, though I think it does some service in providing older titles with a commercial niche to shelter in. I think we default to discussing retro games as though they were just steps along the way to whatever the present, perfected form of that game happens to be - which will, in turn, get demoted to "retro" status in years to come. None of which is to disparage retro-themed games, which are a genre rather than some kind of loose period classification, or the people who operate retro games websites and save these ancient titles for posterity.
Elsewhere in the same chat, Kamiya went long on
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