There is an interesting pair of articles over at the Richmond Times Dispatch that deals with retro gaming. They do quite a bit of listing of just what kinds of retro games that have been released (or rereleased).
Retro gaming is something that I’ve seen coming for a long time. During the ‘Sega vs. Nintendo’ wars, almost everything was directed squarely at me. Okay, well, maybe not me specifically, but I was definately in the target market. Problem was, though, that I didn’t have the kind of money that I needed to get all the games that I wanted (a problem that still persists today), so there were a lot of games that I either missed out on playing or got rid of so that I could play something else. Now that I seem to have a dollar or two in my pocket, I’m going back to those same stores to try and get some of those games back.
Now, I’m sure that there’s people that play these older games exclusively, just like there’s a lot of people who play new games exclusively, but I can’t do that. Yes, I believe that it’s important to know about and play some of these games (some of the conventions used in those early games are still in use today), but I like to play something new once in a while.
So now that there’s people in their 20’s and 30’s (and on up) that are trying to get back some of the games that they had growing up, and there’s people younger than that who realize that some of the older games are actually good, and there’s been two results to this: companies are realizing that they can get away with releasing compilations of old games at low, low prices and not have to do a whole lot of work on them, and communities like FatManGames spring up to facilitate the collecting of these games. Unfortunately, a lot of the games that are sought after are rare, expensive, and probably both.
So that drives people (for better or worse) to the emulation scene, well, that’s not the only factor, but I’m willing to bet it’s the biggest one. I’m not going to go into the legality of emulation or ROMs or any of that again, but as long as there’s at least some people that get into collecting and maintaining old games and systems after trying them out on an emulator, there’s some hope for ROM Masters.