So uh...

I'm a huge fan of video games. I started gaming during the tail-end of the Atari VCS's and I remember loading tapes to get a game going on my TRS-80 Color Computer II -- I've never stopped gaming. But recently, like lots of people who share a similar story, I've fallen out of love with gaming. New games rarely capture me the way old games did.

It's probably a bad case of nostalgia, but I've long been interested in the question, "do games I thought as great growing up still hold up today?". As much as I'd like to fallback on the hardcore gaming line of "it's the gameplay stupid", it isn't just that. There are crap games that somehow just worked. But do they still hold up? Graphics are important, Sounds are important, etc. It's some combination of things that seems to make it work. This is my effort at finding those combinations.

Video games are now well over half a century old. They started as technical demonstrations and idle challenges, turned into bar entertainment, were reinvented as toys, and are now a major entertainment segment of the economy bigger than the film industry. But I think it really only started with my generation that video games became a predominant, cross cultural, entertainment phenomenon -- something that routinely occupied our free-time rather than movies, tv, books, sports or other sources of fun.

We realized, not all that long ago, that the games we grew up with still have value. This realization has manifested itself in broad and sometimes incomprehensible ways: emulation, retrogaming, abandonware, retrorevival, and resurrection of entire genres thought long dead. Games are repackaged for modern consumption, distributed on digital networks undreamed of in my youth, rebooted, remade, reskinned and restarted.

Incomprehensible is that this mantle has been taken up by people a generation younger than me. Except for them, their retro systems are the Playstation or the Gamecube. Mentally I have a hard time moving past the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. But it has to be acknowledged that the transition from 16-bit (mostly) 2d systems to more modern 3d capable systems is probably one of the most important transitions in gaming history, perhaps only after the introduction of home gaming in the first place.

I'm also interested in the incredible parallel gaming histories that I never could participate in. Entire hardware and software ecosystems existed in Japan and Europe, but never made a blip in North America. Tens of Thousands of games and entire multi-generational game series are completely unheard of here. I've grown into having an intense interest in these systems as well.

So how am I going to do this? Well, however I feel like. I intend to review games, genres, systems, historic retrospectives, mechanics and more. I'll use emulators, retrosystems, long play videos and more. I don't want to just cover popular games (there's enough breathless reviews of Chronotrigger on the Internet as is) or only talk about hipster-level obscure games, I want to cover things I personally find interesting. I'll reference the greater community, introduce podcasts or video series I enjoy and just general swim in the vast sea of video entertainment that we have the amazing luxury to sail in.