I have mixed opinions about this because the PS3 is often noisy, which is less than optimal for movie watching. Players like the Sony S350 became cheap and common a long time ago...
I don't know if it'll happen but I'm gonna be tickled if games ever develop academicly studied eras like films do. Like the whole silent era, golden age, Hollywood Renaissance, new wave, etc thing.
"Oh, you enjoy Dig-Dug? A classic from the Namco golden era. Personally I'm more into the early British wave of ZX Spectrum titles. The Stamper brothers were autuers, ahead of their time. Have you played Atic Atac? The origins of the standard life bar."
Actually now that I type this out this is just what white guy 45 minute video essays are
the 3Ds was okay, but it was a huge downgrade from the DS and was missing most of the magic of the DS which came from the hundreds of tiny devs making innovative use of the DS stylus.
To me retro is not just about age but also how those particular games are historically situated within the development of gaming. Retro implies pre-3d (console) gaming, so N64/PS1 onwards isn't retro no matter how old those consoles are relative to the present. Retro itself can be broadly divided between pre-1983 crash (Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Breakout, Centipede) and post-1983 crash (Contra, Streets of Rage, Final Fantasy 1, Wolfenstein 3D). The early retro games people remember are all arcade games while the late retro games are where you start seeing franchises like Mario and Zelda.
Due to how janky early 3d is, the N64/PS1 generation is at this awkward period of time where it's not really retro anymore but is not modern either. I mostly see it as a transitional period between late retro gaming (SNES) and early modern gaming (Gamecube, PS2).
I guess I see the N64 situated in a time when big changes were happening in gaming. Besides the obvious advent of 3d, this was around the time when gaming stopped becoming arcade-dominant and transitioned towards being console-dominant, which has huge implications (arcades existed in third places while consoles were privately owned). It's for these two reasons that I wouldn't call N64 retro (or lump N64 in a different historic period than the NES/SNES if we're just using "retro" to mean "old").
I think there's a degree of millennial revisionism where the spotlight is shown on retro/whatever-you-want-to-call-that-particular-period-of-gaming console games when they weren't even the dominant form of gaming during that time period. You're not going to see video essays of The Simpsons arcade game or Alien vs Predator or Space Harrier anytime soon even though those were massively popular arcade games way back in the day. You can't really compare arcade cabinet sales vs console game sales because obviously people weren't individually buying cabinets to put in their garages but buying cabinets to put in a mall or a laundromat or a pizza place.
The dominant form of gaming was arcades. You can see this very clearly whenever movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s reference gaming. It's almost always some kind of arcade game. The Simpsons' first reference of a console game (Bonestorm) was a Season 7 episode that aired 9 months before the N64 dropped in NA and even that reference was largely a Mortal Kombat reference (Liu Kang knockoff getting owned by a tank, Goro mirror match in a bridge stage that every arcade Mortal Kombat game had). Everything else before that were parodies of arcade games. You have something like Terminator 2 where you saw John Connor briefly playing Afterburner 2 at a mall while being stalked by the T-1000.
There is a way bigger difference between the nes and n64 than between the ps3 and ps5, hell even between the ps2 and ps5. Things moved really fast in the 90s as far as games and the technology behind them goes. A console generation is longer and also less of a defining era of gaming than it used to be because at this point putting more power into a system is yielding dismissing returns, you can only make a polygon so small until it doesn't matter anymore or takes way more time and money than it's worth. Gameplay has gotten stagnant as hell for AAA games over the last 15 years or so as well and at the moment, indie games are starting to fall down that trend hole too. The world can only take so many survival crafting games, rougelites and metroidvanias
Yeah that's the millennial perspective on retro gaming that held sway during the 2010s. Its time has passed, I'm sad to say. The 2010s were to the 80s/90s split as the 2020s are to the 90s/2000s split. The retro aesthetic of a lot of games now draws from the early 3D era, like SIGNALIS.
I completely missed out on the PS1 so the rise of all these faux-retro games with polygon jitter is honestly pretty cool. Helps that we've learned how to make games feel better than the first time they looked like this.
I guess my point is that regardless of what particular label someone uses, the development of gaming can be split into various periods just like how the history of painting can be split into various periods. It's just weird to have a floating label that basically means "old." When I was a kid, "old games" were essentially just pre-1983 crash games while "modern games" were post-1983 crash games because gaming was only two decades old. But now, gaming is a little over half a century old at this point.
In the end, I think "retro" is used in gaming in the same way "classic" is used in film and movie. Casablanca and The Godfather are both classic films even though they have nothing in common outside of being old Hollywood films.
i think the line between retro and contemporary for consoles is defined by internet connectivity tbh. the n64 only had internet with the n64dd (which didnt last long), whilst the ps2 and the dreamcast had internet support built in or via some adapter. so i think the line of "retro" stops at the n64/psx era but thats just me. the term will be subject to change anyways as time goes on so it doesnt really matter
I mean if you want to get into the weeds about that, the Atari 2600 and the Intellivsion both had dial-up modem cartridges in the early 80s. The GameLine and PlayCable. (Fun fact the company behind the GameLine eventually became America Online, yuck)
The NES and Genesis had connectivity as well, but only in Japan. The NES one is a little surreal because it had email and stock trading. The earliest console I can think of that had internet multiplayer capacity was probably the Sega Saturn in the mid 90s, or maybe the Apple Pippin? Whichever came first.
ah, then nevermind then lmao. i knew there had to be earlier internet support for retro consoles but wasnt too knowledgeable about it. back to the drawing board
The real dividing line is between when games were arcade-dominant and when games were/are console-dominant, which also maps pretty well with when games started to be 3d. The only flaw in this conception is how to fit mobile gaming into this since mobile games are massively popular but are part of its own niche instead of replacing console games.