If you look on social media right now, it might surprise you to see the volume of posts about a specific game: Championship Manager 01/02.
If you aren’t familiar with Championship Manager, it’s a soccer management sim game.
There are similar titles out there, including Football Manager, all with the same basic premise: managing your squad and eventually conquering the world of soccer.
Now, the fact that Championship Manager remains popular is no surprise. After all, soccer has billions of fans around the world, and these sims allow players to live out their team management dreams through the game. Yet, the interesting part is the popularity of CM 01/02, referring to the game that came out for the 2001/2002 soccer season.
The point is that there are dozens of CM and FM games that have come out after CM 01/02, many of which have higher ratings on platforms like Metacritic, yet a game created over twenty years ago still gets traction today. There are a few reasons for this, but one of them is clearly based on the modern phenomena of retro gaming’s appeal.
Gaming has always held retro appeal
The idea of retro gaming having appeal is, of course, unsurprising. You can cite everything from the Classic Tetris World Championships to the enduring appeal of casino table games, which have been largely unchanged for decades (centuries, even), as examples of how some aspects of gaming have a timeless appeal. Yet, there remains an interesting trend today to capitalize on the popularity of retro gaming from both a social and business standpoint.
Consider the rise of emulators we have seen in recent years. An emulator allows you to play thousands of retro games, mimicking the performance of classic consoles like the Super Nintendo or Sega Megadrive. They have been gaining a lot of traction. Some of it is for technical reasons (Apple relaxed rules on emulator software in its App Store), but there is also pent up demand.
Emulators tend to operate in a legal gray area – the software is legal, but you are treading on uncertain ground by accessing copyrighted games if you haven’t paid for them. Games makers like Nintendo have taken an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude, releasing updated versions of their classic consoles so gamers can access the 1980s and 1990s classics without fear of skirting the law. These retro-release consoles have sold millions of units.
Social media reinforces a sense of nostalgia
We can argue that some of the trends come from social media in the sense that content creators are finding niches in exploring the past. Look at YouTube, for example, and see how many classic Super Mario walkthroughs you can find. By some metrics, the appetite for content based on classic gaming is more popular than that with modern games.
Arguably, what streamers are doing with respect to the above is tapping into areas that go beyond nostalgia. It is about building culture, often through charting the history of gaming. In the 1980s and early 1990s, gaming culture was largely centered around kids. It was mainstream in that sense. However – and this is important – those building the games did not get mainstream attention. The industry is, of course, vastly different today, as a multi-billion-dollar business that appeals to adults, yet exploring retro gaming allows today’s players to understand the history of the culture they have immersed themselves in.
We can certainly make other arguments. Retro gaming is often associated with the concept of casual gaming. You do not need to engage with a quick round of Puzzle Bobble or Tetris in the same manner as you would with a big, beefy AAA game of today like Assassin’s Creed Shadows, where you would need some level of gaming experience to enjoy from the get-go.
In the end, this all feeds into more vibrant gaming communities. You can find Reddit threads dedicated to obscure games of the 1970s, Discord communities dealing with Age of Empires, and just about everything else you can imagine. And with the rise of emulators, retro consoles, and numerous platforms for flash games, gamers can experience just about anything they want at their fingertips, often for free. There are about 50 years’ worth of titles to explore, so it’s never going to get boring.
