Sega Mega Drive: why retro consoles are about more than nostalgia

Every year at about this time, newspapers love to identify the biggest-selling Christmas presents – those sudden surprise hits that have desperate shoppers combing internet stores for hours or simply fighting each other in Toys R Us.

This year, among other candidates, is a £40 wireless version of the Sega Mega Drive, the classic 1988 games console, famous for Sonic the Hedgehog. According to Argos, sales of the retro gadget, which includes 80 built-in games (although only 40 are Mega Drive classics, the rest are generic mini-games like solitaire) and a cartridge port so you can use any original game carts you have lying around, have risen by 400% this month. While we’re all supposed to be saving up for cutting-edge machines like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, some families will be gathered around a very different audio-visual experience come 25 December.

Of course, cheap retro consoles have been around for several years. You can buy a version of the legendary Atari 2600 that fits into a single joystick and lets you play games like Pong and Breakout until ... well, until you realise why people don’t play those games anymore. There is now even a retro console called the Spectrum Vega, based on the old ZX Spectrum computer.

In a lot of ways, this is all about simple, honest nostalgia. We’re now in an era where the first generation of gamers have grown up, had kids and maybe fallen a bit behind on where gaming technology is going. An old games console, like a favourite band or movie, is a pleasurable way to revisit and capture some of the fun and spirit of youth. For many people my age, Sonic is their New Kids on the Block; Star Fox is their Star Wars.

But now that retro hardware is simulating the 16bit age – the era of the Mega Drive, Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Neo Geo – something different is happening. It’s not just about reliving memories anymore, it’s about getting a specific and very valid gaming experience. Indeed, the renewed interest in these machines very much reflects the return of the vinyl record: sure, there’s a nostalgic component, but you’re also getting a very distinct and singular experience that holds its own in the digital age.

The Mega Drive, for example, was expertly designed to recreate the arcade games of the era. With its Motorola 68000 CPU and dedicated video display processor, it could handle big animating characters (or sprites) and detailed scrolling backgrounds with ease. At the time, beat’em-up titles such as Golden Axe and Altered Beast looked amazing – gamers had never seen anything like this in the home. Meanwhile, the technically superior SNES brought rich, deep colour palettes and music of great emotional resonance to its wonderful platformers and role-playing adventures. We were staggered.

And the thing is – they all still look beautiful.

In the modern era, the rise of the independent games scene (facilitated by digital distribution and cheap development kits) has seen a revival of 2D pixel art. Games such as Fez, Towerfall, Super Time Force and Shovel Knight have discovered that this remains a gorgeous, meaningful aesthetic, that chunky sprites and hand-drawn backgrounds are not nostalgic, they’re poetic. They’re just a different way of doing and seeing things. “Pixel art doesn’t always spell everything out,” said indie developer Adam Saltsman to tech site Verge when it wrote about the pixel game phenomenon. “It can be pretty minimalist and evocative that way. Often when you are looking at pixel art you are seeing more than is actually there.”

But we don’t need to play contemporary indie titles to understand the beauty of pixel art – we can see it in the original 16bit titles. Mega Drive games such as Gunstar Heroes, Comix Zone and Dynamite Headdy, and SNES greats such as Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger and Yoshi’s Island show an incredible artistry, an intricacy of detail, colour and animation that still have immense power. While the console games of the 1970s and early 80s do have a minimalist appeal, it is the 16bit titles that brought us into the age of naturalistic worlds and human characters. It was the Mega Drive and SNES that formed the foundations of modern console game visuals (even in terms of 3D polygonal content – see Virtua Racing on the Mega Drive and Star Fox on the SNES).

However, part of the appeal is that these machines are resolutely not modern. The 16bit consoles were the last generation that was just about games. After this came the PlayStation, the Saturn, the 3DO – multimedia devices intended as CD and movie players as well as gaming hardware. Then we entered the connected era, with its endless system updates and patches. When you put a cartridge into the SNES or Mega Drive, the game boots up in seconds and you’re in – no waiting, no updates. Bam. You’re playing a video game. And once you’re in, you get the whole experience, a complete product. There were rarely any bugs, there was no downloadable content. Everything the game had was on that chunk of plastic.

These were also machines designed to be seen and admired. Modern consoles want to disappear into your living room entertainment setup, providing just another box to spew content onto your LCD display. Designed by Mitsushige Shiraiwa, the Mega Drive drew inspiration from mid-80s high-end audio equipment and muscle cars, while Masayuki Uemura, who lead the SNES team, pictured a sort of family-friendly computer, welcoming and unintimidating to non-tech heads. Both systems have character and presence, and the act of inserting a cartridge – like putting on a vinyl record – is pleasingly tactile. Even user habits such as blowing on the cart to clean it (not recommended) are analogous to the rituals around playing and enjoying records.

Every gamer should try to experience the Mega Drive, SNES, Neo Geo or PC Engine – pure systems, built in an era dominated by arcade game design, by levels and bosses and fixed save points and wonderful 2D graphics. But I would always recommend the original systems. Modern versions don’t contain the same hardware; instead they emulate it, which leads to differences in speed and quality of the visuals and means you won’t be able to play any special carts that added their own hardware features. You can get a Mega Drive or SNES for about £30 on eBay; but you’ll also need a CRT television or monitor (Sony Trinitron is a good bet), because this is an analogue experience.

It is analogue, but it is not ancient or nostalgic or dead. It is just different. You can still sit with friends and play Street Fighter II, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or Micro Machines and have a fun, exciting and demanding experience; and the stories that drive adventures like Mother, Ys and Phantasy Star are just as compelling as those behind contemporary RPGs.

In fact, you will find in the 16bit machines a direct throughline of design sensibilities that leads straight into the most modern and forward-thinking of games. This is where the future as we know it began.