Retro....or not? PS2, XboX, & GameCube are nearing in on 15 years old!

The following article was written by @TheKingofRetro

There is something that has been bothering me lately. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit and today I figured I’d take to the blog (and to Twitter) and try to come to some form of conclusion on this matter. What matter, you ask? Well, everyone knows that The Retro Ghost loves his retro-gaming and I sat down and thought about some of my favorite consoles and how old some of them are. When I filtered through my thoughts I eventually arrived at the generation of consoles consisting of the Nintendo GameCube, the XboX, and the Playstation 2 and that’s when I hit a brick wall. I asked myself, “Are these systems filed under modern-gaming or retro-gaming?”, and I couldn’t really come to a conclusion as to how I would place my stamp of approval. I stopped and thought about how old the consoles are and as of this writing the oldest of the 3 is the PS2 which saw release in late 2000, while the other two found their way into retail in late 2001. As of this writing that makes the oldest 15 years old and the other two 14 years old, which in most cases would most certainly stamp these consoles with the “retro” label. But yet they don’t feel retro and since they all saw release after the turn of the century I just assumed that anything 1999 or earlier would be given the title of being retro while everything after would be considered modern.

   The problem with that is eventually these systems will continue to age and become 20 years old, 25 years old, 30 years old, and so on and so forth and shouldn’t be considered modern by any means. I also stopped to think about it a little deeper and kids who were born in the late 90’s or the early 2000’s would view these consoles as I view the Atari 2600 and the NES. They will eventually look back at their childhood (if they haven’t already) and will see these systems and their games as their childhood and will eventually recognize these system as retro themselves. Maybe it’s me and the fact that every year since around 2001 has shot by like wildfire and now I find myself in my mid 30’s and it feels like yesterday that I was salivating over owning a PS1 and an N64 after seeing how advanced the games looked compared to my NES, SNES, and Genesis. Time is shooting by and in a blink of an eye I’ll be thinking about my XboX 360 and PS4 and how they’re still “new” when the XboX 360 will probably be 20+ years old and the PS4 around 10 at that time. Generations of hardware are shooting by like the Millennium Falcon in hyper-space and I feel like I can’t grasp it or slow it down. It’s a terrible feeling.

   So what do I do? Should I consider the GameCube, XboX, and PS2 “retro” or should I wait it out until they have a little more time to resonate with the crowd that grew up with them, or should I say “screw it” and consider anything that’s been around as long as they’ve been a retro machine? I’d love to hear what you all think so please feel free to comment below.

What do you think? Do you think that the PS2/XboX/GameCube should be labeled as "retro"? Any fond memories you'd like to share about these consoles? Questions? Comments? If so than feel free to post them in the comments section and I'll reply as soon as possible.

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