Friday 11 December 2020
For years, retro gaming primarily lurked in the game world’s seedy underbelly. Although some dedicated advocates of classic titles sought out original hardware, most players did not. After all, it was far easier to launch a videogame ROM or disk image on a PC, hacked handheld or smartphone than battle with increasingly rare, failure-prone consoles and computers of old.
There had been attempts at official retro products, but 2016’s NES Mini (or to use its full name, the Nintendo Classic Mini: Nintendo Entertainment System) was the first to fully capture the public’s imagination. With this tiny console, you no longer played games you had no rights to, on systems they weren’t designed for.