Hello and welcome to another edition of Vintage Media Millennial. This week I present an article from my archive, which I may have published at some point around 2012. It concerns a subject we don’t really cover on this website, retro gaming, but I wanted to share.
My aim for this website is always about media preservation. It is something I care passionately about, and I support it regularly. As we get further away from the eras which built the foundation for our media, pieces of it get lost in the mists of time. This is most prominent in the streaming world, where movies from 50 years ago are seemingly taken away without warning. They seem to do this because they say there is little audience for the material these days, but I disagree.
I feel these companies have just forgotten how to package these things, or perhaps they don’t want to for fear it will overshadow their new product.
The gaming industry doesn’t seem to have that problem with their classic games. They’re always trying to find ways to repackage them for new audiences, as you’ll see here!
With all this talk of new consoles for a new generation, there is often a thought spared for what has come before. In recent years, Retro gaming has proved popular and has kept many current and former generation consoles in great games. The game compilation has been around as long as gaming itself, but retro ones have only come to the surface in the last twenty years. In this article, we shall be highlighting three compilations which are worth having a look at if you can.
Super Mario All-Stars
The oldest collection on our list, it was a bundled title for the SNES back in the early 90s. The cartridge itself was a collection of all the main Mario games up to that point. These were not just straight ports though, as the titles included “enhanced” graphics and sound. The idea of several games on a cartridge was a novel idea, and is still one of the best-remembered games on the system, despite the source material coming from the NES. The game was re-released for the Wii a few years ago, in exactly the same guise as before. It seems as though these versions are still as popular now, as they were back in the 80s and 90s.
Ultimate Sega Mega-Drive Collection.
A huge collection of over 40 games on one disc, released for a multitude of consoles. Although some of these games had been featured previously in Sega collections, this was the most thorough. So many classics were included and even up-scaled to work on a modern TV. The 16-bit was a great era for games, and any newbie is advised to pick this up if they can.
Atari Anthology
Released for the PS2 and other consoles back in the early 2000s, this collection contained over 80 games from Atari’s past. It included many console-based titles, as well as arcade originals. It’s still the most comprehensive of all Atari collections and is a great starting place to learn about the origins of gaming. Some of the games may not be up to today’s standards, but they’re still great fun.
So there we have it, three great collections of gaming genius. Which was your favourite?
