What makes something a retro game or not is entirely a subjective thing. A poll I ran on Mastodon on what periods of videogames people still consider to be retro, responses were almost a perfectly even split. For me, the retrogaming era is roughly from 1991 to 1999 between the release of the Super NES and the PlayStation 2. Other than a few hours playing SNES games at a friends' house, I only really started playing videogames in 1996, and games much older than that are so alien and archaic to me that I perceive them as "paleogames". Academic curiosities and historical artifacts, but nothing that calls to me as something fun to play. While PC games in particular evolved incredibly fast throughout the 90s, I feel that there was a major breaking point in 2000 when 3D game textures were no longer either pixelated or blurred smudges, polygon counts on models jump up exponentially, and you got the first appearance of facial animations. Half-Life and Thief from late 1998 are absolutely quintessential retrogames for me, while FreeSpace 2 and Quake III from late 1999 already feel like something different. When the first major released for the PlayStation 2 appeared in late 2000, the world of videogames was already completely unrecognizable to me, in hindsight.
This site is all about PC and PlayStation games from 1995 to 1999, and contemporary indie games that aim to recapture some of the style and feel of these older games.
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