As I highlighted in my previous blog post, Retro gaming is an expansive market with incredible depth and engagement. However, there remains a stark disconnect between investor perceptions of the Retro gaming industry, and what I believe to be the reality of its immense potential. I don’t believe this is the fault of any one person or idea in particular, but rather a lack of communication and understanding between realms.
When outsiders to the Retro gaming industry hear about Retro gaming, oftentimes, the first things that come to mind are “niche”, “outdated” and “unproven”. This is understandable given the name Retro, in some ways implies that the tech is outdated, and the customers only sticking around out of nostalgia. As such, it would be reasonable to assume as an outsider, that the Retro gaming industry must be unlikely to grow, since it’s presumably composed of a fixed group of people who grew up around a certain technology, who are unwilling to get with the times and adopt the latest technology, making them unlikely to lead to any massive consumer revolution.
While it would be easy for an outsider to assume this, nothing could be further from the truth.
At the core of Retro gaming communities, the predominant sentiment isn’t about sticking to outdated tech just for the sake of nostalgia, but embracing and celebrating the unique solutions that older generations of technology brought, which have been lost with more recent technology generations.
An example I like to give about the nature of technological innovation, and the embracing of older technology, is to consider the humble spoon.
When it comes to solving problems, often times increased technological capabilities allow for more advanced solutions. However, for any given problem, there is a point of significantly diminishing returns, where a design cannot fundamentally get more simple and effective, and further technological advancements can generally only be used to enhance and tweak the simplest, and most effective design.
Let’s think about the problem of eating soup from first principles. You have some sort of soup in some sort of vessel. You want a method to transport that liquid into your mouth.
The most simple possible method of doing this is to just put your face directly into the bowl of soup and slurp. However, despite being the simplest solution, it’s not the best, because now your face is covered in soup, and everyone will look at you weird.
The second most simple is to use your hands. This avoids the problem of your face getting covered in soup, but still creates the problem of your hand getting covered in soup.
Again, from a first principles perspective, we would need some sort of bowl which can hold the soup that is not our hands, to transport it to our mouth.
However, there’s still a major problem if you try to just use a small bowl to dip into the soup and transport it to your mouth, if it’s just a simple bowl, you will not be able to submerge the whole bowl into the soup without the soup touching your fingers.
Ideally we would also have some sort of handle or stick attached to the small bowl, to allow submersion of the bowl, but without having your hand directly touching the bowl, instead just holding onto the attached stick. And so ultimately, we just invented the spoon.
And there we have it, we’ve solved the problem of transporting soup to your mouth without introducing any more large problems.
Now, even though the problem has been solved, there’s still room for improvement. We can learn to make spoons of different sizes and shapes, different materials, cheaper manufacturing methods, and wider availability and convenience. All of these innovations in spoon technology have come about. However, the fundamental design of the spoon, the idea of a small bowl attached to a stick to move food to your mouth, is unchanged.
However, this doesn’t mean we couldn’t make more advanced technology to solve this already solved problem. What if we instead, had a subscription-based IoT smart drone, capable of lowering a bucket into your soup, then using computer vision to identify your mouth and fly that bucket of soup directly to your mouth, eliminating the need to use your hands at all.
While that is certainly an innovative idea, something that is fundamentally different than a spoon, and solves the problem in a new way, I would hazard to guess even if it existed that you would probably still use a spoon on occasion.
The spoon, while not having all of the advanced features of the personal food bucket drone, has a mixture of simplicity and utility that will inevitably make it the best combination of cheap, simple and usable to always have a place in human society, regardless of technological advancements. Even if many people love the food bucket drone and adopt it as their new go-to eating utensil, there will always be applications and groups of people who just want a regular old spoon.
The conclusion of this thought experiment, is that simple solutions to problems, as long as those simple solutions don’t cause many additional problems, are always going to have a place, even when new technologies come out.
In our technological society, we’ve seen many times in our lifetimes, technologies come and go, and fade into irrelevance. I would liken these technologies to the idea of a using a small bowl with no handle as a sort of primitive proto-spoon. It’s on its way to solving the fundamental problem, yet still causes enough additional problems to need to be replaced with something better.
However, I think what we don’t notice as often, but are arguably just as big parts of our lives as new exciting technology, is what I call “spoonized” technology.
Most modern kitchen appliances are what I would consider “spoonized” technology. This is because there is always definitely innovation in technologies like dishwashers, sinks, and microwaves, their fundamental design doesn’t change. The fundamental design of a spoon can be described as “a small bowl attached to a stick”, the dishwasher can be described as “a closed box with a dish rack and hot, soapy water jets”. In theory, with modern technology, the design of a dishwasher could fundamentally be rethought. However, the modern dishwasher already solves the problem it aims to solve, and does not introduce a lot of additional problems, so any fundamentally new dishwasher design which fundamentally alters the core technology will only appeal to certain people and use cases, and the classic decades old dishwasher design will likely continue to be refined but remain fundamentally unchanged.
Finally, getting back to Retro gaming, the fundamental problem being solved with gaming is about entertainment and creating joy, fun, and engaging activities through using inputs to manipulate a screen.
Arguably, very early game consoles were too primitive to be particularly engaging. Things like the Magnavox Odyssey, while integral to the history of gaming, were a little too primitive to truly create a fun and engaging experience. They would be equivalent to the proto-spoon that’s just a bowl without a handle in the spoon analogy.
The subsequent generations, from the Atari 2600 to the NES are when retro gaming really begins to become more popular. I think this is when gaming starts to fundamentally have a new technology which actually is able to solve the problem of being fun and entertaining. They are the dawn of the spoonization of gaming.
That, in my opinion is the fundamental reason why Retro games from that era and on will always have a place. They are the simplest possible thing needed to create a fun and entertaining experience between inputs and a screen. That’s why Pico-8, despite having about as much graphical fidelity as an NES, is downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and used by many young game developers who have never played an Atari 2600. The simplicity makes it timeless and fundamentally much easier to get started and work with than any modern game engine with millions of lines of code running on operating systems with tens of millions of lines of code.
Even though we’re probably not going to fundamentally overhaul how spoons work, there’s still always innovations to be made, manufacturing them faster, making them better, cheaper, more convenient, or more ergonomic, even if at the end of the day it’s just a bowl attached to a stick. Similarly, there’s much room for innovation in the Retro gaming industry, even if we’re only working with thousands, rather than millions of lines of code, and 128×128 pixels rather than 4k displays. There’s still so much left to improve and explore, even when more advanced technology exists, because Retro gamers understand the beauty and utility in not overcomplicating things.
By all means, I think it’s great to develop the smart drone soup delivery service, but I’m going to stick with spoons.
-Jonah Eskin
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