Remember playing the original Super Mario Bros. on the Super Nintendo? You don’t? Ah! Well. Nevertheless.
The hosts of the television program BBC Breakfast interviewed Nick Poole, the head of UKIE (the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment), earlier today about a recent trend of people retreating into retro gaming to cut down on the hobby’s modern excesses. The segment may have come about from producers reading repeated stories about the resurgence of retro gaming in The Guardian. Who doesn’t love a nice trip down memory lane back to the ‘80s and ‘90s, when gaming was still a novel escape from the drudgery of life and not associated with the battle cries of the worst people you’ve ever encountered online?
But the segment went off the rails immediately when the camera zoomed in on the props: a ZX81, a Nintendo Wii, and a SNES with an NES cartridge stuffed into it. There’s no way to harp on this without reinforcing the worst Simpsons comic book guy stereotypes, but, I mean, come on folks. This is like stuffing a VHS tape into a DVD player. I hope anyone planning to get back into retro gaming took it as a helpful warning of what not to do.
“As Nick shared on the programme, it’s no surprise that older titles and classic consoles are back in demand,” UKIE posted on LinkedIn. “Retro gaming taps into a powerful sense of nostalgia and community, offering players a way to reconnect with their past and share the games they loved with a new generation.”
The organization later distanced itself from the retro gaming debacle. “For transparency, the studio team set up the in-studio display independently and handled the placement of the consoles—unfortunately, we couldn’t adjust it whilst on air,” a spokesperson told VGC.
In fairness, the SNES’s lack of backwards compatibility confounded news broadcasters back when it came out as well. The fact that it couldn’t “mix-and-match” games with the NES was seen as part of Nintendo’s uphill battle to sell parents on a pricey next-gen upgrade. That’s a problem the Switch 2 doesn’t have.
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