Retro Games Are Back In Modern Avatars

Ajali Puri, a 33-year-old entrepreneur from Delhi NCR who runs a content marketing agency, still remembers the day she and her cousin finally defeated Bowser, the final boss of Super Mario World, a game released for the Super NES console in the early '90s.

- Shrey Pacheco

"We started screaming so loudly that my mother came running because she thought we were injured," she laughs. "We were just excited at the fact that we had accomplished this feat."

Like Puri, almost everyone who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s has fond memories of playing these games, whether it was saving the princess in Super Mario, finishing all stages of Contra, or defeating the final opponent in Tekken. They were straightforward but addictive, and didn't require tutorials or cinematic intros. You just picked them up and started playing.

"There was something intuitive about Mario," says Puri. "Nobody had to tell me to hit the bricks to break them, or press a button to go down the pipe."

While gaming has undergone drastic changes since then, retro games have never truly disappeared, and one doesn't need an old console to enjoy them. They are now available in different formats.

Re-releases are compilations of classic titles made available on modern platforms with minimal or no changes, such as Capcom's Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection (2018) and Konami's Contra Anniversary Collection (2019). Remasters typically update the visuals and audio while preserving the original gameplay mechanics. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition (2021) and Ubisoft's Beyond Good & Evil—20th Anniversary Edition (2024) are great examples of remasters.