A Guide to Retro Gaming 复古游戏指北

8 min read (1698 words)

When I talk about “retro games,” I usually mean both modern games made in a retro style and genuinely old games (e.g. from the 90s or earlier). In this post, it mostly refers to the latter. However, this post isn’t really about retro gaming history – it’s about a practical question: as a player, how do you actually get your hands on those good old games?

There are pragmatic reasons to seek them out: most are small in size, run on low-spec hardware, and cost little or nothing (since many are only playable via emulator). But the more compelling reason is the craft itself: rich worlds and clever design that remain astonishing to this day, and the occasional pleasant jolt of recognising, in some game you love right now, exactly where it came from.

The games industry changes at a relentless pace, and so do the ways games are made. As AI lowers the barriers to game development, I find myself worrying, as both a player and a gamedev enthusiast, that shovelware will only become more rampant. So now it feels like a good moment to look back at games that were built with genuine care – and to find in them something worth carrying forward.

1 Retro Gaming Resources

If you just want a quick taste, the simplest option is to play directly in your browser on one of these sites:

That said, most players who are slightly more serious will prefer playing locally, because you can save your progress at any time, play offline, and generally get better input response. Here are some places to download games:

2 GOG

For players who want to download and play locally, GOG.com is, without question, the best platform today for the preservation and purchase of good old games (they even run a dedicated GOG Preservation Program). It carries many titles that never made it to Steam, and its greatest strength is that all games sold there are DRM-free: you can play offline without having to log in every time, unlike Steam.

That said, the same game can vary in subtle ways between the two platforms: GOG versions tend to have less achievement systems, for instance, so it’s worth comparing prices, platform support, and review sections before buying. Tools like GOG Database and SteamDB are handy for this.

Compared to the Steam client, GOG GALAXY is more flexible in that it lets you browse and download your library across other platforms too. I actually find the open-source, free Heroic Games Launcher more capable and easier to use. GOG Galaxy, for what it’s worth, had a persistent bug on macOS where the app would refuse to quit properly. They only fixed in the relatively recent 2.0 update, which is rather hard to believe…

2.1 Emulators (that I’ve used)

For games that no longer have any official purchase channel and no pre-compiled port available, you’ll need to download ROMs and use emulators. Here are some useful links:

Emulator Platform Notes
RetroArch Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and more A comprehensive emulator
OpenEmu macOS Emulates a huge range of consoles
DOSBox-X Windows, Linux, macOS, and DOS DOS emulator
Boxer macOS DOS game emulator
ScummVM Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and more Limited library, but actively developed

2.1.1 A Note on macOS and Windows

I’ve long had a grievance with the idea that Macs are “not for gaming.” The display quality, the speakers, the performance, the battery life of macs – all of it should, at minimum, serve anyone whose tastes run to modern video games on it. But the unfortunate reality is that many games simply haven’t been ported to macOS. For retro games, though, macOS fares reasonably fine: quite a few of the emulators above support Mac, and there are dedicated resources like Mac Source Ports, plus tools like Porting Kit for converting certain GOG and Steam games into macOS-compatible formats. However, since macOS no longer supports 32-bit software a long time ago, there are still a number of (not necessarily old) games that cannot be played.

On Windows, most retro games can be played directly or easily found in versions that other players have already converted. For anything else, RetroArch remains an excellent catch-all.

3 Classic Macintosh Games

Do you have any history of mental illness in your family? I have an uncle bought Macbook for gaming.

Early macOS had no such reputation for being “bad for gaming.” In fact, we can still experience many of those cool old Mac games today through Macintosh emulators (or real old Macs, if you have one).

Getting Started (WIP) – Macintosh Repository is an excellent all-in-one introduction to the scene. My personal emulator of choice is Mini vMac, simply because I adore the 2bit minimalism of Macintosh System 7. Once you’re up and running, Macintosh Garden is a nice place for classic Mac games and software.

One of my current favourite games is Déjà Vu, which cleverly uses the Mac’s native Finder interface as part of the game itself (there’s something wonderfully meta about it!). Other standouts from the same era include Shufflepuck Café, SimCity, Glider, and Battle Chess, each remarkable in its own way.

Déjà Vu screenshot
Déjà Vu
Shufflepuck Café screenshot
Shufflepuck Café
SimCity screenshot
SimCity
Battle Chess screenshot
Battle Chess

4 Nintendo

Gameboy timeline

As one of the defining forces in the games industry, Nintendo was producing design strokes of near-genius very early on – Super Mario Bros., the Legend of Zelda series, and a series of inventive hardware.

Me and Zoe at Nintendo Museum

The best place to explore Nintendo’s history is the Nintendo Museum, and Nintendo’s own website also has a overview at Nintendo History | Hardware. I’m pretty sure there are lots of YouTubers who have made videos about this too.

4.1 Nintendo Switch

Since iOS loosened its restrictions on emulator apps, you can now download a lot of GBA emulators directly from the App Store. But probably the simplest and best way to experience GBA and Famicom games in their most authentic form is through Classic games – Nintendo Switch Online, if you don’t own any old consoles. With a Switch Online membership, you get access to a curated selection of games – mostly in Japanese and English, but even just playing them leaves you in quiet admiration of the design. There’s also an Expansion Pack for the more dedicated.

For me, there’s one particularly welcome feature: these games all support save states and rewind, so less experienced players can still experience as much of the game as possible.

4.2 3DS

Unfortunately, Nintendo Classics hasn’t yet included 3DS titles (probably because the 3DS doesn’t quite feel old enough to qualify). Your options are to use an emulator or to buy a second-hand 3DS. For emulator, Azahar is the currently active one, though I haven’t tried it personally; second-hand 3DS come in a range of models, though most are still priced somewhat higher than I’d hoped. After a long search on the second-hand market, I eventually found one – the screen is slightly yellowed, battery life is poor, certain games trigger crash bugs, and SD card read speeds are painfully slow, but it works (and worth the price).

Tomodachi Life screenshot from my 3DS

The 3DS game library is super impressive, and many titles make wonderful use of it’s unique hardware: dual screens (top and bottom), glasses-free 3D, a camera and microphone, a circle pad, a stylus. By today’s standards the performance and fidelity are decidedly vintage, but put it all together and the experience still feels inventive and fresh. You’ll find yourself marvelling repeatedly at the ingenuity of the people who designed both the games and the hardware. In my opinion, the 3DS is one platform where buying a physical unit rather than using an emulator really does feel like the right call.

4.2.1 Modding, Installing Games, and System Setup

OasisAkari’s blog has an detailed walkthrough (in Chinese): 3DS Modding – Getting Started

4.2.2 Download 3DS Games

4.3 Game & Watch

Somewhat less well-known, Game & Watch was a series of handheld devices Nintendo produced in the 1980s and 90s, as part digital clock, part simple game machine. One could reasonably call them a distant ancestor of the Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo™. In 2020, Nintendo released two limited-edition products: Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. and Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda, each containing a functional clock, the original Game & Watch minigames, and ports of several Famicom and Game Boy Mario and Zelda titles. Charming things.

Play online:

There are also many fan-made HTML Game & Watch games on itch.io and similar platforms, such as Cuphead: Game And Watch Edition and LCD, Please (the latter is made by Lucas Pope, one of my favourite indie game developers).

5 Conclusion

Looking back, writing this post turned out to be its own kind of rabbit hole. Somewhere in the middle of organising these resources, I ended up replaying a few rounds of Simcity on Mini vMac.

I also realised there’s a particular quality I love about the retro gaming community: players who carefully document everything about a game on wikis and forums – modding guides, fan translations, hardware compatibility lists – not for any obvious reason, but simply because they don’t want those things to disappear, and help others to enjoy them. That instinct feels as worth preserving as the games themselves.

So perhaps this is less a guide than an invitation. If some half-remembered game from childhood suddenly comes back to you on a random weekend – this is a place to start looking for it ;)