RGcade👾

Raster Graphics Retro-gaming Arcade Museum

A Unique Era in Gaming

The raster graphics era, approximately 1972 (arcade) to its peak in 1992 (consoles) to 2006 (handhelds), was the era of mostly hand-drawn art, before verisimilitude and photorealistic rendering became a holy grail for most mainstream games (Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong Country, Pit-Fighter). This was before free-moving viewpoint and perspective projection, before Quake, the first truly 3D, freeform first-person shooter, before the start of an essentially endless arms race of more powerful dedicated GPU hardware, a race that continues to today. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, just not what this project is about.)

The creators of these mostly-2D games produced some amazing character designs, cute animations, inspiring and memorable synthesized instrumental game music, beautifully-imagined worlds, and most importantly, fun and rewarding gameplay—not in spite of the limitations of the hardware, but perhaps because of those limitations. Raw spectacle was simply not always possible, and great gameplay and storytelling was a must.

Game Systems

See the overview histogram charts at the left, with years on the x-axis and number of great games on the y-axis.

• Arcade, a few Atari-only titles (console ports for Atari were usually worse or at least looked worse)
• NES, Sega Master System, SG-1000
• SNES, Sega Genesis
• Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, Game Boy, a few unique-to Sega Game Gear titles

The goal was to pick the best or earliest port ever for a given title, unless different systems had different-enough versions to include both. Another goal is to present the list chronologically, so the history of early gaming becomes more clear in context.

Scope

• Non-3D video games from 1972’s Pong through GameBoy Advance’s Zelda and Pokémon releases in the 2000’s. Over thirty years of constraint-based, mostly 2D game design.
• Arcades, Consoles and Handhelds, but no PC or Mac games (or other computer systems) because that is even more open-ended.
• Included games come from numerous lists of best-of video games (top 100, top 50) that document three decades of amazing, fun, and groundbreaking titles, before the modern era of 3D gaming. Lots of games from newer systems are excluded deliberately because there are already over 1,000 titles, as it is!
• The games must still be fun to play and must have aged well, at least in terms of playability. Poor graphics or low-fidelity are not necessarily a negative unless it impacts gameplay.

Anti-Scope

• No text adventure games or text-mode-only games (The Oregon Trail 1971; Zork, 1977). Those games are important and valuable and even excellent games, but they are outside the scope of RGcade.
• No mouse or keyboard, just opposable thumbs on a D-pad-based controller, or perhaps a joystick or knob.
• No LaserDisc-based games, which were bigger on spectacle and lower on gameplay.
• The author does not know Japanese and cannot play games that require an in-depth knowledge of the language; there must be an English-language port of the game, unless the gameplay makes sense by essentially ignoring the text. Release dates are for North American ports, when available, otherwise the earliest release date (usually Japan) is used.

Arbitrary Cutoff: 2D and not 3D

Many of the more modern, 3D games are excluded not because they are not important, wonderful, nor groundbreaking, and by no means does the author consider them “bad” games; many were/are great, but they are simply outside the scope of this project.

I consider these early 3D games to be early modern games instead of retro-games in their own right. This obviously-arbitrary cutoff criteria exists to make the scope of the project more manageable. (I especially want to avoid cataloguing the near infinite catalog of contemporary games in the 2010s and 2020s to today. These games are thoroughly covered by YouTube and Twitch streamers, gaming magazine sites, top charts on Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo stores, Steam, Google Play, Apple’s App Store, etc. Contemporary gaming is simply too preposterously vast. You already know where to find this information for your game systems, computers, or mobile devices.)

I consider this cutoff to have occurred around the time when almost all arcade games moved to 3D (Virtua Fighter, 1993) and had dedicated hardware for it (Ridge Racer, 1993, and Tekken, 1994, essentially a Sony PlayStation in an arcade cabinet). Some games had pre-rendered 3D content, with 2D sprites, such as the rail light-gun game Area 51, 1995. Around this time we saw the launch of Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and DOOM (1993) on the PC, and systems such as the Sega Saturn (NA 1995), Nintendo 64 (1996), and the Sony PlayStation (NA 1995), and later 3D handhelds like Nintendo DS (2004-2005) and PlayStation Portable (2004-2005). It seems both younger and older gamers more or less expected 3D gameplay by that point, especially for big-budget, mainstream games.

1972

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982

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1992

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1998