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Iâve been revisiting Simon Reynolds âRetromania: Pop cultureâs addiction to its own pastâ. Itâs a book that I keep coming back to, even previously I had come across snippets of Reynolds work elsewhere, such as in Jonathan Rozenkrantz's article Analogue Video in the Age of Retrospectacle: Aesthetics, Technology, Subculture.
This entry was partly responsible for what resulted in my University blog post in which I first mentioned the term âRelative Nostalgiaâ due to highlighting how artefacts from media in the 1990s have gone on to be used by creators in the 21st century. The crucial difference being that it evokes nostalgia for specific media rather than a particular time. This is why I argue that relative nostalgia results in something that is not actually dependent on a specific time. An individual can be nostalgic for something based on when they first came across it, rather than when it was first created.
The crucial difference being that it evokes nostalgia for specific media rather than a particular time.
I previously gave the example of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a videogame that is often considered one of the greatest of all time. One that many might understandably be nostalgic for. Yet what decade are they nostalgic for? Presumably, the 90s which is when it was first released on the Nintendo 64 (1998 to be precise). But what if you didnât play it until the following decade? As was the case for myself, in which I played the Nintendo GameCube rerelease around 2003. Furthermore, there was also the remake for the Nintendo 3DS (2011), which quite likely could be the first time a new generation played it for the first time.
It is for these reasons that the example of Ocarina of Time highlights that relative nostalgia can be particularly helpful, contributing to how we might understand the scope and agility of nostalgia. Media does not exist in a vacuum, which perhaps also helps partly to explain how past videogame aesthetics live on today.
This brings me back to the point I started on, which was relating to Simon Reynolds. Towards the end of the book [pg 425], he reflects on a point made by author William Gibson regarding how the younger generations viewed the future. Reynolds provided his own anecdotal confirmation that his children are ânot the least bit interested in the capital âfâ Future, [they] barely even think about it.â Whilst this was in reference to escapism that current media and technology provide, and that current technology already feels pretty futuristic today if we think about it (the never-ending online video meetings demonstrate that), today we also have access to past (or rather, recent past) media like never before.
Just before highlighting how his children donât care about the future, Reynolds also mentions how the past has lost its âlost-nessâ because of the availability of access to the past. Preventing media (as a whole) from fading into obscurity, or in the case of videogames succumbing to obsolescence like the manufacturers and publishers previously wanted. There is a reason why for a long time videogames were poorly preserved, because publishers saw no interest in them, instead the priority was in providing the next new thing to be sold. Old things donât sell (in the context of technology) itâs all about the future. Today though, itâs a different story.
That story will come in the next entry, as I will continue pulling at this thread and looking at how past aesthetics, which had been left to the bin of videogame history now haunts the medium.
Header Image credit: Marble Pawns - âZeldawaveâ
This was originally posted to my Substack newsletter back in August 2021. It has been modified/updated slightly. You can find the original here: