If you’ve spent any time among the old-school gaming community, you may have come across GameCenter CX. This Japanese TV series, which began in 2003, sees comedian Shinya Arino trying – and often failing – to beat all kinds of retro games. Now, after 23 years and over 400 episodes, the show is reckoning with what “retro” actually means, and its viewers are pretty confident that the Wii and PS3 both count now.
GameCenter CX has largely focused on games from the ’80s and ’90s, only rarely venturing into the ’00s. According to Time Extension, the show has largely defined retro games as those released at least 20 years ago – though even that isn’t a consistent rule, since its early episodes often featured Super Nintendo games that were barely a decade old at the time.
Regardless, the show’s producers decided to put the question of whether PS3 and Wii should be part of the retro gaming program to its viewers as part of a YouTube stream in August. The results? 71% were in favor. Then host Arino played a bunch of Wii and PS3 games, and the show reran the poll. This time, 17,000 viewers voted that yes, PS3 and Wii should be a part of the retro family.
For some players, the Wii and PS3 era – which, as an American, I’ll also throw the Xbox 360 into – are a hard cutoff for retro gaming. After all, this is the period when consoles started to get online play, DLC, microtransactions, and downloadable patches on the regular, all of which remain markers of modern gaming. But, well, maybe it’s time to accept that even these things are old now. At least these consoles had physical game discs, right?
There’s some irony in the fact that the Wii is now, itself, a retro console, since its Virtual Console helped define the retro gaming hobby in the ’00s. But remember: the Wii Virtual Console launched in 2006 with Super Mario 64 on the service, a game that was just 10 years old at the time. With that in mind, I think calling 20-year-old consoles “retro” makes perfect sense.
For more retro goodness, check out our lists of the best Wii games and best PS3 games.