From keeping old games alive to making new games for old hardware.
RetroGamesX did not begin as a new retro-gaming brand in the 2020s. Its roots go back to the early days of the commercial internet, when playing older video games was still a niche interest and the phrase retrogaming had barely entered common use.
RetroGames, 1996
Robert Frasure began RetroGames in 1996 while working with colleagues at Turbo Zone Direct, a mail-order video-game business with connections to the TurboGrafx-16 era and people formerly associated with NEC, Hudson Soft, and TTI.
RetroGames sold older consoles, games, accessories, and repair services online at a time when most of the industry was focused on the newest generation of hardware. Atari, Sega, Nintendo, TurboGrafx-16 and other systems that retailers were moving away from were exactly what RetroGames wanted to keep in circulation.
The Unofficial Turbo Pages
Frasure was also behind The Unofficial Turbo Pages, one of the larger online destinations devoted to the TurboGrafx-16 and PC Engine during the mid-to-late 1990s. The site connected players, collectors, importers, and enthusiasts during an era when information about the platform could be surprisingly difficult to find.
That period is an important part of what RetroGamesX is preserving: not just the hardware and games themselves, but the early online community that formed around them.
Retrogaming becomes a culture
The word retrogaming existed before RetroGames; documented print use goes back at least to 1995. But through RetroGames, customer conversations, online communities, and sites devoted to older systems, the idea became increasingly familiar. What had once been treated mainly as obsolete hardware gradually became a culture of collecting, restoring, replaying, documenting, and eventually creating for old systems again.
The longer version of that story, including archived material and screenshots, is preserved in The Emergence of Retrogaming: A Historical Perspective.
RetroGamesX
Today the project has a different purpose. Instead of simply finding old games for old hardware, RetroGamesX is experimenting with what happens when we make new games for those machines.
The first major example is PIRATES, an FMV game being adapted into a true PlayStation release, with Sega CD and TurboGrafx-CD / PC Engine CD versions planned.
The technology has changed. The motivation has not: interesting hardware deserves to stay alive.