this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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I hate to break it to you but... It's been over 20 years. It's more retro now than the SNES was when the 360 came out.
You're hurting me.
This episode is 30 years old.
No u
Shit, that saying is over 20 years old.
YOLO is now old enough to legally drive a car.
Please stop...
I first heard that one over 15 years ago.
You know that 'Cleopatra is temporally further away from the Great Pyramid' thing?
Grand Theft Auto V's release date is closer to Half Life 2's release date, than to the present.
Grand Theft Auto 4's release date is closer to the release date of the original Starfox or Street Fighter 2, than it is to the present.
And you don't even want me to do any date comparison for the following:
... Let's do the time warp Againnn!~
Spock - Civilization 4 (2005)
It's never too late to find a time warp to go back a few decades. The holos just don't hit the same
Wow the diminishing returns between that time really comes into focus.
I mean yeah. There isn't that much of a drastic shift in game design, except for the bleeding of RPG mechanics into more genres, more roguelite mechanics in indie games (choose one of 3) and having equipment systems in multiplayer FPSes. The biggest hit of 2024 was basically solitaire.
It's hardly that much more different.
Wheras, going from snes through ps1 to xbox 360, things went from 2d (and extremely crude 3d) to textured 3d with jank controls to high fidelity games with standardised controls. Not much changed after that. The huge "innovations" of VR, motion controls, are basically niche due to economic factors, so people aren't exactly having commonplace motion control VR experiences that put them in the game and comparing that to ducking behind cover in gears of war. They're comparing making cover in Fortnite with ducking behind cover in gears of war.
The line between 4th and 5th gen (SNES to N64) was enormous, 5th to 6th was pretty significant, 6th to 7th was noticeable, and it's been 20 years of small improvements since then.
There is a noticeable difference in graphics from 7th to 9th. But 8th felt like a half step. And it doesn't feel like there are noticeable improvements in any graphics, physics engines, lighting or anything else since 2020 when 9th gen started. This cant be said about any generations up to 8th.
Right. I bet more people play SNES than Xbox now as well.
SNES is far more accessible due to ease of emulation and small game sizes, so makes sense!
I guess if you count emulators and Brazil....
Me then: "Haha 'time marches on' what a cool phrase"
Me now: "Yo, time, can we maybe slow the pace or take the break?" Time: "No. Only march on." Me: visibly aging
I already have Father Time beating my ass before I even started playing Hades II lmao
Frankly, the reason this is shocking to people is that games, graphically and mechanically, made leaps and bounds from the SNES to the 360, and gave largely stagnanted from the 360 to now.
A LOT of people have completely failed to grasp how much technology has stagnated in the last 20 years.
Yeah, my smart phone with Internet access basically everywhere begs to differ.
Phones didn't changed fundamentally since 2015.
Saying technology hasn't progressed in 10 years is a very different statement than technology hasn't progressed in 20 years.
Phones, as we know them today, entered market much later than consoles or PCs.
My point is that eventually we hit the ceiling of progress. PCs and consoles hit their peak 20 years ago while phones did 10 years ago. Things haven't changed in a while for both of them and it doesn't feel so far that there will be major progress any time soon.
We've got driverless cars and CRISPR gene editing. Those weren't around 20 years ago. You don't think those are major advancements?
The Iphone entered the marked in 2007, before that is what entirely possible to connect a PDA to the internet via you dumbphone (using IRC from my palm pilot in the 90s surely felt cool...)
I don't understand, is that from now?
You're a generation off: It's more retro now than the NES (US release) was when the 360 came out. We crossed that threshold about a month ago.
Yeah, but the SNES became retro the moment the PS1 came out. That leap in tech was ridiculous.
*crumbles into pieces like a Dry Bones*
Perhaps I'm in a minority but when the PS3 and 360 first debuted I did not consider even the NES to be "retro". I would have applied that term to the likes of an Atari 2600 or colecovision.
The NES and Atari are separated by mere 6 years. The NES and Xbox 360 are separated by nearly 22 years. That's how much the perception of graphical advancement has decelerated. Sure we keep making leaps on graphical fidelity, but ever more in areas that are less and less noticeable every time.
I don't believe you.
You didn't hate that at all.