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Retro gaming is the practice of playing older video games — typically from the 1970s through the early 2000s — on original hardware, through emulation, or via official re-releases. It is defined less by a fixed year cutoff than by a combination of era, hardware generation, and design style. If you want to start, the practical path is: pick a platform generation, choose how you want to play (original hardware, emulation, or a modern re-release), then solve the two problems that trip up most beginners — display lag and region locking.

What "Retro" Actually Means

There is no single agreed cutoff, and the term shifts as time passes. A useful way to think about it is in three layers:

• Era — games from roughly the late 1970s to the early 2000s, before HD displays and online distribution became standard.
• Hardware generation — cartridge and early disc consoles: NES, SNES, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Boy, PlayStation, and similar machines.
• Design style — pixel art, limited sprites and color palettes, chiptune audio, and often high difficulty with limited or no save systems.

A game can feel "retro" in style even if it is new. GGGames.se, an enthusiast site covering both modern and retro games, frames its coverage around exactly this split — "Modern and Retro" — and its review of QUOD INIT EXIT IIo covers a game that is new but built in a deliberately old-school style. That is a good illustration of why style matters as much as release date.

The Main Retro Platforms

Each generation has its own quirks — controller design, region coding, and video output all differ — so it helps to pick one platform to start rather than trying to cover everything at once.

Three Ways to Play, and How to Choose

Original hardware

You buy the actual console and cartridges or discs. This gives the most authentic experience, including original controllers and timing. The trade-offs are cost, aging hardware (worn cartridge slots, failing disc drives), and the need for a compatible display.

Emulation

Software runs the game on a modern computer or device. This is the most flexible and often the cheapest route, and it makes save states and region-free play easy. The catch is that the legal status of ROMs varies by country, and reliable sources matter — avoid sketchy download sites.

Official re-releases and compilations

Publishers and platforms reissue classic games on modern systems, sometimes with save states, rewind, and display options. This is the lowest-friction option if you want to play legally and without setup. Availability changes over time, so check the current store listing for the specific title you want.

A simple decision rule: if you want authenticity and don't mind maintenance, go original hardware. If you want convenience and flexibility, go emulation or official re-releases.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

• Display lag — modern TVs can add input delay that makes precise retro games feel wrong. A low-latency mode or a dedicated upscaler helps.
• Region locks — many older consoles only play games from their own region. Check before buying imports.
• Unreliable ROM sources — unofficial download sites carry legal and security risks. Prefer official re-releases where they exist.
• Assuming "old" means "cheap" — some retro hardware and cartridges are collectible and priced accordingly.

A Practical Starting Path

1. Pick one platform generation that appeals to you.
2. Decide how you want to play: original hardware, emulation, or an official re-release.
3. If using original hardware, sort out your display and check region compatibility.
4. Start with a well-regarded title for that platform rather than a rare or expensive one.
5. Expect higher difficulty and fewer conveniences than modern games — that is part of the design, not a flaw.

If you are unsure where to begin, following a site that covers both modern and retro games — like GGGames.se — can help you find reviews and context for older titles alongside current releases.

"Indie" means independent: work made by individuals or small teams who control their own creative and business decisions, rather than by studios owned or funded by major publishers. In games, that usually means a small team (often 1–10 people) self-publishing or working with a small label; in software, it means a developer or tiny company shipping a tool without a large corporate parent. The label describes who holds control, not budget, genre, or quality — a polished indie game can outsell a AAA title, and a rough one can still be fully independent.

The core meaning: independence of control

The defining question is not "how many people made this?" but "who decides what gets made and shipped?"

• Independent: the creators set scope, deadlines, pricing, and creative direction. Funding may come from savings, crowdfunding, early access sales, or small grants — but no publisher owns the project.
• Not independent: a studio owned by or contractually bound to a major publisher, where an external party controls budget, milestones, or release timing.

A solo developer using a publisher only for marketing and console porting can still be indie, because the publisher isn't directing the design. A 200-person studio bankrolled and owned by a large company is not, even if its game looks quirky.

Indie games vs. AAA and mainstream software

The same split exists in software. An indie developer might ship a focused tool — a text editor, a note-taking app, a small utility — while a large vendor ships a suite with enterprise contracts. Indie software tends to be narrower in scope and closer to one person's workflow.

Common traits of indie work

• Small teams wearing many hats. The same person may code, design, and handle support.
• Self-publishing as the default. Storefronts like itch.io and Steam let creators release without a publisher.
• Creative risk. Niche genres, experimental mechanics, and personal themes are more viable when you don't need to satisfy a large marketing department.
• Direct audience contact. Devlogs, Discord servers, and social posts replace big ad budgets.
• Tighter scope. Indie projects usually cut features to finish, rather than expanding to fill a budget.

Recognizable examples

In games, titles like Braid, Minecraft (in its early independent phase), Celeste, and Hollow Knight are commonly cited as indie successes — small teams, self-directed, and commercially significant. In software, tools such as Neovim and Vim sit in the independent/open-source tradition: maintained by small groups of contributors rather than a single large vendor, and shaped by their users' needs.

These examples matter because they show the range: indie can mean a two-person puzzle game or a community-maintained code editor. What they share is control by the makers.

How to get started

If you want to make indie work:

1. Pick a scope you can finish in weeks, not years — a single mechanic or a single utility.
2. Choose a toolchain you already know. For games, that might be a general engine; for software, a language and editor you're comfortable in.
3. Ship something small publicly (itch.io for games, a repository or package registry for software) to learn the release process.
4. Talk about the work as you build it — devlogs and posts build an audience before launch.

If you want to find indie work:

• Browse itch.io for games and small tools, and Steam's indie sections for released titles.
• Follow developer communities and devlogs to see projects before release.
• Check open-source repositories for maintainers who welcome contributions.

A quick way to tell if something is indie

Ask two questions: Who controls the creative decisions? and Who owns the result? If the answer is "the people who made it," it's indie — regardless of team size, budget, or how polished it looks.

A video game is interactive software: the experience only happens when a player provides input, and that input changes what occurs on screen. That single condition separates games from film, television, books, and music, all of which deliver a finished experience whether or not the audience does anything. If you want to understand the category, the useful move is to look at four things: the input loop, the genres, the platforms, and the people who build them.

The defining trait: player input drives the experience

In passive media, the work is complete before you arrive. A film plays the same whether you watch closely or leave the room. A game is not complete until it is played — the software holds rules and state, and your actions move that state forward.

That produces a feedback loop:

1. Rules define what you may do (move, shoot, build, choose).
2. Goals define what counts as success.
3. Challenge creates resistance between you and the goal.
4. Feedback tells you immediately whether your last action worked.

Remove the challenge and you have a toy — something to fiddle with, with no win condition. Remove the goals and you have a simulation, which models a system rather than asking you to beat it. Games sit where rules, goals, challenge, and feedback all apply at once.

The term covers many different things

"Video Games" is not one product category. It is an umbrella over genres and platforms that share almost nothing except interactivity.

Common genres

Common platforms

• Console — dedicated hardware connected to a TV.
• PC — desktop and laptop systems, often with keyboard and mouse.
• Mobile — phones and tablets, usually touch controls.
• Browser — games that run inside a web page with no install.

The same genre can appear on any platform, but the controls shape the design. A strategy game built for mouse input plays differently from one built for a touchscreen.

Making a game takes several distinct roles

A finished game is usually the output of a team, and the roles map closely to other software and media work:

• Design — defines rules, goals, balance, and pacing.
• Art — creates characters, environments, and interface.
• Programming — implements the systems that make the loop run.
• Audio — music, sound effects, and voice.
• Testing / QA — finds the cases where the loop breaks.

Small teams combine these roles; large productions separate them. This is also why game development overlaps with web development and design as a technical discipline — both are software built for an audience, and both live or die on how the interaction feels.

How to actually try games yourself

If the category is still abstract, the fastest way to make it concrete is to pick one path and start:

1. Choose a platform you already own — a phone, a laptop, or a console.
2. Choose one genre from the table above that matches something you already like (puzzles if you like logic, strategy if you like planning).
3. Pick one starting title that is free or low-cost on that platform, so the commitment is small.
4. Play for one session and watch the loop: what did you do, what happened, and did the feedback tell you whether it worked?

If step four is unclear, the game is probably not giving you enough feedback — which is itself a useful thing to notice, because it is the same failure mode that makes a website or app feel broken.

Video games are best understood not as a single medium but as a family of interactive systems. The label tells you one thing reliably: your input matters. Everything else — genre, platform, budget, team size — is a variable.

MESON is a free, online database of chess problems and endgame studies hosted on the BDS Website (bstephen.me.uk), run by Brian Stephenson. According to the site, it has been free and online since 2006 and currently contains more than 256,000 items. It is the right resource if you want to look up composed problems, search for a specific composer's work, or study endgame studies — rather than browse casual tactics puzzles.

What MESON actually contains

MESON is a chess problem database, not a game database. That distinction matters:

• Chess problems are composed positions with a stipulated task (for example, "mate in 2" or "mate in 3"), usually with a unique solution the composer designed.
• Endgame studies are composed endgame positions where the task is normally to win or draw, again with a constructed, often surprising solution.

The site describes MESON as containing "more than 256,000 items," covering this kind of composed material. It does not claim to be a record of played games, so don't expect opening statistics or tournament results here.

How to access it

Access is through the BDS Website's navigation menu:

1. Go to the BDS Website (bstephen.me.uk).
2. Select the MESON menu item.
3. You land in the database itself, where you can search and browse.

The site states MESON has been free and online since 2006. No pricing, account, or login requirement is mentioned in the available site information, so treat access as open browsing unless the site itself tells you otherwise when you arrive.

How to search for problems and studies

The site's own description does not spell out the search fields, so the practical approach is to work from what a problem database of this kind is built to answer. Typical ways to use it:

• By composer — if you already know whose problems you want (for example, work by a specific problemist), a composer search is the fastest route.
• By problem type or stipulation — mate-in-2, mate-in-3, helpmate, selfmate, study, and similar categories let you narrow to the genre you care about.
• By position — entering the pieces or a diagram position lets you find whether a given setting already exists, which is useful if you are checking a composition or studying a theme.

Because the exact field names and menu labels are not documented in the source material, verify them on the MESON search page itself rather than assuming a fixed layout. The database is implemented with MySQL and Perl (with CGI::Simple, HTML::Template and XML::LibXML) and a jQuery/Bootstrap/DataTables front end, which is consistent with a searchable, table-driven interface.

What else is on the BDS Website

MESON is one part of a larger site, and the surrounding sections are useful if you want context or related material:

If your interest is specifically endgame studies, the Endgame Studies menu and MESON together cover both the articles and the underlying positions.

Practical tips

• Start narrow. With 256,000+ items, searching by composer or stipulation first will get you to relevant material faster than browsing.
• Use the Ladder problems for practice. The BDS Ladder is closed as a competition, but the site keeps its problems available if you want solving practice.
• Check the composer's own page for context. Stephenson has composed and published problems since 1977, and his Chess Problems section is a small, curated complement to the much larger MESON collection.
• Contact route. The site points to the BCPS Website contact page, where Stephenson is listed as magazine curator, if you need to reach him.

MESON is best understood as a specialist reference for composed chess problems and studies: free, long-running, and large enough that targeted searching beats casual browsing.

PC gaming means playing video games on a general-purpose computer rather than a dedicated console or handheld. The same machine can run games, browse the web, and do work, and you can upgrade parts over time. It's the right starting point if you want flexibility, access to a huge back catalog, and control over performance and settings. It's a worse fit if you want a single box that just works with no setup or troubleshooting.

How PC Gaming Differs From Console and Handheld Gaming

The core difference is that a console or handheld is a closed, fixed system built for games, while a PC is an open, variable one.

The trade-off is consistent: PC gives you choice and range, consoles and handhelds give you convenience. If you value tinkering and options, PC wins. If you value sitting down and playing within minutes, a console is simpler.

What You Actually Need to Start

You don't need a top-tier machine to begin. What matters is matching the hardware to the games you want to play.

The basics

• A computer — desktop or laptop. A desktop is easier and cheaper to upgrade; a laptop trades that for portability.
• A display — a monitor, or the laptop's own screen.
• Input — a keyboard and mouse for most genres, and often a controller for others. Many PC games support both, so you can pick per game.
• Audio — speakers or headphones.
• Storage — modern games are large, so plan for a drive with enough free space for the titles you install.

What determines whether a game will run

Three things decide this more than anything else:

1. GPU (graphics card) — the biggest factor for 3D games and visual quality.
2. CPU — matters for simulation, strategy, and games with lots of active systems.
3. RAM — affects multitasking and heavier titles.

Before buying any game, check its listed system requirements against your machine. Requirements are usually split into a minimum and a recommended tier; the minimum tells you it will run, the recommended tells you it will run well.

A practical approach for newcomers

• Decide which two or three games you most want to play.
• Look up their requirements.
• Choose hardware that meets or slightly exceeds the recommended tier for those games.
• Leave headroom — a little extra performance now saves an upgrade later.

Where to Buy PC Games

Unlike consoles, PC games come from several competing storefronts and launchers. You'll typically install a launcher, create an account, buy or download games through it, and launch them from there.

Common categories you'll encounter:

• Large multi-publisher storefronts — the widest selection, frequent sales.
• Publisher-specific launchers — required for some of that publisher's games.
• Independent and niche storefronts — smaller catalogs, sometimes DRM-free. GGGames.se, for example, has covered indie releases hosted on itch.io, showing that smaller platforms are a real part of the PC landscape.

Practical tips:

• The same game can be priced differently across storefronts, so it's worth comparing before buying.
• Sales are frequent and often steep, so waiting is usually rewarded.
• Keep track of which launcher each game needs — it's common to end up with several installed.

Common Entry Barriers and How to Handle Them

These are the friction points that surprise new PC players most.

• Specs mismatch — a game looks fine in screenshots but won't run smoothly on your hardware. Always check requirements first.
• Compatibility issues — older games may need compatibility settings or community patches to run on modern systems.
• Troubleshooting — crashes, driver problems, and configuration errors happen. Most have documented fixes, but you'll sometimes need to search for them.
• Launcher sprawl — multiple accounts and launchers to manage.
• Cost creep — the entry price of a PC can exceed a console, though games are often cheaper and sales are deeper over time.

None of these are dealbreakers, but they're the honest reason PC gaming asks more of you than a console does.

How to Decide

Choose PC gaming if you want upgradeability, a deep and often cheaper game catalog, control over settings, and access to mods and indie releases. Choose a console or handheld if you want zero setup, predictable performance, and a single store to buy from. If you're unsure, start by listing the specific games you want to play — their requirements and availability will tell you which platform actually fits.