Retro Blog 🕰️

  Released in North America on 09 October 1988, Super Mario Bros. 2 took everything we thought we knew about Mario and threw it out the window. No more stomping enemies. Now we were pulling vegetables out of the ground, throwing bad guys around, and choosing between Mario, Luigi, Toad and Princess Peach, each with their own abilities.   And I loved it.   Super Mario Bros. 2 will always have a… Read more

The harvester is miles from home. Your money is almost gone. Somewhere beyond the black edge of the map, an army is getting ready to ruin your evening. Then a voice announces “Unit ready,” the music kicks in, and you decide you can probably afford one more tank. Command & Conquer understood that particular kind of optimism. It let you build a little military empire, made you feel clever for keeping it… Read more

Five years ago today, Samus Aran returned to remind us why Metroid is still one of Nintendo's greatest franchises. Released on 08 October 2021, Metroid Dread brought the series back to its side-scrolling roots, combining classic exploration with modern visuals, slick combat, and the relentless pursuit of the E.M.M.I. robots. I was lucky enough to get the special edition with the game, a limited steelbook, artbook, and game cards from a friend… Read more

Sometimes the best yard sale finds are the ones you didn’t know you were looking for. I recently picked up this complete 1963 copy of The Money Game of Junior Executive by Whitman. It’s basically a kid-friendly business simulator: choose a company selling candy, ice cream, toys, or soda pop, then spend the year buying, selling, filling orders, dealing with nd trying to finish with the most money. It’s over 60 years… Read more

The worst sound in Top Gear was not a crash. A crash could be recovered from. The real disaster was watching your car slow down while the other half of the screen kept moving. You had squeezed one more lap out of the fuel tank, missed the pit lane, and handed your friend a story they were going to tell for the rest of the afternoon. The music, rather unfairly, still sounded… Read more

Legendary Wings NES to PC Beta 1 is available now. This first public Windows release brings refreshed artwork to the opening level while keeping the original game presentation a keypress away. The project comes from dmb062082, modded by retro-replay.com. Visit the Legendary Wings NES to PC GitHub repository for the project, instructions and feedback. You can also download the Windows Beta 1 release here. You will need to supply your own compatible,… Read more

September 28–October 5, 2026. This week brought a substantial shadPS4 release, a fresh DOSBox-X build, and a coordinated set of Gear emulator updates. There are 162 notices, many of them successive development snapshots of the same project. The dated log below groups every notice; the analysis here covers changes confirmed by project releases or source repositories. The releases that matter shadPS4 0.19.0 moves PS4 compatibility forward shadPS4 0.19.0 is a tagged release,… Read more

I was visiting RetroGameCon in Syracuse on October 2 when I stopped by the Arcade Legends panel with Paul Niemeyer and Tim Kitzrow. An artist associated with Mortal Kombat’s original arcade artwork and the voice of NBA Jam, sitting down to talk about the old days? That sounded like a good place to spend part of the afternoon. I wanted to share this cool story with you guys, so the full panel… Read more

Before walkthroughs were a click away, Nintendo had people you could call. Meet the game counselors, explore their secret maps, and follow the hotline from its NES beginnings to its last recorded tips—with a small memory of my dad, Dark Link and a call around 1989–1990. Read more

Some consoles leave behind a favorite game, a battered controller and an argument about which version was better. The Phantom and Indrema left behind something stranger: people who still remember waiting for them. You could picture the empty spot beneath the television. Perhaps you had already decided which games would go there. Indrema offered a silver machine that would welcome small developers into the console business. The Phantom offered a white box… Read more

If you grew up reading game magazines, you probably had a shopping list that never quite existed. A screenshot caught your eye. You read the preview twice. You worked out whether you could afford it, or whether this was going to require a birthday. Then the game vanished. For a while, you kept looking. Maybe next month’s issue would explain the delay. Maybe the shop would know. Eventually, another game took its… Read more

Opinion and satire. Contains story spoilers. You sit down for dragons, racing through a futuristic arena, or a little cartoon paint warfare. Then the character menu asks about identity, the publisher announces another representation milestone, and the dialogue stops to explain a social lesson. For players tired of corporate inclusion campaigns, the pattern is becoming familiar. This countdown looks at specific choices: pronoun settings, romance systems, identity-related storylines, public collaborations, and publisher… Read more

You beat the boss. The credits roll. You start thinking about the next game. For a kid with a Genesis, a Super Nintendo, or an Amiga, that was a perfectly reasonable habit. Another cartridge would turn up in a magazine. Another impossibly large enemy would fill a screenshot. Your favorite character would get new moves, a new sidekick, perhaps a skateboard. Everybody seemed to be getting a skateboard. Then, somewhere between the… Read more

Christmas dinner may need to make room for a few grudge matches this year. Super Mario Kart Deluxe is targeting December 25, 2026, bringing a huge fan-made expansion to the SNES racer that started it all. For anyone who spent afternoons trading shells, missing shortcuts, and demanding one more race, this is a very tempting reason to pick up the controller again. The date appears in the new teaser shared by ScouBsmk… Read more

Before the first bullet, before the jungle, before anybody could blame the other player for scrolling the screen too far, there was a little ceremony. Someone picked up the Nintendo controller and pressed Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. Then Start. If they had done it properly, Contra became a considerably more generous host. The guns still killed you. The pits still killed you. The alien infestation was… Read more

A green lizard walks into a graveyard and immediately starts reviewing the television. He can climb the walls, hang from the ceiling, and knock a monster sideways with his tail. What he cannot do is keep his mouth shut. Somewhere between the jump button and the next bad joke, Gex makes his pitch: you are going to spend a lot of time with this mascot, so he might as well have something… Read more

A gold seal on the box. A lock inside the console. Five games a year, and a contract that could keep those games away from the competition. Nintendo’s happiest era had a remarkably ugly business side. In 1989, two very different versions of Tetris became part of Nintendo Entertainment System history. One came from Nintendo. The other came from Tengen, in a black cartridge that looked slightly wrong beside the familiar gray… Read more

Lucas Barton opens the case as though he is about to show everybody a weapon. Inside is a gray glove, a black wrist console, and the sort of plastic armor a kid in 1989 would happily have worn to school. He puts it on, plays Rad Racer, and delivers the line that outlived almost everything else in The Wizard: “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.” He means bad in the… Read more

Selected using PriceCharting popularity, observed aftermarket activity, and complete-in-box values as collector reference points. From familiar favorites to hard-to-find releases, these 200 games show why collecting physical retro games remains so compelling. This is Retro Replay’s collector-focused selection, organized by system. It is not a claim that every game outranks every other one. How we chose the 200 We started with 200 games in the Retro Replay database and used PriceCharting’s sold-listing… Read more

The Sega CD was never one thing. It could be a rock-scored shooter, a hand-drawn cartoon, a huge role-playing journey, or an interactive movie that asked you to watch every camera at once. That restless variety is what makes its library so much fun to revisit. Would you rather watch than read? Settle in with our video countdown below, then return to the write-ups and images whenever you want a closer look.… Read more

Before Aero the Acro-Bat saves a single circus performer, the game asks him to jump through a hoop. Then another. Then to find the exit that those hoops have opened, while clowns, spikes, and a timer make his first day at work feel like a hostile audition. He can fly a little, drill through enemies, and throw stars. He cannot simply run to the right and call it a level. That is… Read more

The first thing Dragon’s Lair asked you to do was watch. That was strange for an arcade game in 1983. Most machines made their case with a few seconds of sprites racing across a screen. This one had a knight charging through a castle drawn by professional animators. People gathered behind the player to see what came next. Then the player died. Dirk the Daring’s death could be quick, elaborate, and expensive.… Read more

In 1991, Philips put a disc player beneath the television and asked families to buy a piece of the future. It played music. It could show pictures, video, and encyclopedias. It even played games. The machine looked as if it belonged in a hi-fi cabinet, and its pointing controller seemed perfectly happy with a menu. Then someone asked it to be a Nintendo rival. The first American CD-i player cost $899, according… Read more

A $4.5 million judgment can sound like a precise measure of damage. In Nintendo’s case against James C. Williams, known online as Archbox, it was something different: the maximum statutory award the court granted for each of 30 selected games after Williams did not defend the lawsuit. Retro Replay covered Nintendo’s original lawsuit against Williams before the court entered this default judgment. On September 23, 2026, U.S. District Judge Lauren King of… Read more