People occasionally ask me how long I’ve been into “retro” gaming and I never have a good answer for them because I’ve been playing a lot of these retro games since before they were retro. Here’s an interesting thing I ran across today that reminded me of that fact.

I was interviewed for an article titled “Classic Video Games Make Comeback” by a reported from the Associated Press. The interview took place over the phone and a day or two after that, they sent a photographer out to the house to take pictures of me with some of my gaming collection. The article was picked up by most national newspapers and websites.

That happened twenty years ago, in the summer of 2004. Twenty years ago, classic video games were “making a comeback,” and I was considered to be enough of a subject matter expert on the topic that someone reached out to interview me. One of the funny things about that article is that the then-modern consoles being discussed, like Nintendo’s Gameboy Advance, are considered to be retro systems today. There’s a bit in the article about how Nintendo is cashing in on the retro crazy by re-releasing updated version of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, again back in 2004. Since then, Nintendo has released multiple Mario games, including Super Mario Bros. U in 2012 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder in 2023. To put the date of that AP article in perspective, it was published two years before Nintendo released the Wii.

Here’s a link to that article, if you want to read it: Classic Video Games Make Comeback (CBSNews.com)

On a recent episode of my podcast Sprite Castle I covered Congo Bongo for the Commodore 64. Congo Bongo is a super old and retro game — nobody would argue that. It was released by Sega in arcades back in 1983 as a pseudo-3D (“isometric”) competitor to Donkey Kong, and found its way to home consoles and computers later that same year. But the thing is, I remember playing it when it was a new release in arcades, and I have a copy of the cartridge for the Commodore 64 that I got from someone (Jeff, probably) back in the mid-80s. So, yeah — I play retro games, but I played those same games when they were new.

Anyway. That interview I did for the AP was a neat experience. I had friends in New Jersey and family in Chicago all see the article. The one newspaper it didn’t seem to run in was ours here in Oklahoma — go figure. Although a lot of people already knew my name, that article helped me get writing gigs at a few magazines and helped me make a few other connections. Not bad for playing and being willing to talk about video games — games that didn’t seem to be that old to me then, or now, twenty years later.