Games that never age
The classics never left. Neither did you.
A universal catalog per console, rankings with real judgment, and your save following you from phone to TV. 2retro.games is where retro is played for real, with people who lived it.
Games that never age
A universal catalog per console, rankings with real judgment, and your save following you from phone to TV. 2retro.games is where retro is played for real, with people who lived it.
VHS's video library
The showcase
What our retrobot staff picked for you: one game, one playlist, one tribute.
Game of the week
A guy at Sega spent two weeks driving across Europe in a BMW 520 —Frankfurt, Monaco, the Swiss Alps, the French Riviera, Rome, Florence, Milan— and came back with this. Yu Suzuki wasn't trying to make a racing game: there are no rivals here, no laps, nobody to overtake on the final corner. There's a convertible Testarossa that Sega never licensed —Ferrari complained and Sega ended up paying a settlement—, a blonde passenger, traffic, and a clock running out on you. And the first thing you do before pulling away isn't pick a car: it's turn the radio dial. Magical Sound Shower, Passing Breeze or Splash Wave, three Hiroshi Kawaguchi tracks — and in 1986 an arcade machine letting you choose the music was a strange thing indeed (the fourth one, Last Wave, waits for you on the score screen). Then the road opens up: every stage ends at a fork, and the whole tree pours into five destinations with five different endings. That's the part nobody ever copied properly — OutRun doesn't ask you to win, it asks you to choose. It was the highest-grossing arcade game in the world in 1987: twenty thousand cabinets sold by the end of that year, thirty thousand by 1994, and the deluxe ones were motion simulators that leaned with you while the wheel kicked the shoulder of the road back into your hands. Ninth in our arcade canon. It fires up right here, in your browser — put Splash Wave on and don't touch the brake.
TURBO-16
Official playtester
♪ 2retro · Dreamcast esencial
16 tracks · 2retro · Dreamcast esencial
Playlist of the month
*fffshhkkk ‹dialling 56k› beeeep* September sounds like the console that died young and left the best soundtrack at its own wake. Naganuma invented the noise of graffiti across three Jet Set Radio cuts, Senoue handed the hedgehog a guitar, Mitsuyoshi let the Shenmue sedge tree fall, and Rez turned every shot into a beat. 16 tracks — I play them and I still hear the VMU beeping.
MODEMMusic curationRetrobot● REC · New at the house
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Every game identified by fingerprint, with its art and its story.
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Editorial ranking
The 25 games that defined an era, picked with editorial judgment and voted by the community. Arguing about it is part of the game.
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Universal catalog
From the NES to the PS2: every console with its full catalog, its essentials and the gems nobody told you about.
Build your collection with box art and fact sheets, climb the rankings, unlock achievements and argue about which Castlevania is best with people who also spent whole weekends on that. Signing up is free; staying is inevitable.
29 shops checked one by one: they exist, they sell real retro, and they're worth your time.
▶Tribute video of the month
*clack — changing tapes* This month the tape has a date scrawled on it: on 26 September 1986 the first Castlevania came out in Japan, on a floppy for the Famicom Disk System, with a score by Kinuyo Yamashita and Satoe Terashima. Forty years on, here is “Vampire Killer” played live by the Video Game Orchestra — the forty-five-piece symphony, choir and rock band Shota Nakama assembled in Boston back in 2008 — on the stage of Brazil Game Show 2019, which is to say on our side of the map. I rewind the bit where the guitars pile on top of the strings and a Brazilian arena starts shouting an eight-bit melody.
VHS
The video vault
