With console price increases, $80 games, and the looming death of physical media, the time is now to decouple your interest in video games from the new-release schedule.

In late-May, Valve announced a significant Steam Deck price hike that brought its 1TB model to $949, which restarted conversations about the affordability of new gaming platforms over the next few years amid the RAM crisis. This followed Sony bumping the price of all of its PlayStation 5 models in April, with the Pro now coming in at $899, while the “Digital” edition without a disc drive now costs $599, or, more than the base model did at launch and just $100 shy of what the Pro used to cost. And speaking of digital, Sony kicked off July by announcing the end of physical disc production for PlayStation consoles as of 2028. In June, the Steam Machine got its price reveal, and it starts at $1,049; that might be a bargain for what’s effectively a mini PC of its quality, but it’s also $1,049. That same month, Xbox announced that the 512GB models of its two Series variants would jump by $100, and the 1TB version $150; it will cost $799 for a Series X with a disc drive now compared to $499 at launch, but don’t worry, Microsoft had some recommendations for how to afford it in their price hike announcement, with interest-free financing through Amazon or a credit-hampering Buy Now, Pay Later program both available options. 

There are better ideas for weathering this particular storm than taking financial advice from a company that seemingly buys studios just to close them. Given this seemingly all-encompassing state and a future that will surely include further price increases and $80 big-budget video games, a better short-term idea for the majority might be looking backwards. Do you need new games and new hardware, or do you just need something that is new to you?

Classic games can be inexpensive and plentiful, whether you’re talking about acquiring them on the high seas or familiarizing yourself with the likes of Hamster’s Arcade Archives series, which has released a classic arcade game for $8 once per week for over a decade now. Of course, going retro can be expensive as well, if you limit yourself to grabbing special launch editions of boutique re-releases, or insist on only playing on original hardware, but there are classic systems you can acquire for a relative song, or emulation machines that are actually inexpensive, or entire systems you can play on hardware you already own, be it an old PC or a laptop or a mini console or even just a modded piece of original hardware. You don’t have to limit yourself to a future that includes a Playstation 5 or a Series X or anything from Valve if you want to game, and you don’t need to wait for permission from a boutique production that may or may not ship your game the year it promised to in order to experience an older game.

This isn’t a decree from the federal government telling people to tighten belts because of increased grocery costs, or to simply drive to fewer places because of higher gas prices. Consider this akin to advocacy for eating more beans: it’s not automatically a recession indicator when you see an outlet publish that sort of piece about a relatively inexpensive and abundant food, because this healthy and delicious staple should be a normal part of your diet, anyway. Retro games, older games, classic games, whatever you want to call them, should play a similar role, no less special for their lack of newness or flair (ed. Note: Joe does this every month at Skybox, and we highly recommend it). Kill the FOMO that dominates your mind, dismiss the voice that tells you progress is a straight line and newer games are inherently better, and focus on how old can still be new to you — and just as enjoyable, if not even more so.

Everyone gets to read the Iliad for the first time; that story wasn’t even published in English until the late-16th century, and existed for well over two millennia before that in other languages and its original oral form. Are newer books inherently better than the Iliad, or are they just newer? Let the same positive spirit of classicism that allows Homer’s work to continue to exist, be adapted, retranslated, and enjoyed in the present guide you directly into the older days of an art form that is ever-so-slightly fresher-faced. 

Did you know that Sega’s Master System is still produced and sold in Brazil, four decades after its launch? Not in its original form, no, but as what is effectively a licensed emulation machine preloaded with a significant chunk of the console’s library: Brazil’s historically limited access to new consoles and games, brought on in part by high tariffs that kept many companies besides Sega out of it entirely for years, helped to foster a culture very different from that of the United States, and has led to this moment in time, where an 8-bit system older than a considerable percentage of people who could read this piece remains viable and appreciated and engaged with in the present. It doesn’t have to be a unique culture, however: this was a situation brought on by economic need, of a country grabbing hold of what was on offer and making it matter, pushing its utility well beyond what was deemed normal in places like America, where critics argued about whether using 2D graphics in the era of 3D games was a matter of laziness, incompetence, or both. Because 2D was old, you see, its time clearly over, all hail our 3D-only future.

Be like Brazil. Don’t concern yourself with the latest and greatest — that lifestyle is going to be out of reach for more and more people as we approach the kind of console prices that doomed the likes of the 3DO decades ago, when it launched for a price equivalent to nearly $1,600 in the present. There are multiple reasons Sony ended up winning that particular era of consoles with the inaugural Playstation, and a lower platform price plus relatively inexpensive, disc-based games played into it just as much as quality did. You could similarly stretch your dollar so much further in the present by investing in something like an Everdrive, which is basically a cartridge-based vehicle for a microSD card full of ROMs to be played on original hardware. Have an NES and want to be able to play anything from that library at any time? Drop $159 on the corresponding Everdrive and load a card up with anything that catches your eye, especially if you’ve never played it before. You could also do this for the Nintendo 64 instead, or the Genesis, or Master System, or Game Boy(s) or Turbografx-16 or… you get the idea.

You could also attempt to mod the original hardware in a variety of ways. There are “hard” mods, where the guts of the console are swapped out — optical drive emulators, for instance, replace the optical drive with a hard drive for platforms like the Sega Dreamcast or Saturn — as well as “soft” mods, which are less intrusive. For the Dreamcast, that would mean, say, downloading certain files and burning them to a CD-R, then playing that CD-R in the Dreamcast to install software workarounds that allow it to both play burned image files of Dreamcast games as well as disable the region lock of the system. For the Saturn, there are programs that are stored on expanded storage cartridges, and work similarly to allow you to play burned discs and turn the system into a region-free wonder. It doesn’t change the console itself in any way; there are positives and negatives to this approach for the Saturn and more, but there is also no shortage of options.

Don’t care about original hardware because you have something capable of emulation already? Then you can get moving here even faster, and not be limited to a single machine, either. The further back you go, the less horsepower it takes to emulate an older game. Consider: the first time English-speaking folks — including the author you are reading right now — played Squaresoft’s Japan-only Super Famicom game Final Fantasy V was thanks to an unofficial translation from 1998, which was then played on PCs from the same time period. This sentence was written from a desk with five different platforms capable of playing that and more, none of them actually designed specifically for gaming like a MiSTer is, the laptop itself a $50 refurbished piece from 2017 that has to be constantly plugged in because it doesn’t keep a charge. You don’t need the ultimate in technology here to make it work for you. Take it from me, a guy who buys MS-DOS games on GOG for a few bucks and then transfers the games files to an old PC tower running Windows XP via an $8 thumbdrive, in order to play them on appropriate hardware plugged into a CRT.

You don’t need to have a setup for sickos, though! DOSBox is right there, for those who don’t mind emulating instead, and both GOG and Steam play MS-DOS games through that emulator. Emulation might be intimidating if you aren’t familiar with it, but it doesn’t have to be — sometimes it’s as simple as reading the sentence, “Download SNES9X and some SNES ROMs, then open one of them in the program,” and sometimes you need a guide to understand the process, depending on the system or the user-friendliness of the emulator. You do what feels within your power, and maybe you push further and further as you get more comfortable (ed. Note: Dolphin and Redream are great places to start for the emulator curious).

Why go through the effort to play old games, though, whether it’s minimal or invasive or something in between? Even beyond the economics of it all, it’s because older games are games deserving of your attention and understanding in the same way newer ones can be. Star Fox on the Nintendo Switch 2 is truly wonderful in its shiny newness, but that was also true when it was remade the first time on the 3DS, and when it originally released on the Nintendo 64 in 1997. The heart of the game, its rhythms and structure, are what made it work in ‘97 and still make it work today; again, the Iliad is thousands of years old and holds up, even if it can use some updating and adapting to ensure that’s true for a mass audience each time out. Star Fox 64 and the ethos of its play isn’t actually “old” by any stretch of the imagination when you consider the existence of other art forms, and stretching your imagination is something that gamers struggling to look beyond what’s coming on the horizon could stand to do.

Your favorite modern game has its roots in an older one, and despite the fears perpetuated by view-seeking YouTubers, games released in the 20th century are not “unplayable” because there might be some slowdown or you aren’t used to the controls of a less-defined era — seek out those roots, explore them, learn about the origins of a genre or a series or the art form itself by doing so. Are Nintendo 64 games aging like milk, or are you playing them in the wrong context, with the wrong controller, and coming away with the wrong impression because of it? Was the Sega Saturn a failed system because of a lack of games, or because it featured stunning 32-bit 2D art at the exact wrong time in history, with the vast majority of its library — 775 of 1,028 games — releasing exclusively in Japan rather than worldwide? It might not have the quantity of the PlayStation, which sold over 10 times as many consoles as the Saturn managed and therefore kept getting the lion’s share of new releases and development attention, but what’s there is a joy. 

You have the time to explore these questions and more — hell, the 3DO has never been more affordable to play on hardware that can handle it than it is right now, and more and more PC Engine CD-ROM² games are unofficially translated all the time — if you simply devote some energy towards answering them. And with the present and future looking ever-more expensive, what better time than now to look back? Not with nostalgia, but with a sense of discovery and wonder. Let those feelings guide your hand, rather than the release schedule, and find what is already out there waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.

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