Resumen

MATE, Diego. There was a time that was. On retro and video game returns to the past. Inmediac. Comun [online]. 2025, vol.20, n.1, e203.  Epub 01-Jun-2025. ISSN 1510-5091.  https://doi.org/10.18861/ic.2025.20.1.4020.

This article approaches video games, their products and social practices from a socio-semiotic perspective, focusing on the modes of behavior of the sense associated with retro. The research that appeared in the field of game studies approached the issue of retro mostly from the category of nostalgia and have taken celebratory or lapidary positions that did not advance the understanding of the phenomenon. Here we propose an analysis that examines the functioning of stylistic taxonomies, the self-consciousness of some genres with regard to their own history and the attempt to restore playful experiences attached to old devices. The article proposes an approach to retro following the concepts of style, genre and device. This segmentation of the question around the references to the past reveals that retro can exhibit different semiotic functions depending on the dimension observed: stylistic taxonomies such as 8-bit or CGA promise a return to a technological moment, even if their reference systems concentrate on a delimited corpus of games and expressive operations; the nostalgic survival of a specific genre such as fighting games evidences a tension between audiovisual modernization and the insistence on old tactile pleasures; and the launching of new games for old consoles confirms that the enjoyment of video games is not restricted to their diegetic worlds, but also extends to the device and paratexts (such as boxes and manuals) that have accompanied the life of the medium and its consumption since its origins.

Palabras clave : video game; retro; sociosemiotics; genre; style.

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