A trip back through video game history
Thunder Bay's Retro North Games keeps classic gaming alive
With shelves full of classic games and consoles, a visit to Thunder Bay's Retro North Games is like taking a trip back through video game history.
The store, located on Algoma Street, has accumulated thousands of classic gaming items, including games and consoles. And they're selling much better than owner Matt Carr expected.
"We originally were gonna do this just for our website, just online," Carr says. "We started putting some stuff out, and I'd say now, our online is probably matched, or even in-store, I'd say, is maybe higher than online."
Carr said the business finds its retro gaming products in various places, including auctions. The stock includes various classic consoles — those include the Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, PSP, 3DO, a Sega Genesis-Sega CD combo, even a Virtual Boy — and shelves of controllers, and games.
And while the store does have in-the-box collectors' items — like an unopened Game Boy and Virtual Boy — most people that purchase from Retro North Games do so to play, Carr said.
"We'll usually see three different reasons," he said. "The first reason is childhood memories, nostalgia, somebody wants to play a game they used to play when they were a kid."
"The other one is forcing their kids to play the games they used to play, that happens all the time," Carr said. "And for younger kids, it is easier to pick up a game with a controller that only has a couple of buttons versus like a PS5 controller."
"And then the third one would be collectors, people that just want to have it on display, or show it off."
Frank Cifaldi, founder and director of the Video Game History Foundation in Okaland, Calif., said the interest in retro gaming is "50-50 nostalgia and, honestly, new people discovering old games."
I've actually been around video game collectors for a very long time, since it was new," said Cifaldi. "I started collecting games when you could find them in thrift stores, and yeah, a lot of people are nostalgic for their past, and are sort of trying to maybe fill in the gaps, right?"
"There's a lot of people who, let's say, collect old games like they're baseball cards or something, where they identify with a specific console they like," he said. "Maybe you like the 8 bit Nintendo. And they think it might be fun to figure out what all the games are and collect them as a full set. That's one type of collector."
But younger gamers who are discovering classic gaming play a big role, too, Cifaldi said.
"There is sort of a culture online around not only playing but also watching people play old games," he said. "They're a lot more, let's say, easily accessible in terms of immediately-gratifying entertainment."
"You turn it on and you press start and you just start playing, and it's easy to sort of grasp the rules....that might be easier to immediately understand and be entertained by, than maybe a more-modern game that might have a little bit more of a learning curve, or you know, cutscenes with stories in them."
"I think a lot of people are discovering that you can get a $5 game from two Xboxes ago and be just about as entertained as something you get for $60.00 new now," he said. "I expect a lot of people are just looking for cheap fun games to buy from that sort of era, like the early-to-mid-2000s tends to be a big chunk of what I've I've seen from retro game stores."
Cifaldi, who's worked in the video game industry, has been interested in preserving video since his high school days.
"I always felt that it was difficult to get the information one might need to explain video game history," he said. "For example, libraries didn't hold on to magazines that reported on games."
"They tended to throw them away once they were done, and so there was no backtracking and seeing what people thought about games in their time, or how games were marketed back in the old days," he said. "I founded the Video Game History Foundation that actually exactly nine years ago this Friday."
The foundation includes an archive of informational material for researchers, including a digital library with magazines, business records, and other game-related documentation.
"It's gratifying to me to see that there is an active interest in discovering where we came from in terms of the art of video game creation," Cifaldi said. "I think that video games are the best form of entertainment to be invented in the last like 50 years, and and it's something that I feel that we've barely scratched the surface on, what games are capable of even like socially, let alone entertainment-wise."
"It's like when we were in school, and we were asking our parents and teachers to justify why we need to learn history," he said. "It's to learn where we came from to, to not make the same mistakes that we made in the past. It's to sort of build something new and better by understanding how we did things before."
"I feel very strongly that video games are the entertainment of the future, and that they only get better the more we understand where they came from, and so it's been really nice for me to to see that there's still an active interest in looking backward and understanding it."