Retraux / Video Games

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• The entire Roguelike genre qualifies. Roguelikes, such as NetHack, ADOM and Angband (among others), use primarily ASCII graphics. This style, along with the gameplay, is a deliberate attempt to evoke the feel of the classic game Rogue.
• 1942: Joint Strike is designed to look like a World War II movie, complete with film grain, sepia tones, and the projector winding up and down at the start and end of each level.
• 198X, like the name implies, is set in the 80s, and is a medley of various mini-games influenced by genres from that time.
• 1917 - The Alien Invasion DX is an arcade-style shump modeled after the graphics of 1942, but released in the 2016.
• 2Dark is made to look like it's from the 90s.
• 3D Dot Game Heroes takes this up another level by turning pixels into voxels.
• 70's Robot Anime - Geppy X - The Super Booster Armor is purely what could have been if the early Getter Robo anime would be interactive. Starting with a lot of FMV cutscenes done a-la the intended time period (all of which occupy four discs!), going on with the slightly cheesy vocal themes, title cards before every stage loads up... God, it even includes fake commercial breaks inbetween the "episodes"!
• Supercharged Robot Vulkaiser homages several other Super Robot shows such as Mazinger Z, Voltes V and Voltron. It also has a sequel of sorts in the form of Witch-bot Meglilo, which this time homages and parodies 70s Magical Girl shows instead of giant robots.
• 80s Overdrive is a sprite-based arcade-style racer in the spirit of OutRun.
• Aberoth is a 2015 MMO that is nevertheless done entirely in 8-bit graphics.
• The developers describe Abobo's Big Adventure as "Every NES game ever made put into a blender".
• Ace Attorney:
  • The flashback sequence, within a flashback sequence, in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations is presented in flickering sepia-tone with flickering black lines, suggesting the earliest days of silent film. Despite the fact that, according to the timeline of The 'Verse, it took place in 2003.
  • Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney does it as well for one sequence. When you play as Phoenix Wright in his final trial, all the graphics and music used are from the Phoenix Wright games instead of the new style used by Apollo Justice. Only Klavier, Trucy, Zak, Valant, and Drew Misham appear in a more modern look in graphics during this sequence.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies gets upgraded to stereoscopic 3D, but it imitates the limited sprite animation of the previous games. Characters fade in and out, and snap from pose to pose.
• The Adventure Time video game for DS/3DS, Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage!? is a love letter to old school video games, uses NES style graphics (except for the character portraits) and chiptune music. Even the overworld map you can't deny it wasn't inspired by Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
  • Taking it even further, using the Konami Code on the title screen opens up a Easter Egg with Atari graphic styled Pendleton Ward, Finn and Jake. With Pen singing "The Secret Screen song."
• Used in Alien: Isolation. The game itself is totally modern, but the technology in-game is intentionally designed to look like it was built in the 1970's. Just like the original Alien.
• Alisa: The game uses pre-rendered backgrounds and low polygons for characters to invoke the feel of an old-school Resident Evil game.
• Alwa's Awakening is done entirely in 8-bit graphics, and even has a literal 8-bit edition on an NES cartridge.
• Andro Dunos have a sequel released 30 years later, simply titled Andro Dunos 2, whose graphics and effects looks exactly like the original arcade classic.
• The style of Andy's Apple Farm is reminiscent of old games designed for old televisions, including the rounded screen-edges, static-y visuals, and awkward audio clips.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures is made in the style of an 8-bit platformer, and uses NES chiptune sounds for its soundtrack.
• Antonball Deluxe is a 2022 compilation game that features clone of Breakout and Mario Bros.
• The Double Fine prototype Autonomous is set in a TRON-like computer world where you go around building robots. It's a digital game but you could have had it boxed and the cover is suitably retro; take a look.
  • The lead Director of those games, Lee Petty, would then go onto make Headlander and RAD giving off a 1970's and then a 1980's vibe respectively.
• A Short Hike uses 3D graphics with a pixelated style and outlined models reminiscent of the Nintendo DS Zelda games.
• Axiom Verge is a game designed with Metroidvania style games in mind, complete with 16-bit graphics and a soundtrack, and manipulating enemies and parts of the levels by (un)glitching them is a large part of the gameplay.
• Babysitter Bloodbath and Power Drill Massacre both mimic the look and feel of PS1 Survival Horror games like the original Resident Evil, complete with tank controls and weird camera angles. Their plots homage retro horror movies from the 80’s and early 90’s, such as Halloween.
• Back in 1995 is done in the style of old PS1-era horror games, with blocky graphics, camera angles, and even a screen effect evoking the look of old standard-definition televisions.
• Whenever Babe Ruth appears in Backyard Baseball, he is drawn in a crude style, unlike everyone else.
• Balacera Brothers is basically Contra, but released in 2020.
• Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal had a quest in the Tower where the player had to let go of the main character, and play a Dialogue Tree driven pen and paper RPG in order to obtain a MacGuffin.
• Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts has a mini-game called "Hero Klungo Sssavesss teh World!" [sic], a parody of 8-bit games, right down to the strange (but awesome) promotional art that has nothing to do with the actual game.
• Battle Axe, a 2021 game whose graphics and gameplay is inspired directly by Gauntlet.
• The poor audience reception of Battlefield 2042 opened the way for two low-poly Mockbuster clones of Battlefield to be released, one called Battle Bit Remastered, and the other, Clownfield 2042.
• Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril is a Metroidvania released in 2010 and it's completely with 8-bit graphics and music. Which makes sense, considering that it's a real NES game, cartridge and all. It got a sequel in 2012.
• Despite its 2018 provenance, Battle Princess Madelyn is intended to look and feel like an early-90s Capcom arcade game.
• The art style of Battlezone (2016) deliberately makes heavy use of textureless low-polygon models to invoke an early-VR appearance. There's also "Classic mode," which allows playing with green wireframes similar to the original 1980 vector arcade game.
• Bethesda created a browser game based on Fallout 3 that used 8-bit graphics similar to the early Dragon Quest games. It's currently only in Japanese, but it's fascinating. It actually looks similar to Wasteland, the original game which inspired Fallout.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine goes out of its way to recreate the Ink Blot Cartoon Style of the late 20s and early 30s. Altough the animation is done using 3D models, they have sketchy hand-drawn outlines and Cel Shading to make it look like the environment and characters are entirely hand-drawn. The game is also sepia-toned to further imatate the black and white style.
• The Binding of Isaac Rebirth is a "16-bit makeover" of the original game; Word of God states that it's based on colorized Game Boy games.
• Bio Lab Wars is a came from 2019 that could pass for a game from 1989.
• The WiiWare game Bit Boy!! features six levels each based on a different generation of consoles and with graphics to match.
• Blaster Master Zero and its sequels, produced by Inti Creates, the co-developers of Mega Man 9 and 10, is a reboot of the series in the style of the original NES game.
• Blood Breed: The game is presented with a low polygon count like Survival Horror games from The '90s.
• BLOODCRUSHER II looks and plays like a mid-90s shooter in the style of Doom and Quake, complete with low resolution textures, blocky character models, and pixely effects.
• Bomb Chicken's aesthetic calls to mind The 16-bit Era of Console Video Games with its large, cartoony sprites and smooth animation, but an actual 16-bit system wouldn't be capable of running this game.
• Bomberman Tower features a 16-bit graphical style reminiscent of a TurboGrafx-16 game with the limitations of a Game Boy game.
• Burger & Frights: The game is rendered in 64-bit graphics.
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare uses this in two places.
  • The first, and more perplexing occurrence, is in the flashback cutscene to the two Lt. Price sniper missions. These are shown in sepia tones and simulated film graininess... despite being set roughly a decade after the Chernobyl accident (1986).
  • The second is a cheat setting, unlocked through collecting items in-game, that changes the in-game rendering to mimic early Ragtime films, complete with all the sound being replaced with a piano tune.
• Carrie's Order Up! is an indie homage to Japanese arcade games that looks and sounds like it was pulled straight from an early '90s arcade cabinet.
• Carrion has a 16 bit aesthetic.
• Castle in the Darkness is done in 8-bit style, with the appropriate graphics, sounds, and music.
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's Prologue uses the HUD from its predecessor, Rondo of Blood, which makes sense as it's a pseudo-flashback to Rondo and the game is a direct sequel to it. Richter and Maria modes also make use of this HUD.
• Cave Story's graphics were made in a very low resolution with no anti-aliasing to mimic 8-bit era games. The music, similarly, uses a custom-written sound driver whose sound is not unlike that of the TurboGrafx 16.
• Cleaning Redville: The game is presented in 64-bit graphics.
• Cloud Cutter, a Vertical Scrolling Shooter resembling older games of it's type, but rendered photorealisitcally with almost lifelike graphics.
• Cold Call is said to be inspired by early-2000's Point And Click Games seen on Flash websites.
• Contra 4 is a retraux sequel to the earlier Contra games, particularly Contra III: The Alien Wars, with several Shout Outs to the first three console games in the series. Even the game's manual is written in the same tongue-in-cheek tone as Konami's old localized manuals during the NES era (and unlike the NES games, this carried over to the game itself).
• The games in the Colorgrave Universe series are styled after Game Boy Color games.
• Cortex Command is an in-development retraux game which is a 2D side-scroller with a look of the early 90s, though it wasn't even started until the year 2000.
• Some early 2000s Cartoon Network online games, including Creep TV and The Envelopes, Please!, use a slightly pixelated art style.
• One of the unlockable skins in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time gives Crash his low-poly look from the original PS1 games.
• Cruelty Squad has a deliberately crude low-poly style reminiscent of early PS1/N64 games.
• Crusaders Quest is an auto-combat RPG with pixelated graphics.
• Cuphead takes on the visual aesthetic of 1930's cartoons ala Felix the Cat and the works of Max and Dave Fleischer. The backgrounds are painted and every frame of animation is hand-drawn, and it's just as beautiful as it sounds.
• The bonus video in the extras section of Dark Parables 9: Queen of Sands is an 8-bit version of the introduction, complete with authentically tinny music and sound effects.
• The Darkside Detective homages the style of 1980s point-and-click games like Police Quest and Maniac Mansion, complete with blocky pixel art.
• The Dark Spire is a close imitation of 1980s Wizardry games, and even has a mode which produces wireframe graphics like in the early 1980s, along with 8 bit style music.
• Released for Nintendo DSiWare and Steam is Dark Void Zero, which is Dark Void reworked as an 8-bit action side-scrolling platformer. It was even marketed with a fictional development history, saying that it was originally developed for the PlayChoice-10, taking advantage of the technology available. It also supposedly featured "System Zero", a chipset that increased the limitations of the NES. Capcom found the promotional materials for the game and began tracking down a surviving copy of it, and found that a promotional prototype copy of a home version was given away to a young Jimmy Fallon. It was this version of the game that the DSiWare version was supposedly based on. More details are here. Part 2 describes the attempts to get the supposed ROM working.
• Darwinia has pseudo-retro style graphics with very little textures and many of the characters are 2D sprites. In addition, game intros provide homage to the older times. One is a ZX Spectrum loading screen. Another is a deliberate recreation of Amiga Cracktros which tells how it's been cracked by DMA Crew. The Steam release got delayed by an hour because it was thought to be authentic.
• Dead Cells is a 2017 game done with very fluid pixel art graphics. They're a little too lush to call back to the 16 bit era, but are quite evocative of the 2D platformers that thrived on the Sega Saturn and late '90s arcade machines.
• Dead County is based on Survival Horror classics like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Alone in the Dark. It has old PS1-style blocky graphics, awkward camera angles, and even classic door opening animations.
• In The Deadly Tower of Monsters, you play through a schlocky sci-fi movie made in the 1970's. Every aspect of the game hearkens back to cheesy B-Movies, from bad special effects to over the top acting.
• Dead Seater uses third-person fixed camera angles and low resolution character models and environments, evocative of old Survival Horror games such as Alone in the Dark.
• From the same developer as Darwinia, Defcon's game board is a monochromatic vector graphic map of the world, obviously chosen as an homage to the game's inspiration.
• Demoniaca: Everlasting Night is a Metroidvania game where the title hero requires different items to defeat different bosses.
• The minigames in Densetsu no Stafy are styled to look and sound like arcade games, and play similarly to Atari's Breakout series.
• Diablo III runs the annual "Darkening of Tristram" event to celebrate the first game in the trilogy. On entering the special event dungeon the game is switched to a UI based on the original game, as is the text, sound, and music. A filter is applied to the game itself, creating the illusion of a game from the original Diablo generation. This is further reinforced by all models being restricted to face in only eight directions and the player model being restricted to their walking animation.
• Diluvian Ultra, a 2023 game whose graphics resembles pixellated, 90s-style gorn-focused actioners.
• Dino Trauma pays homage to the 90s dinosaur craze and also to various FPS games of the era, with it's graphics looking like the old Turok and Dino Crisis games.
• Disgaea 4 allows you to use either detailed high definition sprites or the standard definition sprites utilized by the past three games.
• The Rhythm Game Donkey Konga 3 includes a version of the theme from the original Donkey Konga done in NES-syle.
• Donut Dodo is deigned exactly like an early 80's arcade game.
• Doom II: Maps 31 and 32 are a callback to Wolfenstein 3-D. They keep the same fixed height and 90° wall structure as the original maps, with the only real differences being that floors and ceilings have textures now and everything is far larger in scale. They even included the old blue-clad SS enemies, who still cry out "Mein Leben!" when killed.
• Dot Arcade takes this to an extreme, with games done in the style of an 8x8 matrix of colored lights to simulate extremely primitive video games (though even Pong was played on a TV screen). To complement the style, the pillarboxes are filled in with equally old-looking artwork that look like they might have adorned the side of an arcade machine in the early 80's. The default artwork for "Mr. Snake" looks like a comic book from that period, while the alternate artwork is drawn in a style similar to that of Namco's 8-bit era. Its sequel, Dodge Club Party, ditches the colored lights and simply puts the gameplay onto a 16x16 grid of solid pixels, making it look like something from the earliest Atari 2600 days. It does away with the Retraux look of the promotional artwork, however, updating Speck's design to look like something from the game's release in 2016.
• Double Dragon IV is a direct follow up to the second game in the series that has graphics done in the style of the NES ports of the previous three games. It even includes the head-to-head mode of the NES games as well as the main story mode.
• Dragon Creek has a pixel art style. While the dragons, backgrounds, and lighting are detailed, the faceless humans look like they came out of an Atari 2600 game.
• The Nintendo 3DS version of Dragon Quest XI has a mode where the game can be played with 16-bit graphics similar to the Dragon Quest games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This mode was later brought over to the Nintendo Switch version.
• Dragon's Wake is done in a pixel art style which is reminiscent of older systems but doesn't specifically mimic any of them.
• Draugen's story is set in 1923, and it has old-film effects on the loading screen and the pause menu. There is also a 1923 Mode option which turns these effects on in the main game.
• Dread Delusion: A heavily saturated Clock Punk gothic fantasy RPG using PSX-style graphics.
• Dread Templar is inspired by old-school gornfest FPS games, with graphics close to the original Doom and Quake.
• The graphics style of Duck Game evokes this trope, the music sounds just like it came out of a Sega Genesis sound chip, and the promotional images evoke the style of hand-drawn game covers of the era.
• DUSK is a game that painstakingly and lovingly replicates the early 3D Quake-era FPS games, complete with a startup that emulates a fake MS-DOS screen. The game even features the ability to turn off texture filtering and enable a low-resolution mode to give it an authentic '90s look. The developer even complained once that the biggest difficulty in developing the game was undoing every visual improvement the Unity engine received.
• Dwarf Fortress is a very detailed civilization building and exploration simulator set in a High Fantasy world... that happens to be illustrated entirely in ASCII. It's a great example of the "doing it for practical reasons" variant of this trope as well; the sheer complexity of what's being simulated in-game would be nigh-impossible to represent visually so the developer decided "less is more" and let the player's imagination fill in the blanks.
  • Donators can ask for "ASCII Art" that depicts part of a story in Dwarf Fortress style Ascii. Donators who continue to donate get to continue this story.
• Eggy, a game made using Game Maker, in which you take control of a sixteen-by-sixteen-pixel egg trying to defeat an apparently French chef.
• else Heart.Break(): The game is 3D, but the textures are pixellated. Perhaps something of a stylistic choice.
• Eschatos takes this trope in a different direction. Rather than mimic graphics seen in 8 or 16-bit systems, ESCHATOS goes for full 3D graphics reminiscent to that of Sega NAOMI arcade games such as Triggerheart Exelica and Under Defeat, while its FM synth soundtrack composed by Yousuke Yasui gives off a Sega Genesis vibe.
• The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] , though claiming to be a remaster of a lost 1987 DOS game, is a 2019-original cinematic platformer in the style of Another World with 4-color CGA graphics and rotoscoped animation.
• The whole Etrian Odyssey series more or less came about because a certain game designer really wanted there to be Dungeon Master for the DS. Every aspect is lovingly oldschool, even down to the music, which was actually entirely composed on a PC-88. It even creeps into the meta level: an in-game map would be too modern, so the bottom screen is basically a piece of digital graph paper to draw your own.
• Eversion is a very 8-bit-like game released in 2008. The cute, low-res graphics, however, are a facade for the game's much more sinister side. The Steam remake is more modern-looking than the freeware original, however.
• Evil Genius has a very 60s style to it, meant to evoke the campy spy movies it's based on.
• Evoland and its sequel Evoland 2 both invoke this heavily. The first has you go through various graphical and gaming adjustments. The second has three distinct time periods, each with a different art style to depict different eras of gaming and in each part there's showcases of different genres of play.
• Eyra the Crow Maiden: The game, being a Homebrew on the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis, is rendered in 8-bit on the first, and 16-bit on the other two systems.
• Factorio uses the aesthetic of an late 1990s RTS - typically compared to StarCraft - dabbed with some Diesel Punk touches. All assets are created as high-definition 3D models, which are then converted to 2D sprites to give it the classic RTS appearance.
• FAITH: The Unholy Trinity are horror games done in the style of old school Atari and MS-DOS games from the late 80's, with primitive-looking graphics and garbled chiptune music, both for stylistic reasons, and also to mask the grisly content (violent exorcisms, Body Horror, demonic entities, and enormously bloody fusions of all of the above) which otherwise would be too much to present with any modern fidelity. The most advanced presentation it features are brief cutscenes with rotoscoped animation, but it's done strictly with lineart of a character or two at a time in their respective single color.
• The Fallout '84 demo by 8 Bit Weapon, running on the Apple IIc.
• Faraway Kingdom was a pixelated auto-combat RPG with Captain Ersatz heroes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. The spinoff Tap! Tap! Faraway Kingdom follows suit.
• Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon revels in 80s-style retraux: scanlines, loading screens with a tracking bar ala VHS tapes, Mecha-Mooks that look more like people wearing motorcycle helmets and suits with Tron Lines,^*They actually created real-life costumes under a deliberately limited budget (a couple hundred dollars each) which in-game models were based on. cutscenes that would be at home in an NES-era Ninja Gaiden game, and so on...
• Farnham Fables is heavily inspired by old-school adventure games, and its aesthetic reflects that. The graphics are limited to a 216-color palette, the screen resolution is 800x600, and music consists mostly of short MIDI tracks.
• The FB Games Directory held a programming competition in 2008, where the task was to create a Retraux game using the FreeBASIC programming language.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The flashbacks in the Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (including a playable one in Porom's chapter) are deliberately done in the same style as the the original SNES version of Final Fantasy IV. The rest of the game looks more like Final Fantasy VI, which at first makes it appear as an example, but the game was originally made for cell phones incapable of the graphics of later Final Fantasy games.
    • Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light is a Genre Throwback intentionally modeled after Final Fantasy III. The soundtrack is all partially composed with 8-bit samples to invoke an "old-school" effect.
  • Final Fantasy Record Keeper and its predecessor Final Fantasy All the Bravest have pixelation for monsters, characters and combat effects from games released later than the 16-bit generation, and play SNES era music and sound effects. The Record Keeper Final Fantasy realm, due being on the NES, uses 8-bit music throughout the entirety of the realm, including the victory theme.
  • After various high-definition remakes on the PSP and mobile platforms, the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series of releases takes the first six games and plunks NES/SNES-era sprites into worlds closer to the Game Boy Advance while also excising a lot of the extra content introduced in those releases, save for quality-of-life updates.
• Final Vendetta is a Beat 'em Up released in 2022, but has pixel art that evokes the 90's. It pays homage to both Final Fight and Streets of Rage.
• Finding Light: Unlike the previous games in the Knights of Ambrose series, this game uses monochrome pixel graphics to capture the feel of old school RPGs. This is lampshaded by Malady, who is the only character to notice that the graphics no longer have color.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • In Five Nights at Freddy's 2, occasionally when the player dies, Atari 2600-style minigames show up, telling stories of past events in the pizzeria. Given that the game takes place in the 80's and is a parody of Chuck E. Cheese, this seems fitting.
  • Done again in Five Nights at Freddy's 3, with between-night mini games that reveal Springtrap's true identity and hidden ones that may seem like random Easter Eggs at first, but actually need to be found and played correctly to unlock the good ending.
• The arcade game Fix It Felix Jr., inspired by the animated movie Wreck-It Ralph, has the look and feel of a late 1970s or early 1980s game.
• Flesh Birds is based on original First-Person Shooters like Doom, being rendered in 16-bit flat images in a 3D world.
• The aptly named Formula Retro Racing is a throwback to early polygonal racing games such as Virtua Racing and Ridge Racer.
• Freedom Planet is a game with 2D sprite-based graphics which resemble a Sega Saturn or PlayStation era game, with gameplay similar to a 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game and some gameplay elements recognizable from other games like Mega Man and Gunstar Heroes in the mix. The music is also done using instrumentation common to the Saturn and PlayStation era, and in a more subtle manner, composed in a wispy, floaty, yet upbeat style often heard in Japanese games during that era, such as Tales of Phantasia^note the PlayStation version, at least and NiGHTS into Dreams….
• Frogun is designed like a 5th generation platformer.
• From Next Door's graphics and color palette are designed to resemble an old Gameboy game.
• The Game & Watch Gallery series of games allows the player to play two versions of the Game & Watch games - a "Modern" version, which utilizes a new art style featuring the Super Mario Bros. characters, and a "Classic" version, which recreates the original handheld version of the game as closely as possible, complete with it making the original handhelds' beeping sounds.
• In Jaleco's self-referential Arcade Game The Game Paradise: Master of Shooting, there is a warning message early in Stage 5: "32bit-CPU Captured by 8bit-CPU." The enemies start turning pixelated and jerky, and pastiches of ancient video games like Space Invaders and Head On ensue.
• Ganryu has a sequel made in 2022, simply titled Ganryu 2, whose graphics looks almost exactly like the original from the late-90s.
• Gemini Rue is a point-and-click adventure game that actually looks like an old DOS-based adventure game, running at 640x480 with 8-bit colour. Even the save/load screen is reminiscent of old games.
• Ghostlore runs on pixel animation that looks more like games of the 90s. The developer, A Ndrew Teo, specifically cites the original Diablo and Titan Quest as inspiration.
• Ghostly Matter is heavily inspired by games of the 80s and 90s, down to the pixel graphics andd chiptune soundtrack, and also has several options to emulate the graphical glitches of a game being played on an old CRT monitor.
• Ghoulboy is rendered in 16-bit style, including chip-tune music.
• Giana Sisters DS tries to capture the look and feel of a late 80's-early 90's PC 2D game. If anything, the music fits.
• Ginormo Sword and other Babarageo games tend to resemble Atari graphics.
• God Hand has two minigame segments that play 8-bit styled music, as well as referencing Space Invaders in one of them with a randomly appearing UFO worth loads of points.
• Golden Force, which plays out like a 90s platformer but is released in 2021.
• Golf Story has a Game Within a Game called Galf (as well as its sequels Galf Seasons and Galf Nights), designed to replicate the look and feel of NES golf games, complete with low-quality voice clips, an overhead view of the entire hole until you get to the green, only being allowed to shoot in 16 directions, and a limited game interface that requires you to manually change clubs and doesn't inform of you of club ranges (you have to open the digital manual to see them).
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a game from 2002, mimics the loading screen of a Commodore 64 upon booting up, a reference to the game's 1986 setting.
  • Similarly, on Rockstar Games' website, as a tie-in for Vice City there is a "fanpage" devoted to the Degenatron, a primitive parody of second generation video game consoles, complete with working "emulations" of its three "8-bit" games and a supposedly old scan of a Degenatron magazine ad.
  • Done again with the eXsorbeo in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a parody of the Game Boy. Like before,
  • Rockstar created a fake eXsorbeo fansite containing another "emulator" for one game from 1991, with monochrome and pixelated graphics not dissimilar to those of classic Game Boy games.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories features similar aesthetics in some of its fake websites, appearing like those circa 1998. Of note is this one, which parodies the typical poorly designed Geocities-like website common before the abundance of competent graphics and web designers.
• Guild Wars 2 has the Super Adventure Box special event. The art style for the event is designed to evoke a classic NES game with voxel-based graphics decorated with low-res textures and an 8-bit soundtrack.
• The opening credits of Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s features an Atari-era Activision logo, and a retro Harmonix logo.
• Gun Crazy: A plotless, fully action-focused game with graphics and sounds styled after the 16/32-bit era.
• Haiku, the Robot uses a retro pixel art style for the characters and backgrounds, although it also mixes it with a more modern and fluid look for things like the menus and dialogue boxes as well as some of the animations.
• Half-Minute Hero features blocky sprite graphics reminiscent of the old Dragon Quest games, despite being on the PSP.
• Hands of Necromancy is a medieval-era FPS made in the style of Hexen and Heretic decades ago.
• The Happyhills Homicide is a homage to 80's slasher movies in the style of old 16-bit video games.
• Harvest Festival 64 is a short horror game, with low-poly graphics in the style of early Animal Crossing.
• Haunted Halloween 85 and its sequel, Haunted Halloween '86: The Curse Of Possum Hollow, are both done in 8-bit style, complete with 8-bit graphics and chiptune music and sounds.
• The Haunted PS 1 Demo Disc is a variation. While collecting a number of in-development horror games sharing an early PlayStation 1 aesthetic, rather than a game, it's a frontend, which lovingly recreates/parodies the Totally Radical and Xtreme!! box art, trailer video, and hyperactive dynamic menu of a magazine demo disc from the same era, complete with eyepopping talking skull, floppy-haired '90s kid, disembodied heart, flashing monitor screens, electronic music, and gratuitous CG. The first disc released in 2020 was merely a launcher menu, whereas the second disc from 2021 includes a Playable Menu in the form of a multi-level museum environment with each of the 25 games as its own exhibit, akin to the PS1 Namco Museum installments.
• Hazelnut Hex is inspired by 1990s arcade shumps, with cartoonish graphics resembling arcade Cute 'em Up games similar to Cotton, Harmful Park and DonPachi.
• Heidelberg 1693 is based on Castlevania games from the late 80s and early 90s, despite being made in 2021.
• Hellbound is a massive Doom homage, paying tribute to 90s gorntastic FPS games. To the point where it's website calls it the "best 90s FPS ever made in 2022"!
• Homestar Runner RPG, a cancelled RPG running on the Atari 2600.
• Hotline Miami:
  • The game is set in 1989 and has the graphics you'd expect from an arcade game of that era.
  • Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number has a twofer: keeping the pixelated graphics of its predecessor, as well as the presenting itself like a VHS tape, complete with VCR-style pause menus.
• Hypnospace Outlaw, an Adventure Game set up as an Internet simulator, takes place in an alternate 1999 where advances in technology have resulted in an web browser accessible while asleep. Owing to the time period, the game's operating system is set up with a pixelated and saturated look reminiscent of Windows 95, while the websites you can access evoke the early GeoCities aesthetic with deliberately low-quality animations and autoplaying MIDI-like songs. This extends to the general feel of the universe the game is set in as well, with the optimism and paranoia of Y2K painting the game's tone.
• Iji's graphics are done in low resolution to mimic games from the late eighties, and lots of solid colors as though there were a palette. The animations however, are much more fluid than those of that era.
• illWill (2023) is a loving homage to the No Plot? No Problem! days of Doom, Quake, and other 90s FPS games.
• Incision is made in the style of the original Quake.
• Ion Fury, a retitled prequel of Bombshell made with the Build engine (the engine that powers Duke Nukem 3D), is made to look as much like a '90s FPS game as possible. Its sequel, Phantom Fury, is a throwback to early polygon games, complete with low-resolution textures on character models.
• I Wanna Be the Guy focuses almost exclusively on the difficulty of older games with an occasionally matching graphical and audio style.
• Like many RPG Maker games, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass uses this aesthetic. The graphics have a grainier and more retro style than most RPG Maker VX games, the aesthetic is EarthBound-inspired, and the world map uses the same style as Chrono Trigger.
• JumpJet Rex, which was released in 2015, features 16-bit graphics and music similar to the games that inspired it, like the earlier Mega Man and Sonic the Hedgehog titles.
• Games by Kairo Soft such as Game Dev Story and Pocket Stables have sprite designs similar to those from early SNES games- pixelated, but makes full use of the 16-bit colors.
• Katamari Damacy:
  • The intro for "Shine! Mr. Sunshine" from Me and My Katamari is a chiptune version of "Katamari on the Rocks", the theme song from the first game.
  • One of the music tracks in Katamari Forever is a chiptune remix of "A Crimson Rose and a Gin Tonic" from the first game, done by Japanese chiptune band YMCK.
• Killer Queen wears its homages to Joust and Mario Bros. on its sleeve, with pixelated 8-bit sprites for all the characters, and music composed in Famitracker.
• The Timeless River in Kingdom Hearts II, which is Disney Castle in the past (reached through time travel), based on 1920s Disney shorts. The audio for the world is even in mono and the two songs for it are deliberately left in low quality on the game's OST. Everyone switches to their earlier/original designs — including Sora, who reverts to his Kingdom Hearts appearance, simplified even further to resemble Astro Boy-era Osamu Tezuka.
• Kingsway takes Retraux one step further by being a throwback to old-school PC Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game by building an entire fake operating system around it, modelled after older versions of Windows.
• Kirby:
  • The penultimate stage in Kirby's Adventure mimics the black-and-white look of the previous installment, Kirby's Dream Land, which was on the Game Boy. What makes this example particularly odd is that Dream Land was only released one year before Adventure. The level returns intact in the Game Boy Advance remake Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, where it makes more sense, given that the GBA is the direct successor to the Game Boy and is backwards-compatible with its games.
  • Kirby Star Allies:
    • The game has a black-and-white level at the end of the final secret stage, as one of the many references to the older Kirby games.
    • During the fight with Void in Soul Melter EX, the boss song is rather somber compared to the series' usual fast-paced and intense boss songs, and eventually starts adding chiptune to the theme. The chiptune eventually starts taking over the piano and starts playing the Green Greens theme from Kirby's Dream Land. But the pace of the song is still rather slow, and just enough of it was changed to make it feel not quite right before the piano takes back over and the song loops.
• La-Mulana is a 2005 indie PC game with a striking resemblance to MSX games, complete with limited boss animations, SSCC channel music, and Flip-Screen Scrolling, the latter of which many MSX platformers, such as Knightmare II: Maze of Galious and Vampire Killer, utilized due to the MSX's poor scrolling capabilities. The 2010 remake acts more like a 'lost' PSX game, with 32-bit graphics.
  • GR3, developed by the same people who worked on La-Mulana, is designed to mimic the MSX Gradius games, complete with the graphics, HUD, two-option limit, and jerky scrolling.
• The Last Door is an 8-bit horror made in the style of a LucasArts Point-and-Click adventure game. Aside from the sound department, the game looks like it would run on a Sega 32X with no issues.
• Left 4 Dead has a film grain, though you can disable it if you want. Additionally, the campaign title screens are made to look like movie posters and credits are played at the end of each, essentially making it a 90s Zombie Apocalypse movie in video game form.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games, you have access to a ring later in the game that makes you look like 8-bit Link from the original 1986 game.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for the Nintendo GameCube was deliberately designed to look like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, albeit with effects only possible on the GameCube, such as image distortions, a fluid, dynamic camera, and various overlaid 3D polygonal effects.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition has three nostalgic Bonus Dungeons, each of which were based on The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, and Link's Awakening, complete with graphics and music from each game respectively.
  • Hyrule Warriors: The Adventure Mode has a grid laid over the overworld map of the very first Zelda game and 8-bit sprites of all the characters. They even re-did maps from other Zelda games into the same style. Koholint Map is a partial exception, given its source game was already in 8-Bit (though it was modified so it can fit with the NES graphics and grid system).
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes has an outfit called the Timeless Tunic, which turns Link into a blocky version of his Wind Waker self and makes all the music and sound effects 8-bit chiptune. The NES-style music was originally created due to the memory limit of 3DS Download Play, as music with a smaller file size was required.
  • The soundtrack for the Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening include elements of Chiptune, usually taken directly from the original hardware, to complement the live reorchestration of the original soundtrack. Several songs (like the end credits) even have portions where the 8-bit version instrumentation takes over entirely.
• Lenna's Inception allows you to choose between 8-bit (i.e. NES and GameBoy Color) and 32-bit (i.e. GameBoy Advance) graphical styles, to fit with its various nods to the Zelda series.
• Life of Pixel is in the style of many 8-bit and 16-bit systems, from consoles to computers.
• Spanish game creator Locomalito is very fond of NES and arcade games from 80s, and his games show.
  • 8Bit Killer is a Wolfenstein 3-D-esque FPS featuring characters drawn with limited palette on 32*32 sprites (there are bigger entities than that, but no larger than 64*64) in a 3D world comprised of 32*32 textures at right angles to each other, 8-bit sounds and chiptune music in the style of NES.
  • Hydorah is a Gradius style shooter featuring very similar aesthetics to Gradius itself.
  • L'Abbaye des Morts is a platform game complete with one-colour sprites and Flip-Screen Scrolling in style of ZX Spectrum.
  • Maldita Castilla is a Ghosts 'n Goblins-inspired game with aesthetics of a late 80s arcade game. If the game was asking the player to insert coin, you'd be thinking you're playing an arcade game on an emulator.
  • The Curse of Issyos is a Greek mythology-themed homage to "Classicvania" games.
• Lost in Vivo fills out its sewer, subway, and cave environments with highly pixelated textures and blocky character models, and low-definition Silent Hill-inspired music and sound design.
• The low-poly visuals of the game Lunistice are heavily inspired by fifth generation console games, particularly the PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn. The game is even intentionally rendered at a low internal resolution to better sell the effect.
• Lyle in Cube Sector has sprites and backgrounds that would not look out of place in a Nintendo Entertainment System game.
• M2 have made this their specialty:
  • Gradius ReBirth is a throwback to older titles in the series, with sound effects from the MSX Gradius arc, remixes of music from lesser-known titles (Gradius II for Famicom, Salamander 2, etc.) using instrument samples from the arcade version of Gradius III, and graphics that look like something out of Gradius II, III, and Nemesis '90 Kai. They also developed, in the same line, Contra ReBirth and Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth.
  • Sega's Fantasy Zone Complete Collection in their Sega Ages line includes a reinterpretation of Fantasy Zone II if it had been developed by Sega's AM team on Sega's System 16 arcade board like the first game, instead of the vastly inferior Sega Master System hardware and System E arcade board. For extra authenticity points, they developed this remake on the actual System 16 hardware. The later 3DS release called it Fantasy Zone II W to distinguish it from the original Fantasy Zone II, and because it also comes with a new mode, Link Loop Land.
  • GG Aleste 3, released in the Aleste Collection and fifth version of the Game Gear Micro, was developed for the Game Gear in 2020. Aleste Collection, by default, emulates the slowdown issues that a real Game Gear would have with the game.
  • 2020's Namcot Collection includes newly-created ports of Pac-Man Championship Edition and Gaplus to the NES, the former of which is actually an officially-sanctioned NES fan project.
  • The Mega Drive Mini microconsole includes brand-new ports of Darius and Tetris for the Mega Drive hardware. The Mega Drive Mini 2 similarly includes a new Mega Drive port of Fantasy Zone.
• MacBat 64: Journey of a Nice Chap is a love letter to late 90s-era 3D Platformers like Banjo-Kazooie. As such, it presents itself in that style, from the wacky characters and colourful locales, to the Nintendo 64-era graphics.
• Freeware flash game Malstrum's Mansion (from the creator of Zeno Clash) is an Adventure Game in the style of Shadowgate or Uninvited, made in the style of an old black-and-white Apple Macintosh game. You start it up from a "System 1.0" desktop, and it even has manual-based copy protection!
• Magical Girl Critical is styled like an 8-bit video game, but it goes a bit further than most. When started up, a channel select is seen, and in widescreen mode, you can actually see the TV the game is being played on.
• Maptroid: The area's graphical representation in the top-right corner is pixel art, despite the rest of the game being made in HTML5.
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance allowed you to play Pitfall! with your active hero after the boss fight with Phoenix. While the hero still appears in 3D, the rest of the stage (save for the end point) is entirely made like in the Atari 2600.
• Mass Effect has a film grain screen filter, in order to better emulate the 70s-80s science fiction movies that inspired it, though this can be turned off in the settings. The default setting for Mass Effect 2 has it turned off, probably because of the shift in style - the sequel has more in common with the darker and more serious sci-fi of the The '90s, such as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5.
• McPixel is done in the style of late 70's / early 80's pixel point-and-click games.
• MCSX is a modpack for Minecraft that replicates what the game might look like on a Playstation, with crunchier visuals and short fog rendering, even using the original alpha and beta textures to further sell the old-school aesthetic.
• Mega Man 9 is done entirely as an NES-style game, essentially making it an NES game on high-definition consoles (and WiiWare, where it makes a bit more sense). Up until the game's release, this was busily producing a Broken Base — fortunately, it turned out to be so good, it consolidated Mega Man fandom in enjoyment instead. Capcom produced some fake NES carts for the game and commissioned a ridiculous "box art" picture◊ (a homage to the famously So Bad, It's Good North American cover◊ of 1 through 3, which had mostly nothing to do with the character). The game even has an option that lets you relive the glory days of NES sprite limitations by enabling sprites flickering when too many are on the screen at one time.
  • And it continues on with Mega Man 10, also in faux 8-bit sprites. Its faux box art has more-or-less the same style of Mega Man 9's, with now-unlocked-from-the-start Proto Man and Bass joining the badly-drawn fun, and boasting "Dual FX Twin Engines" and a "Parallel Hyper-Bit Interface" much like how Mega Man 9 promised an "Ultrasound Graphics Synthesis" and an "8-Bit Fidelity Engine". The "lost" commercial for 10 comes complete with all the attitude of video game ads in the 80s and poor VCR tracking. (The commercial music, though, is an anachronism of sorts for what is supposedly the 80s.)
  • Similar to Mega Man 9 and 10, Street Fighter X Mega Man is also created resembling the old NES Mega Man games, even including a password system resembling the one from Mega Man 2. Even the Street Fighter characters are drawn in NES graphics. (However, unlike MM9 and MM10, SFxMM merely mimics the NES look, as numerous sprites surpass the limits of NES graphics.)
• The Messenger (2018) is a notable example as it uses 2 different styles. When the game begins it uses an 8-bit style and appears to be an homage to games like Ninja Gaiden. Then halfway through the game, you are sent 500 years into the future, and the game takes on a 16-bit style. After a few levels of that, the game becomes a Metroidvania with Dual-World Gameplay between the 8-bit past and 16-bit future.
• During Act 4 of Metal Gear Solid 4, Old Snake starts dreaming on the way to Shadow Moses Island (the setting to Metal Gear Solid). The game scales back to PS1 standards. Original music, graphics, Guard stupidity, and even the Game Over screen is retraux. As Snake wakes up, his head is still PS1-style for a split second. This also unlocks facial camoflage that allows you to keep the PS1-Snake head (which makes him look like the eraser sitting on the top of a pencil in comparison to the rest of his body).
  • Also, in the boss fight against Liquid Ocelot, the appropriate music and health gauges regress back through the series for each stage of the fight, including changing the combatant's names and replacing Psyche with Hunger/Stamina or O2 (for chokeholds).
• In the original DS version of Meteos, the Falling Blocks on Gigagush take on the appearance of pixelated, solid-color creatures resembling those found in Space Invaders. The music is also a bare bassline meant to evoke the Atari 5200, as are the sound effects. Together, the sound package is titled "Aliens."
• Mighty Goose is a loving homage to 90s arcade side-scrolling shooters, with Metal Slug as it's most obvious influence.
• In Miitopia, when it's the protagonist's turn to attack, the battle music's main melody and some accompanying sounds become an NES chiptune version of itself, though the bass remains the same.
• Minecraft has intentionally very low resolution textures to go with the gameplay of moving giant pixels around. Originally the intention was to update to more modern graphics but fans had already become attached to the faux-16-bit textures.
• Misremembered Memories is a Len'en fangame in the style of the Touhou Project games for the PC-98.
• In Mother 3, the theme for the fight against the Porky bots is a 8-bit remix of one of the first battle themes in the game.
• Mr. Hopp's Playhouse: The graphics and gameplay can certainly bring Clock Tower (1995) to mind.
• Muri is a 2D shooter very reminiscent of old DOS platformers. It even has the option to turn on choppy scrolling.
• The Nintendo 3DS game Mutant Mudds has graphics somewhere between an NES and SNES in fidelity (the game advertises itself as "12-bit") and authentic NES chiptunes for music. Taken even further, there are hidden levels that mimic some iconic color schemes of older hardware; the pea-green grayscale of the Game Boy ("G-Land"), the red-and-black monochrome of the Virtual Boy ("V-Land") and the cyan/fuchsia/white/black of early IBM Personal Computers ("CGA-Land").
• Mystik Belle is a point & click adventure/Metroidvania hybrid with 16-bit graphics (albeit in widescreen) and a Famicom/NES-style chiptune soundtrack.
• The titular game in Nanashi no Game is based on 8-Bit style graphics, akin to Final Fantasy 1. Given Square Enix developed the game, this is likely intentional.
• Never Stop Sneakin', an Affectionate Parody of Metal Gear Solid, replicates the Three-Quarters View and low-res character model styles of MGS.
• Newcomer, by Protovision, is a C64 game released in 2001.
• Nexomon and its sequel have graphics designed to resemble the the third and fourth generations of Pokémon, albeit translated into HD.
• The 25th Anniversary Edition of Night Trap lets you choose between upscaled versions of the Sega CD, 3DO, and MS-DOS interfaces. Even better is that developer Tyler Hogle of Screaming Villains took the game's three deleted Game Over scenes from backup VHS tapes, recropped these scenes to widescreen, and modified their video processors, graphic sprites, displays, and audio to fit their respective retro interfaces so it would look like the entire game is played uncut on any 1990s console version.
• Some of the songs introduced in Season 7 of Ninjala are variants of pre-existing songs using an NES chiptune sound set and working within the NES's limitations to produce how these songs might have sounded like if they were composed during the NES era.
• Ninja Outbreak is done in very simplistic 8-bit style with chiptune music.
• Freeware Ninja Senki was made in 2011, yet its graphics and soundtrack are pure early 90's. The gameplay is considerably more fast-paced, though.
• The Pachinko minigame in Nintendo Land uses low-res graphics and an NES-style remix of the main theme.
• No More Heroes features a number of throwbacks to 8-bit games, including 8-bit music at some points, a pixellated tiger that serves as a timer for your special moves, a high score board that appears after each ranked battle, and even a top-down scrolling shooter minigame. The sequel turned the menial task side missions into 8-bit-style minigames as well. The final game starts with you playing the final level of an old, in-universe game, with a Yamaha soundchip for the music and sound effects.
• No One Lives Under The Lighthouse is a short experimental horror game using low-res textures and chunky polygons, framed as a long-forgotten, newly rediscovered PC game.
• Nostalgia (Red Entertainment) is a love letter to old Eastern RPGs.
• Observo: The game is made as a love letter to early-2000s Survival Horror video games, being rendered in fifth generation graphics and fixed camera angles that were widely used before Resident Evil 4's over-the-shoulder view became more widely accepted.
• Ocean's Heart is a top-down tribute to The Legend of Zelda games done in a pixelated graphical style. The creator of the game says that The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap on the Game Boy Advance was the most direct inspiration.
• Octopath Traveler is a unique style of retraux, blending 2D pixel art sprites with simplistic 3D environments (using pixel art textures) and modern lighting effects. Dubbed "2D-HD", this style went on to be used in Triangle Strategy and the remakes of Live A Live and Dragon Quest III.
• Odallus: The Dark Call looks like an NES game; specifically one that borrows from the Castlevania series.
• Office Point Rescue comes out in 2021, and the graphics deliberately resembles those from 1990s Konami / Capcom arcade games. The developers cites the original Time Crisis and GoldenEye as an inspiration.
• In Ōkami: The song during the narrator's closing words. If you sit and wait after the music pauses, an 8-bit remix of the song "Ida Race" starts to play. There were also official renditions of some of the game's areas as NES RPG style maps.
• Oniken is a Nintendo Hard tribute to Platform Games like Ninja Gaiden and Shatterhand, advertised with NES-style cover art including a Seal of Quality.
• Orange Pixel and Noodlecake Studios make several pixelated games, like Bitcoin Billionaire, Random Heroes 1-3, League of Evil, Punch Quest, Devious Dungeon, Groundskeeper, Heroes of Loot, etc.
• Organ Trail is a zombie apocalypse survival simulation in the style of, as the name suggests, The Oregon Trail.
• From the same developers as Pier Solar is Paprium, a homebrew beat 'em up for the Sega Genesis styled after genre entries from the 80s and 90s, like Streets of Rage and Final Fight. As an added touch, there is a full-fledged video ad for the game, done as if it were a 90s game commercial.
• Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows: The game is stylized as something that could be played on Game Boy Color.
• The sixth level of PaRappa the Rapper 2 is done with graphics and music resembling old 8-bit video games, and gets progressively less detailed as your performance dips into the "bad" and "awful" levels.
• Pathway is a 2019 Roguelike with 2D, 16 bits-like pixellated graphics.
• The "Void Quest" dungeon in Persona 4 mimics 8-bit graphics and even, during the boss fight, old-style RPG menus - with a twist (you're the monsters being attacked, and the boss is the hero). Golden even gives the boss a chiptune remix of the game's standard boss theme.
• Indie Puzzle Game Petal Crash's audio-visual presentation was clearly designed to mimic the look and feel of a Game Boy Color game with some elements of Game Boy Advance games sprinkled in, such as the game being in widescreen and sampled instruments being used alongside PSG instruments in its soundtrack.
• Phlegethon is a 2021 game that resembles the graphics of old-timey horror games of the late 2000s, with the original Silent Hill being the closest inspiration.
• Pier Solar and the Great Architects: A homebrew RPG on the Sega Genesis/Sega CD, with an HD version for newer consoles, including the Sega Dreamcast.
• Pokémon:
  • HeartGold and SoulSilver, already Video Game Remakes themselves, feature the "GB Sounds" key item, which allows you to replace the game's music with an imitation of the chiptune music from the original Game Boy Color games. Notably, this includes the areas new to the remakes, which received all-new chiptunes.
  • Done in the opening sequence of Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Up to a certain point, it appears to be a 1:1 creation of the original games' introductions, complete with the original 16-bit soundtrack. Later, the camera pans up and away to show this as being a video the player character is watching on their PokéNav Plus during the trip to Littleroot Town, as the music seamlessly transitions into the updated version. The localizations take this a step further by putting KEY TERMS in all caps until the reveal, something that had otherwise been abandoned two generations ago. During regular play the DexNav shows every area as it appeared in the original games on the lower screen.
  • Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl try to emulate the original Pokémon Diamond and Pearl by turning their 2D sprites into 3D Nintendo Switch models while keeping the aesthetic of the originals.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield do this when you trade a Pokémon with someone. The background music during the trading sequence begins with a perfect replica of the theme as heard in Pokémon Red and Blue, but more instruments are soon added in for something sounding more modern.
• The Pokémon fangame Pokémon Wilds uses graphics straight out of Gold and Silver, though it features Pokémon and mechanics from later generations.
• Pole's Big Adventure uses this trope to its fullest as it is a Parody of the 8-bit Platformer.
• The logos for Aperture Laboratories in "The Fall" in Portal 2. In the earliest section built in the 1950s, it's called "Aperture Science Innovators" with a symbol for an atom. For the 1970s, it's a very typical 70s yellow logo. The items in each test are also designed to look like older versions of the main testing rooms and equipment from Portal and the first part of Portal 2.
• Pot of Legend, a mobile game about Rewarding Vandalism, is done in a pixelated 8-bit style.
• Power Bomberman features the appropriately-named Retro stage, which is visually based on Bomberman for the NES down to the bombs, fire and items, including new old-school sprites for those that hadn't been invented at the time.
• The 1st part of the opening sequence for Power Stone is made to look and sound like a faded film reel from the early 20th century is being run. This is appropriate since the game scenery and characters are throwbacks to that era.
• Progressbar 95: This smartphone game has an old Windows operating system feel at first, complete with graphics and whirring computer sounds.
• Project Warlock, a Wolfenstein 3-D-esque shooter made in Fall 2018, with RPG elements.
• Protect Me Knight and its sequel would not look out of place if they had released on NES, being an homage to tower defense games of the era. They also include an option for an FM soundtrack similar to the Sega Genesis. The games even got a spin-off which actually did release as an NES cart.
• Puyo Puyo had a slightly different art style from 2003 to 2011, which the 2013 game Puyo Puyo!! Quest emulates for its story mode where the characters visit the Puyo Puyo Fever 2 era. Not only are there HD sprites of the characters in the simpler Fever style, but the Spacetime Detectives, who were introduced later in Quest's lifetime, are drawn in this style as well.
• Pylons: The game is presented as something you would've played on the old MS-DOS systems, presented with old 8-bit graphics and sounds, and having the ground be solid black.
• Rabbit Knight is deliberately designed to look and play like an old-school Nintendo Hard platformer form the 90s.
• Raging Justice is stylized to resemble 90s Beat 'em Up arcade games, despite coming out in 2015.
• Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army deliberately has no voice acting and uses a 30s style silent film appearance for its dialog windows in order to mimic silents films of the era the game takes place in. Its sequel, Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon, maintains this technique.
• Randy Learns Science has the aesthetic of early 90's edutainment games.
• Realm of the Mad God is done in a pixelated style.
• There exists a (free, totally not-for-profit) fan project to recreate the 1996 Resident Evil in first-person. It's framed as a Stealth Prequel where you play as Bravo Team members Richard and Rebecca, and the visual rendering is so perfectly accurate to the original that any time the player holds still, the environment looks exactly like a static background from the real game.
• The deluxe version of the remake of Resident Evil 2 has a feature where you can change the soundtrack (though some of the remake's songs will still play) to play the music from the original game. Menus, item boxes, and typewriters also use their classic sound effects with the music swap. Swapping the music will also have the familiar ominous voice that shouts "RESIDENT EVIL! 2!" at the title screen. The game also has DLC where Leon and Claire's character models can be swapped out for their original low polygon versions used in the original 1998 game.
• Retro Bowl mimics the look and simplicity of old NES football games like Tecmo Bowl.
• Retro City Rampage:
  • The game plays like an 8-bit Grand Theft Auto and is chock full of Shout Outs to stuff from The '80s.
  • Taken even further with ROM City Rampage, a version of Retro City Rampage designed to work with the limitations of actual 8-bit hardware.
  • And Retro City Rampage 486, an MS-DOS port distributed on a 1.44 mb floppy disk.
• Retro Game Challenge is a collection of faux 8-bit games, presented in-story as having been sent back in time by the host of Game Center CX/Retro Game Master, the Japanese television show it's based on. One of the random events that can take place when you choose a game to play in Story Mode is the cartridge not working and Arino suggesting that you should blow on it. In the second game, you're given a choice to karate chop it instead when it happens and if you don't pick that option, Arino does it himself the next time it happens.
• Retromania Wrestling takes after Tecmo's WWF Superstars and WWF Wrestlefest in it's cartoonish graphics and fast paced gameplay. It even includes a posthumous^note Hawk succumbed to a heart attack in 2003, while Animal passed from natural causes in 2020 months prior to the game's release appearance from the Road Warriors, who appeared as bosses in Wrestlefest.
• The two Retro Revolution games released so far have been done in 16-bit-style graphics.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn is a 3D, animated (partially), polygon-based game, but with a shader that renders every individual frame as if it's a heavily dithered, pixel-based image on a one- or two-color monitor from the early '80s even as the player character moves through the Ghost Ship of the title. The settings offer the ability to switch from the default Apple Macintosh display to IBM, Zenith, LCD, and various others. Settings with a black-and-white/green/grey feature a soft glow on the 'lit' pixels. As a further example within an example, the text and illustrations from the game are done in the style of 19th Century pen-and-ink illustrations, with the dithering corresponding rather neatly with the stippling techniques of the time.
• Rex Rocket is meant to emulate the look, sound, and DIFFICULTY LEVEL of classics like Mega Man and Metroid.
• The Lady Cupid Endless Game in Rhythm Heaven Fever uses pixelated graphics and chiptune music.
  • The Super Samurai Slice game in Rhythm Heaven Megamix is made to resemble a side-scrolling action game. However, almost all of the sound effects are modern.
  • The practice sessions of most stages in the Rhythm Heaven series are set to a stripped down chiptune version of whatever that stage's song would be. The tempo and chord progression are kept but not the melody.
• In Robopon, the GBA games' music sometimes uses sounds from the GBC games.
• The Room: The Game: Resembling a hybrid Game Boy Advance game and mid-90's adventure.
• Rugrats Adventures In Gameland has the option to switch between high-definition widescreen graphics and an authentic NES throwback.
• Much of Rumblesushi3D's games, particularly their racing ones, heavily resemble arcade racing games of the 90s, what with their low-poly graphics and pixellated textures, as well as exaggerated physics.
• Saints Row IV features a stage where the Boss has to fight their way through a retro-style 2D Beat 'em Up, replete with Stylistic Suck, from the stilted and heavily digitized voice-acting to models that are pixelated and choppily animated to resemble sprites.
• Samurai Gunn is designed to at least have the look of this, with pixel art graphics for its visual design. Subverted in terms of the sound design which uses occasional speech samples for death sequences.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game looks, sounds, and feels like a beat-em-up game from the 1990s— quite fittingly for a game based on a graphic novel that was heavily inspired by video games of the '90s. Indeed, Ubisoft specifically hired rock band Anamanaguchi and graphic artist Paul Robertson for the game because of their previous Retraux work!
• Much like Mega Man 9, Sega Racing Classic, an Updated Re-release of the classic racing title Daytona USA, uses graphics that look like they came out of 1994, the year the original game was released to international audiences. The only changes were to the draw distance and resolution. See it in all of its glory here. This is largely due to practicality more than anything else. Arcade operators (they still exist!) continued to place orders to Sega for Daytona USA machines and replacement parts. Unfortunately, Sega no longer produces the hardware and no longer had the Daytona license (till 2017, at least). The solution was Sega Racing Classic, which solves all three problems.
• The Doom Game Mod Shadow of the Wool Ball is deliberately created as a throwback to the Wolfenstein 3-D era, with everything being the same height, all floors and ceilings being featureless, and all walls under orthogonal angles only. The sequel, Rise of the Wool Ball, is analogously a homage to Rise of the Triad and makes use of that game's technical limitations.
• Sharpshooter 3D has a visual style of the 1993 Doom, even using the same mod, despite being released in 2018.
• Shovel Knight is done in an 8-bit style as a tribute to 8-bit games, with a few liberties taken to make things a bit prettier. Despite it being an Indie game, the style is actually an entirely deliberate choice done for its own sake, rather than for the cheaper production values. Even the soundtrack gets in on the act, being done with Konami's VRC6 sound chip.
• SilverFrame echoes early '90s 3d space combat games such as Wing Commander and X-Wing, with a touch of '80s arcade vector graphics.
• Wrack has it's animation designed to resemble a 90s graphic novel coming to life, with the developers calling is a cross between the original Doom and Mega Man.
• In The Sims 4, the Vintage Glamour Stuff pack contains objects and gameplay inspired by aesthetics from The Roaring '20s to The '50s. Bowling Night Stuff also takes cues from The '50s.
• Siren 2: "Kunitoris" in Siren 2, with gameplay and a title screen resembling a Famicom game, and the JOYLiNK Ultra Network King in Siren: Blood Curse, resembling Game & Watch LCD games.
• Slap City has some retro style stages. "Clone Horde" version of Fluffy Field is done with N64-esque graphics, and Hurtland stage uses 8-bit visuals like Princess Remedy In a World of Hurt.
• Slayin somewhat resembles a 16-bit portable game, and the game icon resembles a cartridge for a handheld system.
• Slide in the Woods: The game is rendered in 64-bit PS1-style graphics.
• Snailiad is an 8-bit style game.
• Sol Cresta's graphical and audio style are designed in the style of 16- and 32-bit games.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Game Land Zone from Sonic Colors. The layout of the levels are basic replicas of the levels from the classic Sonic games, and the music played in the levels are 8-bit chiptune-styled remixes of the music from the main game. Fittingly, the chiptune sounds are based on those of the Sega Master System, not the NES.
  • Sonic Mania is a 2017 Sonic the Hedgehog game designed to look as if it came out on the Sega Saturn. As such, it has Sonic, Tails & Knuckles as the only playable characters (that is, until the Plus update, which added Ray and Mighty from SegaSonic the Hedgehog), graphics designed after the Genesis games but with the higher resolution and brighter colors of Sonic the Hedgehog CD, a jazzy CD-quality soundtrack also inspired by Sonic CD, and many classic sound effects from the Genesis days. It also has an animated intro and ending, and even low-poly 3D models in some places, in the style of what you'd see on the Saturn! The physical version of the Updated Re-release also comes with a reversible cover that looks like the cover of a Sega Genesis game.
  • In Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, Opa-Opa's "voice" samples consists of sound effects ripped directly from Super Fantasy Zone. This is in contrast to fellow retro racers Alex Kidd (who's Suddenly Voiced) and the Bonanza Bros. (who have their "he-he", the only speech they ever had in the original game, resampled in multiple variants)
• Soulcaster and Soulcaster II have 8-bit-style graphics.
• Soundless Mountain 2 is a 2-D fan remake of Silent Hill 2.
  • Noiseless Mound is a 2-D fan "remake" of Silent Hill.
  • When Harry makes a cameo appearance in the Silent Hill 2 UFO ending, he appears in blocky, PS1-era graphics.
• Space Quest:
  • Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers revolves around time travel. Though it was produced in the 256-color VGA era, you can travel back to Space Quest I (and Space Quest III in an Easter Egg)... complete with low-res 16-color EGA graphics. This (comically) extends to the smells as attempting to smell the force field generators around Uelence Flats results in the narrator saying it's supposed to smell like it but there's only 16 smells in EGA, therefore it smells like the time pod.
  • Space Quest V: The Next Mutation: In the Eureka's maintenance tunnel, you can disconnect a fuse labelled "EGA-to-VGA", doing so results in the colors reverting to a 16-bit palette until you put it back in.
• Any games by Spiderweb Software are about ten years behind normal games in both their style and their engines, although they advance at the same rate as the rest of the industry. There is a very good reason for this: they have a development team of three people, and if they tried to make modern-style games they wouldn't be able to finish them at a reasonable pace.
• Squad 51 vs. the Flying Saucers is a 1930s B-movie, now translated in video game form. In 2021.
• Star Command is made with pixel graphics in a deliberate attempt to mimic Game Dev Story and recall older games. On the other hands, the backgrounds are spectacular.
• Star Trek: Trexels contains pixelated graphics.
• Steampunk game Steel Empire has the levels start with an old sepia-tone video.
• Streets of Rage 4 includes unlockable characters taken straight from the first three games, pixels and all, as well as the option to replace the soundtrack with those from 1 and 2.
• Stubbs the Zombie. Retro-future setting and they intentionally put a grainy "filter" of sorts to complete the ensemble.
• SturmFront: The Mutant War is pretty much a 90s Run-and-Gun arcade actioner, released in 2017.
• Super Kiwi 64: This game takes a lot of aesthetic influences from later-era Nintendo 64 platformers, particularly those developed by Rare, with simplistic low-polycount characters, low-resolution texture work, and baked lighting.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Maker is a Mario game maker with four styles: the NES Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3, the SNES Super Mario World, and the Wii U New Super Mario Bros. U. For the former three, most graphics are directly taken from the game of origin with little modification; however, when new elements are required, they have new sprites that match the visual style of the selected game. For example, Thwomps and Wigglers in Super Mario Bros. mimic the off-model and poorly-animated graphics of the original game, while Super Mario World has more on-model depictions of Hammer Bros. and Bowser available. This goes even further with amiibo compatibility, with characters never seen in 8-bit (such as the Wii Fit Trainer and Isabelle) gaining new sprites in their playable depiction.
  • At one point in Paper Mario: Color Splash, Mario enters an alternate world inspired by Super Mario Bros. 3, complete with 8-bit graphics and music. Taking a page from Super Paper Mario, Mario can use paint to change the perspective from a 2D perspective for an isometric one, however this is only active for ten seconds at a time.
  • The Bitlands in Super Paper Mario are a throwback to 8-bit games. The doors in Fort Francis even make retro sound effects when opened. Additionally a few of the power-ups create 8-bit characters. The mega star turns your character into a giant 8-bit sprite and the pal pill makes little 8-bit versions of the character surround them. Then there’s also The Underchomp boss fight in Chapter 7, which is one big Shout-Out to early turn-based JRPGs such as Dragon Quest and the Mother series.
  • The Thousand-Year Door has this too - in addition to the traditional ability to turn Mario into an 8-bit sprite (as seen in most of the other Paper Mario games and Super Mario RPG), you can do the same for Mario's various partners - they'll take on edited forms of the sprites of the basic enemy type they are generally, though some like Flurry and Ms. Mowz get totally new sprites due to not being based on any preexisting enemies.
  • Bowser Memory M and Bowser Memory L, in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, are pixelated entities resembling (but clearly distinct from) Mario and Luigi, respectively. Bowser Memory M's attacks are based on what Mario and Luigi could do in Super Mario Bros., and Bowser Memory L's is based on what Mario and Luigi could do in Super Mario Bros. 3.
  • The remake of Super Mario RPG has Culex, the resident Optional Boss, kept in his sprite form from the original game. He even has the same 16-bit renditions of the Final Fantasy music that play during and after his fight. This is actually Culex's motivation for fighting Mario, as he wishes to understand and obtain the power of the "third dimension" so he may enter Mario's world. Sure enough, his fight in the postgame has Culex obtain this power, resulting in a fully-rendered Culex with brand-new orchestral renditions of those same songs, and he's even harder to boot. As another example of this trope in play, the end credits start out with their SNES version, music and all, until the second half switches to the 3D models from Johnny's appearance onward.
  • Being something of a celebration of Mario's history, Super Mario Odyssey uses this trope in several places:
    • Several areas feature "pixelated" pipes that turn Mario into his Super Mario Bros. sprite upon entrance and allow him to travel along the wall a la The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. While in this form, the regular background music will be muffled while a chiptune arrangement plays over it. When Mario climbs into one while Capturing Bowser, he comes out as the "Big Mushroom" Bowser sprite from Super Mario Maker.
    • One of Mario's many purchasable outfits turns him into his older, polygonal self from Super Mario 64. Talking to a certain Toad while wearing this outfit would allow you to access a recreation of Peach's courtyard from the same game, flat trees and all. A later update added an even blockier "8-bit" model based on the 30th Anniversary amiibo, permanently stuck in a jumping pose.
    • While they can't be heard during normal gameplay, chiptune arrangements of "Jump Up, Super Star!" and "Break Free (Lead the Way)" can be unlocked and played in the in-game music player.
  • Mario Kart Tour has the drivers Mario (SNES) and Donkey Kong Jr. (SNES), who use their sprites from Super Mario Kart instead of 3D models like all other characters in the game. Playing as them even changes the countdown, item roulette sounds, and finish music to their Super Mario Kart versions. The 8-Bit Pipe Frame is a voxel version of the kart from Super Mario Kart, and multiple gliders are based on sprites from the original Super Mario Bros..
• Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania has the Classic Characters Pack DLC, which grants you the ability to play as the main cast using their original designs from prior to Banana Blitz. This goes for Blitz newcomers YanYan and Doctor as well, giving them designs that are more in-line with the GameCube games.
• Team Meat, the developers behind Super Meat Boy, released an iOS tie-in game designed to invoke LCD gaming like Game & Watch and Tiger Handheld.
• Super Rad Raygun is a new run & gun style platformer from the folks at Screwattack.com which takes on the look of an old Game Boy game.
• Super Retro Squad is a game featuring nine characters inspired by Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Blaster Master. It invokes the look and feel of an Super Nintendo Entertainment System game, but Downloadable Content is planned to include 8-bit and handheld versions of the game, soundtrack and all. Since this is made by the same team behind Super Mario Bros. Crossover, you'd know where it is all coming from.
• Super Catboy, a 2023 game, have graphics made based on 1990s pixel-based arcade games, with Megaman serving as a major design inspiration.
• In Super Robot Wars Z, the older super robots such as Baldios, God Sigma and Getter Robo G get some very awesome retro-looking animations in their finisher attacks, complete with choppy animation and trippy retro "laser backgrounds" and pastel-frame explosions! This is a first for the franchise and was the key to grabbing the attention of many people who weren't very excited about the game initially and also demonstrates the degree of love the designers have for the older shows, preserving them in all their glory. Needless to say, many mech-anime fan tears of joy were shed.
  • They continued the trend in the sequel, most prominently with God Mars, who receives the lowest amount of actual frame-by-frame movement that was physically possible. His dodging animation is so slight you may never notice it!
• Super Smash Bros. has several examples:
  • Most notable is Mr. Game & Watch, a 2-Dimensional stick figure that references an old Nintendo Game and Watch game with almost every move he makes. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, he even transforms into different Game and Watch characters outright.
  • Several Assist Trophies simply appear as 8-bit or 16-bit sprites, namely the Excite Bikes, Infantry and Tanks, Sheriff, Lakitu, Ghosts, and Color TV-Game 15. Additionally, Andross appears in his polygonal 16-bit form rather than his modern design.
    • Ultimate adds Akira to the mix, using his blocky polygonal model from his debut appearance rather than his current design.
  • Every iteration of the series has had at least one Retraux stage:
    • The original has Mushroom Kingdom, modeled after Super Mario Bros.. Melee follows this with Mushroom Kingdom II, which is modeled after the Super Mario All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 2, and also includes Flat Zone, a stage taking place inside a Game & Watch.
    • Brawl has 75m, Green Hill Zone, Mario Bros., and Flat Zone 2.
    • 4 has Balloon Fight, Dream Land (complete with a Game Boy startup sequence and border!), Pac-Maze, Mute City, Duck Hunt, and Pac-Land. The Pilotwings stage starts out as a Retraux throwback to the original SNES game, but changes to a representation of Wii Sports Resort halfway through.
    • Ultimate brings back all of the above except for Pac-Maze but lacks any new stages derived from older games done in their native graphical style. However, it does have Minecraft World, which keeps the Retraux look of the game it's based on, with the environment made up entirely of cubes with low-resolution textures and background characters and animals moving in a simplistic, primitive manner.
  • Stages from the original Nintendo 64 iteration have appeared in every subsequent Smash game (except for Brawl), with the original Sprite/Polygon Mix graphics kept intact each time. Even in Ultimate, where every other stage is given a significant graphical upgrade, the Nintendo 64 stages still use the same primitive-even-for-the-time graphics they did years ago.
• Supplice, a loving homage to 90s gorn-filled FPS games with Doom being it's main inspiration. In fact, the game started off as a Doom mod in 2009 before it became a standalone game.
• SWAT Police is a run-and-gun arcade-style shooter played from a behing-the-back perspective, a genre popular in the late 80s... but it's released in 2001.
• Sword Of Xolan is a side scrolling platformer with pixelated graphics.
• All four Sydney Hunter games have been rendered in 8-bit to 16-bit graphics with chiptune music.
• The 2023 remake of System Shock keeps the original game's pixelated textures and the retro-futuristic aesthetic, resulting in what looks like an early PlayStation 2-looking game with modern day shaders and lighting effects.
• The TakeOver, a Beat 'em Up video game with aesthetics and gameplay lifted from 80s classics like Streets of Rage and Final Fight, but released in 2016.
• Tanuki Justice is a game rendered entirely in 8-bit, resembling old-school arcade Run-and-Gun games... released in 2021.
• Tanzer, a 2019 game visually resembling 90s Hack and Slash platformers like Strider, Cannon Dancer and Hagane.
• Tattletail takes place in 1998 and focuses on Furby-esque toys, and so much of the game and its marketing is done in the style of home-recorded VHS tapes, including the loading screens and one section where the player watches a VHS tape.
• Team Fortress 2's art style (including some fake ads on the official website and introductory tutorials shown on grainy projector film) has a 1950s-60s aesthetic. The jazzy spy music helps too.
  • The WAR! Update's Propaganda Contest's honorable mentions includes "Best Attempts at Authentic WWI-Era Propaganda," "Best Attempts at Authentic WWII-Era Propaganda," "Best Use of the Time-Worn Maxim, 'Sex Sells,'" and "Best Ironic Resuscitation of a Long-Dead Genre."
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge follows in the footsteps of the classic TMNT arcade brawlers.
• Test Drive: Eve of Destruction has a cheat, the description of which claims that it is "newly discovered racing footage from 1912".
• One of the many Tetris variants on Tetris Friends is Tetris 1989, designed to mimic the Game Boy version as close as possible.
• ThanksKilling Day: The game is rendered in old PS1-era polygons (though the sound is very up-to-date) in order to help emulate the games that inspired it. It even has an optional Standard-Def screen filter.
• Them's Fightin' Herds: Outside of the actual Fighting Game parts, the game use 16-bit styled sprites in segments with an overworld, such as its Action RPG-inspired story mode and the Pixel Lobby.
• Thule Trail was a Flash-based remake of Oregon Trail taking place in the modern day, with the goal of arriving in time to a music festival from Chicago to LA, in a car equipped with a Thule luggage rack.
• Mobile Phone Game Timing Hero has graphics, music and sound effects reminiscent of a Game Boy game.
• Mobile Phone Game Tiny Dangerous Dungeon looks, sounds and plays like an old Game Boy game.
• The Flash game Tower of Heaven has graphics in shades of green that would look at home on the original Game Boy.
• Transformers: Devastation homages the original G1 show (particularly the movie) in terms of visuals, design, writing, and voiceover work.
• Tunic has a throwback to 90s video games, not with the game itself but with its user manual, full of cute illustrations and Gratuitous English. Pulling up said manual also shows that in-story you're playing the game on a CRT television.
• Ultima Underworld II: An area in the Ethereal Void is a Call-Back to the earlier vector line dungeon graphics of Ultima and Akalabeth.
• Uncanny Valley combines a Survival Horror story with VGA-era PC Adventure Game graphics and gameplay.
• Undertale and Deltarune are mostly made to look like 8-bit or 16-bit Role Playing Games like EarthBound (1994) with some Chiptune music, although there are smoother animations and occasional breaks from the retro style.
• UnMetal mimics the 8-bit graphical style of Metal Gear, Snake's Revenge and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
• Unpacking has a 16-bit graphical style.
• Valkie 64: The game is rendered in 64-bit to emulate the Nintendo 64 Action-Adventure Video Games it was inspired by.
• Venture Kid is meant to emulate the NES-era Classic Mega Man games, utilizing 8-bit graphics and chiptune music.
• Vernal Edge resembles a 2D title from The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games, combining detailed sprites with low-poly 3D graphics for the overworld. The game's story also features many elements that were common in the Eastern RPGs of the time, including airships, a Gotta Catch Them All plot, and an antagonistic Corrupt Church.
• The Nintendo 3DS's Virtual Console allows you to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, and added a few Retraux touches to enhance the experience: for example, on original Game Boy games it's possible to swap between a grayscale screen and a green screen that emulates the look of the original Game Boy, even including a motion blur similar to that in the old system. This is done by holding both the L and R buttons and then pressing Y to swap between them. It's also possible to view the games in their original resolution, with a border representing the original system surrounding the screen- the 3DS's 3D effect is used to give the appearance of the screen being set back from the border, and they even emulated the battery light dimming as the 3DS's battery runs low and even includes the Classic Game Boy's "DOT MATRIX WITH STEREO SOUND" label on the front. This is achieved by holding START and SELECT while selecting a title (software has to be closed first).
  • Both the Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo DSi have this in their sound app when playing music from an SD card, either the "Radio" filter that simulates an old AM radio, complete with graininess and pops and the "8-bit" filter but that tends to sound really bad on many songs.
• Void Stranger, by the same developers as ZeroRanger, is a Game Boy-style grayscale, chiptune-scored, block puzzle game/dungeon crawler hybrid.
• VVVVVV feels like some lost computer game from the 1980s, with monochromatic sprites, screen-by-screen gameplay à la Jet Set Willy and Monty on the Run, and even an authentic Commodore 64 font for in-game text.
• The Rewinder, a Point-and-Click fantasy game released in 2021, have all it's graphics depicted in 8-bit format, as a homage to older games of it's type.
• A Chinese developer known as Waixing, known for its RPG conversions, remade the original Resident Evil for famiclones. It plays identically to Resident Evil Gaiden and has screechy music.
  • And it doesn't just end there! How about Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV, V, and even VII; plus Samurai Shodown RPG, Digimon, Heroes of Might and Magic, Warriors Orochi and, for a dessert, RPGs based on The King of Fighters '95 and '96 by the rival company, Nanjing? The list is not ended yet.
• WarioWare: Starting from WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$, microgames frequently resemble NES, SNES and Game Boy games. WarioWare: Smooth Moves is full of Retraux, like the 9-Volt retro stages and the Ashley's Theme title cards to the character intros.
• What Lies in the Multiverse has a 16-bit graphic and music style.
• The Nintendo Wii's controller, the Wii Remote, has a design consciously modeled◊ after that of the original Famicom/NES controller. When held horizontally, you have the D-pad on the left, the 1 and 2 buttons on the right replacing B and A respectively, and the + and - buttons in the middle standing in for Start and Select. The only fundamental changes made beyond aesthetics are the large A button on the front next to the D-pad, the Home button between + and -, the Z trigger on the back, and of course, the Wii's trademark motion controls. Likewise, the Wii Classic Controller was basically a Super Nintendo controller with dual analog sticks and two extra shoulder buttons.
• Wizardry 8: Attempted with the retro dungeons of cubic rooms with bold highlighted lines, but the textured walls don't convey the older games so well.
• WRATH: Aeon of Ruin uses the Quake engine, although it's really the modified derivative source port known as Darkplaces that started development in the early 2000's. Regardless, chunky low-poly models and pixellated textures are king.
• The Indie Game Wretcher is an attempt to mimic old horror adventure games, and uses a 16-bit style remniscent of the Clock Tower games.
• Xeno Crisis: a Run-and-Gun game that was developed for Sega Genesis...in 2019.
• Yes, Your Grace: The game is almost entirely in 8-bit graphics, albeit with fluid animation and a large range of colors. The Modular Epilogue is made with higher-quality graphics that betray the 2020 release date.
• Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void (a Fan Sequel to the 1990 NES game Yo! Noid) is made to look like a PlayStation game being played on a CRT television.
• Zeboyd Games makes tributes to (and parodies of) 8-bit and 16-bit Role Playing Games. Breath of Death VII homages Dragon Quest games for the NES with a slightly larger graphics palette. Cthulhu Saves the World is similar but with aesthetics more in line with SNES games. Cosmic Star Heroine is a homage to Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star and several other 16-bit J-RPGs made for PC and PlayStation 4. The music in these games, however, is anything but retro.
• ZeroRanger is a '90s-inspired animesque vertical shmup with dichromatic graphics reminiscent of the Super Game Boy.
• In Zettai Hero Project, the main character had just taken over the mantle of the Unlosing Ranger; since no one believes in him, he has no sponsors. So for the first few times he goes up against Dark Death Evil Man, it's set to an 8-bit RPG system akin to Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. It progressively improves to 16-bit before settling on visuals more akin to Valkyrie Profile.

Systems

every fantasy console qualifies as this, as they have limitations that meet certain video game console generation characteristics, most of them

• PICO-8, TIC-80, PX 8 and most other fantasy consoles target to met limitations of consoles from the 3rd Generation/8-Bit era.
• the only well-known 16-bit fantasy console as of now is Picotron (which is the 16-bit counterpart of PICO-8)

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