Retro
What is retro?
Retro. Retro Thought Pod. Interesting name; interesting website. But what does it really mean? What is the website about, really?
Flashback: The year 2000, and Majora’s Mask comes out for the Nintendo 64. Fresh on the heels of Ocarina of Time, you grab it (or have it given to you) and play through it non-stop. Amid weird stuff about Link becoming a shriveled nut, and “the masks we wear,” not to mention the weird creepy guy lit by under-lighting that brings out the pointy nose and ‘I-don’t-want-to-be-alone-with-this-guy’ vibe, you finish the game after beating one of the weirdest incarnations of a bad guy that you had seen recently. It goes frolicking around the room waving long spindly arms and throwing death light-stars at you, for Pete’s sake. But you finish the game, and, I think we all have to admit this, you had a ‘What just happened?’ moment. I know I did. You had to take a moment, or a few minutes, maybe even a day or two, and think back over the game you just played, and figure out what, exactly, you had accomplished. “I just stopped a moon with a gigantic mouth from taking out a village.” It got weird.
I don’t know about you, but I know I had to go back and play through the game again (and again), with more care and deliberation, to try and figure out just what indeed was going on in this land-that’s-not-at-all-like-Hyrule. And to bring back the original question, that is what this website, and the word “retro”, is about. There was something weird about the game Majora’s Mask, but, dangit, there was something that was significant about that game, even if I couldn’t even begin to tell you why. But that’s why we here at Retro Thought Pod are engaging in a retrospective. There was something to those games, those sports, those videos and songs, and we know it was something significant. Could we tell you exactly why when we first played them? Probably not. But because there was something that stuck with us, above and beyond the fact that we grew up with them, we want to find out what their significance was.
That’s really the drive behind the website. There’s a story to what has gone before, a story that plays itself out in the games we played, the songs we listened to, the sports we cheered and participated in, the movies we watched. We want to bring the story out, to tell it again. Does everything from the past have significance or bearing on the present? Not always, but they were a way through which we learned about life. And life today plays itself out in largely the same way; the games, the songs, the videos, the sports… all of them say something about us. They say something about the culture that created them, and the people who participate in them. It’s not like the games and songs and such that we review are necessarily better, but if you don’t understand what came before, you won’t understand what’s going on now. All the songs and videos and games and such either try and improve on what came before, or they utterly reject it and branch out in new ways. We’re tracing the roots back to our own time, and connecting the dots. Come with us, and while we’re connecting the dots, we may even chase a ghost or four.
-Dan
