Hey, do you like Wrecking Crew? What’s your high score in Mach Rider? Which Atari 2600 game is better, Haunted House or Ice Hockey?
As a Nintendo-obsessed child I felt a drive to know my history, which meant playing all the classics. When the Wii introduced the Virtual Console, you best believe I dropped $5 for every NES game whose title I at all recognized. Sometimes it paid off. Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3, Kirby’s Adventure, and Mega Man 2 remain some of my favorite games of all time.
But in the 1980s, when video games will thought of primarily as toys for children, many games played like it. I know you rescue the princess by beating 8-4. How do you beat Balloon Fight? What’s the goal of Excitebike? Well, the goal is you set your own goal.
That’s where I bounce off of so many classic games. If the game is over whenever you feel done with it, that moment comes quickly for me. I was born already in an era where video games progress to a climax. A game designed as a high score challenge on a console incapable of saving that score? That’s “pointless” twice over.
Until I discovered RetroAchievements.
RetroAchievements is a service that, as advertised, adds achievements to retro video games. You might have the same gut reaction that I did when I first discovered it: Achievements? Those annoying pop-ups that plague every game released since 2008? Isn’t one of the appeals of retro gaming that it doesn’t have those?
Sure, definitely. I roll my eyes when the emulator congratulates me on picking up a mushroom in Mario. Those are silly achievements in any game. But an acknowledgement that I 100%ed some aspect of the game, by collecting all the doodads or completing whatever list, tickles my brain and makes me feel my accomplishment isn’t wiped when I close the emulator.
Considering that, I think I’m less interested in the achievements as feats of gaming strength then as a way of tracking progression. RetroAchievements categorizes your played games as “unbeaten” (self-explanatory), “beaten,” and “completed.” Completion is simply unlocking all achievements. Beaten status is reached by completing certain progression-related achievements defined by the achievement set author. For example, unlocking the achievement for beating “Bowser in the Sky” will set your status on Super Mario 64 as beaten.
Here’s the key for me: Every game has a “beaten” condition. I beat NES Ice Hockey by winning a single player game against every opponent. I beat Pac-Man for the 2600 by reaching 10,000 points. Duck Hunt can be “beaten” according to RetroAchievements by reaching level 20. By setting those goals, and measuring which ones I’ve met, RetroAchievements has inspired me to play or replay every game in my ROM library. I’ve even been playing entirely on “hardcore mode,” which prohibits savestates and other emulator-level cheats. I’m playing these games just as I would have had to in the 80s. Many hold up better than I gave them credit for.
Naturally though, as I get deeper in the weeds on the platform, I find issues that grate on me after a while. As a Picross fiend I’ve noticed the points awarded bias towards action games. Also, all the most popular games will have at least one achievement that I consider unreasonable to expect of even a committed typical gamer. Super Mario 64 requires a precise glitch used in speedrunning for one achievement, and I’m confident enough in my Super Mario World bona fides to declare that the achievements for beating multiple entire worlds without touching any power-ups are, technically speaking, complete garbage.
It also needs to be acknowledged: Using the phrase “softcore mode” to mean the opposite of hardcore mode is deeply weird. That needs to change.
The project is entirely community-run, for all the faults and benefits that brings. Here is a community of video game fans dedicated to appreciating and preserving the classics and making gaming history more accessible. And enabling thousands of players to waste so much time. I’m glad it exists.
Not unrelated, I’ve been watching Jeff Gerstmann’s NES library ranking streams, in which he plays each game released for the system and determines if it’s better or worse than Dynowarz: Destruction of Spondylous. Jeff is an expert, and seeing his reaction to some of the “classics” has finally broken my 20-year habit of making excuses for old Nintendo games. You know what, Kid Icarus really doesn’t hold up, and that’s fine! I’ll even diverge from Jeff and say Ice Climber is borderline unplayable. It’s easy to say “it was a different time,” but there’s nothing profane about calling out bad design.
His streams have also been an entertaining way to organize my mental library of NES titles. I was aware of, say, City Connection being an arcade game ported to NES but had no frame of reference for the quality of either the original or the port. It looked fun, and without RetroAchievements I might have left it at that. Instead, I decided to play it myself.
