The Japanese TV show GameCenter CX, which has been airing since 2003, conducted a survey among viewers about whether the PlayStation 3 and Wii can be considered retro consoles. The result was clear – about 80% of voters answered in the affirmative. The publication reports this Time Extension.
The show, starring comedian Shinya Arino, revolves around trying to beat classic games in their entirety, often ending in failure. Over 23 years, more than 400 episodes were aired, and almost all of this time the program concentrated on titles from the eighties and nineties, only occasionally looking into the two thousandths.
The unofficial criterion for transfer was the playing age of 20 years or older. True, the show itself did not always follow this rule – in the early episodes, Arino played games for the Super Nintendo, which at that time were barely ten years old.
The question of pushing boundaries was posed to the audience during a YouTube broadcast in August. Then 71% of viewers were in favor of including PS3 and Wii in the program. After this, the presenter played several games for both platforms, and the survey was repeated – this time 17 thousand people responded positively, and the share of supporters increased to approximately 80%.
For many players, the generation of Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 remains the psychological border of the retro era. It was then that consoles massively received online play, downloadable add-ons, microtransactions and regular patches, that is, all those features that define the industry to this day. The difference from current platforms essentially comes down to physical disks, which were still the main storage medium back then.
A separate irony of the situation is that it was the Wii that largely shaped the interest in classics in the 2000s thanks to the Virtual Console service. The store started in 2006, and one of the first titles there was Super Mario 64, which was only ten years old at that time.
PlayStation 3 was released in Japan in November 2006, Wii in December of the same year. Both platforms have long lost support for their own digital stores in their previous form, and some network functions have been disabled.
