Where does your interest in retro things come from?

[naa]

Is there a specific reason you're interested in retro media, old internet, or other retro content? Did your interest start with anything in particular?

 

[naa]

Personally, my interest in retro stuff is pretty much just my interests not changing from when I was younger. It's not really a nostalgia thing, though. I still have a lot of the same interests I did as a kid, but I now have the means to engage with them, whereas when I was a kid I couldn't really watch or read a lot of things, much less play a large variety of videogames, or use the internet freely. So, as an adult I started watching, reading, playing, and just generally doing stuff I wanted to as a kid, and I really, really enjoyed all of it. This started me on being interested in retro media in general, retro fashion, and old internet. It's kind of just escalated from there, with me embracing now-dated interests I couldn't have when I was younger and developing new interests in retro stuff because of that.

 

[Deleted member 1930]

being old

 

[Seggito]

I think my interest with retro stuff was because when I was younger my older brother would show me his nintendo 64 and we'd play starfox 64 on it. Eventually other family members started donating their old consoles and games, my dads coworker gave me his Gameboy along with a bunch of games with the little booklets. It was a pretty cool hobby for a while but I started to get disinterested in video games and more into music, which is what helped me find vaporwave which led me down a rabbit whole of a ton of new electronic genres I've never heard before. It could also be because of youtube videos and the fact that we never had the newest console growing up.

 

[Shi_dawg]

though I don't remember most of my life in the 90s, 80s and 90s media was always playing in my house. I think that's how I connected with vaporwave, with the similar sounds bringing me back to that.

 

[Emmy Fitz]

I was born in the late '90s so all of it is basically before my time. Basically a fabricated sense of nostalgia that I wanna indulge in.

 

[AnanaSUPREME]

Well, as a child I was not allowed to be "normal" because it was mundane and a sin to the Pentecostal church. The few bits of music and media I was exposed to were from the 80s because my mom grew up with them. During those days, the real world around me was unreachable because I was trapped in a bubble of hypocritical morality. Even later in my childhood when we left that environment, I was still incapable of being in the moment like everyone else because my mom didn't care at all about how people saw me until it affected her.
So while I have my appreciation for 20th century media, my tastes revolve around what was forbidden to me growing up... All the video games, fashion, music and arguments from the 00s were lost to me and I am doing my best to take it all back.

 

[vaporwavemaster1]

私は忘れられた、過小評価された、そして見過ごされていることに魅了されているので、レトロなものに夢中です。誰も気づかなかった信じられないほど奇妙なものを見つけたとき、私はいつも幸せです。過去のメディアを再文脈化することで、歴史に自分の足跡を残していると感じています

 

[V 4 P 0 R V 4 R G]

I think because I'm a 90's kid. I didn't notice all the good things in this times but the music, aesthetic and overall lifestyle buried deep in the subcontious mind. I don't know but Retro things and Vaporwave are setting of nostalgic feelings that were buried in memory. When I hear Vaporwave or look at nice retro art it almost feels like I'm at home.

 

[Deleted member 2040]

Growing up rather poor we could only afford secondhand things, thus my attachment to laten 80's and early 90's things. Another reason is because retro things tend to be easier to use than most of the newest things of today which tend to be geared towards complexity and frivolous features.

 

[Deleted member 1043]

Is there a specific reason you're interested in retro media, old internet, or other retro content? Did your interest start with anything in particular?

A couple things probably, one of which was my grandpa being a baby boomer. It introduced me to the 1960s fashion I still love today. Otherwise, my parents older games they used to play and AVGN as a kid helped me get into the 80s and 90s specifically.

 

[V 4 P 0 R V 4 R G]

Personally, my interest in retro stuff is pretty much just my interests not changing from when I was younger. It's not really a nostalgia thing, though. I still have a lot of the same interests I did as a kid, but I now have the means to engage with them, whereas when I was a kid I couldn't really watch or read a lot of things, much less play a large variety of videogames, or use the internet freely. So, as an adult I started watching, reading, playing, and just generally doing stuff I wanted to as a kid, and I really, really enjoyed all of it. This started me on being interested in retro media in general, retro fashion, and old internet. It's kind of just escalated from there, with me embracing now-dated interests I couldn't have when I was younger and developing new interests in retro stuff because of that.

That's a cool story! It`'s like you can now live/discover all the nostalgic memories again with better opportunities that you haven't had as a kid. Really like that :D

 

[spaceghost]

im a 2000's baby so all the retro is fs before my time but i remember my parents always playing music or media from the 80's and 90's and my stepdad was really into computers so i was sitting at a desktop with windows 7 or windows xp when i was like 4 exploring the internet for what it was back then, maybe thats where it came from

 

[That1Producer]

It all started with finding those old adult swim bumps (offical and fan made) when I was younger. Also being exposed early to the only genre of music I'd consider just as good if not better than vaporwave, G-funk.

 

[sicsicksicks]

It started with me being interested in the older nintendo games. I wanted to play the previous games after I had played the then current ones on the DS and and there was a NES for $5 at the local second hand shop so I thought why not?

I appreciate a lot of it from an artistic perspective so to speak. There is a lot of art value in things that are obsolete by "practical" standards. There is something I like about cassettes pushing a chunk of plastic into a machine that swallows it up and clicks it into place is satisfying. My justification for having a CRT is basically Duck Hunt but if I ever got rich I would buy a fw900 monitor though just to see if it really is what its hyped to be.

Another thing is that I admire the ingenuity of analog systems. The amount of physical/electrical engineering work that went into things that would be accomplished today by a simple (and admittedly more reliable) digital controller is impressive.

 

[Kommando]

Personally, my interest in retro stuff is pretty much just my interests not changing from when I was younger. It's not really a nostalgia thing, though. I still have a lot of the same interests I did as a kid, but I now have the means to engage with them, whereas when I was a kid I couldn't really watch or read a lot of things, much less play a large variety of videogames, or use the internet freely. So, as an adult I started watching, reading, playing, and just generally doing stuff I wanted to as a kid, and I really, really enjoyed all of it. This started me on being interested in retro media in general, retro fashion, and old internet. It's kind of just escalated from there, with me embracing now-dated interests I couldn't have when I was younger and developing new interests in retro stuff because of that.

Same. It was a unique zeitgeist of optimism and color in art, fashion and architecture I didn't get to fully experience and today's pop culture is safe and unexistent. The world was also bigger because we didn't have easily accessible information on it so there was a lot to wonder about and experience first-hand.

 

[MugiNism]

i was born in the late 90's but in my house we still used a lot of old tech and some of my best friends did the same. We werent poor its just that if something works why change it(a mentality i still have now in my early 20's). For some reson i am obssesed with the gamecube and i allways wanted one. I love oldstyle 3d graphics a lot of them still look beatifull. Even as a futeure game developer i would like to recreate old graphics styles with the new tech.

now that i answered your question i would like to ask one myself. What characteristics does something need to have in order to be considered retro? Because being old donset really do as for example the 7 gen consoles are alomst 20 years old and nobody would say that they are retro.

 

[[lime]]

ig for me it's a reminder of simpler times, but also old stuff is just cool, since whatevers newer often has strange downsides compared to older things.

 

[naa]

i was born in the late 90's but in my house we still used a lot of old tech and some of my best friends did the same. We werent poor its just that if something works why change it(a mentality i still have now in my early 20's). For some reson i am obssesed with the gamecube and i allways wanted one. I love oldstyle 3d graphics a lot of them still look beatifull. Even as a futeure game developer i would like to recreate old graphics styles with the new tech.

now that i answered your question i would like to ask one myself. What characteristics does something need to have in order to be considered retro? Because being old donset really do as for example the 7 gen consoles are alomst 20 years old and nobody would say that they are retro.

I think it's got a pretty nebulous definition, personally anything before 2010 but after 1970 I think can feel retro to me but it varies. I see a lot of people use it to only refer to the '80s, '90s, or 2000s. I think it maybe has to have a certain degree of kitsch for some people to consider something retro, but I'm unsure.

 

[Shrug]

Being an adult is hard and nostalgic things are really comforting to me. They bring me back to a feeling of being carefree and hopeful that is hard to come by nowadays.