Retro revivals are often overblown. Breathless headlines insist vinyl sales are up eleventy billion per cent, yet quietly avoid admitting that the actual numbers are a rounding error compared to the format’s peak. Yet it’s not just ageing nostalgics supergluing rose-tinted glasses to their faces and claiming everything peaked in 1989. Increasingly, Gen Z is getting into retro media and hardware – and there are good reasons for that.
That generation grew up during a monumental shift in how home media was consumed. Convenience won at the expense of ownership. Today’s media landscape trends towards on-demand everything but you often own nothing. A handful of massive corporations hike subscription prices whenever the mood takes them. You’re bombarded from every direction with upsells and distractions. Focus is dead. Simplicity has been sacrificed.
Even so, when people start revisiting – or, for relative younglings, discovering – old tech, I feel conflicted. Video games? Sure. A cartridge you own. One game at a time. Hardware that doesn’t demand a massive firmware update the second you turn it on. CDs? Also great. Quality audio. Nice artwork. Durable.
But something inside me snaps whenever someone talks up cassettes. Because tapes were always rubbish.
Tape down
In the 1980s, tapes made sense. They were cheap. You could buy blanks and make dodgy copies while growling ARRRRR. You could hurl them at an angry bear in hot pursuit, safe in the knowledge that if you 1) survived, and 2) recovered your possessions, the tapes would probably still work. (Try that with vinyl!) But the audio quality was grim, rewinding was a chore, and cover art resembled a butchered take on vinyl sleeves.
But tapes didn’t stop at music. Here in the UK, they were the main medium for 8-bit games, and some collectors insist you must still use them (rather than digital files and an adapter) with original hardware for ‘authenticity’. I’d argue anyone nostalgic about waiting ten minutes for a game to load – even if the loading music is great – needs their head checked. But VHS might be the worst offender of them all.
The format had no redeeming features beyond being cheap and letting you record stuff off the telly. Tapes were clunky and fragile. Every press of play risked your tape being chewed to oblivion by a ravenous VCR. Yet, somehow, even this format has its fans. Movies are still released on VHS (at a massive premium), and one US company is even trying to spark a hardware revival.
Box not-so-clever
RetroBox has unveiled a TV/VHS combo straight out of a 1990s bedroom. Ambitious? Sure. Sensible? Not remotely. Supply chains dried up decades ago, and VCRs were always complex, temperamental beasts.
But this unit is even stranger than it first appeared. It’s designed to play VHS tapes, while also accepting modern inputs. So you can pipe pristine digital video through RetroBox’s innards, and watch it in ‘up to 480p’ smear-o-vision. However, because CRTs are long dead, this is emulated, which rather undermines the whole authenticity thing.
Even if it were a CRT, intentionally degrading image quality is a wild choice. I mean, I’ve done this with home movie clips in Rarevision, but that’s a fun five-quid app, not a $500 piece of hardware for ruining Dune. And, sure, I use CRT filters on retro handhelds, but old games were designed for CRT. Films were not. No Hollywood director ever thought, “I hope someone removes all the detail from my masterpiece and chops off the sides.”
So no. I get vinyl. I’ll back your CD rack. I’ll even grudgingly tolerate an audio cassette obsession. But I draw the line at VHS. It was terrible then. It’s terrible now. The very idea of a revival needs to be chewed to ribbons, just like that VCR did to your prized copy of Star Wars back in 1985.
- Now read: Why I’m buying my first CD player in 20 years
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