Video Game Romanticism: On Retro Gaming, Remakes, Reboots, Game Nostalgia, and Bad Games

In recent years, a relatively new phenomenon in the video game industry has emerged: the reappreciation of games from previous generations by individual gamers in com-bination with the production of new games aesthetically and/or ludologically clearly based on these older games. The phenomenon has been described as “retro gaming”, “game nostalgia” or “vintage play” and has been associated with parallel phenomena like reboots, remakes, and “bad games” (or Kusoge). As a primer for this special issue of the Journal of Religion, Film, and Media on “Paradise Lost”, the author identifies and describes all these interrelated but distinguishable notions as forms of “video game romanticism”: they appropriate a romanticized version of our collective past to con-struct an appealing digital, interactive, narrative complex.