Retro gaming gets 21st-century boost with Analogue consoles

Within seconds, nearly all of the world’s media can be at your fingertips. At the click of a button, you can easily access Buster Keaton’s early shorts, the “Closet Mix” of the Velvet Underground’s third album and the entire oeuvre of Philip K. Dick.

However, this isn’t true for video games. Once a generation has moved forward, and new consoles and operating systems are released, a game that once sold millions of copies might be lost forever. That lack of preservation, of safeguarding history and conserving an important part of pop culture, is a large part of what drives the current retro-gaming trend.

But while emulators and all-in-one devices do a decent job of recreating older systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Sega Genesis, much of the immersive experience is lost. Enter Analogue, a US company that’s been called the “Leica of retro video games” (as its founder Christopher Taber repeatedly reminds me during our interview). Sure, it’s a marketing catchphrase, but it’s not far from the truth.

The company currently only sells two devices: the Nt mini, which can play NES/Famicom games, and the Super Nt, compatible with Super NES/Famicom releases. Nothing is preloaded, there’s no emulation – you need to use the original Nintendo cartridges and these can now sell for up to US$500 (about HK$4,000), or double the price of a PlayStation 4.

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But despite those limitations, retro-gaming obsessives consider the Analogue devices to be the crème de la crème – stunning high-quality retro consoles that allow nostalgic gamers to relive their youth in high-definition, and often with many of the hardware perks they couldn’t afford back in the day.