Eric Rodríguez: “Cartridge, always”

When we go back to a console from our childhood, what are we really looking for: the game, or the person we were when we played it?

I think it’s a bit of both. The games we play as children shape us more deeply than we realise; to some extent they even define our taste in games as we grow up.

I grew up playing Nintendo games, Super Mario, Zelda, Banjo-Kazooie and the like, and that has led me over the years to focus on games that put mechanics before story, something I think happened precisely because those were my references.

At the same time, as the years go by, all the friction those games had fades from our minds and we keep only the good parts, building an idealised picture of what they were like.

So when we go back to retro, I think we’re trying both to recover the experience we had (or the one our brain remembers) and to return to those years when everything was simpler.

You’ve said your earliest memory of video games is your father coming home with Super Mario 64, and that you ended up inheriting his Nintendo 64. What do you remember of those years? Your story starts in three dimensions: when did you start travelling back to 2D, to 16 and 8 bits?

It’s a memory I treasure, although my memories of those years are a bit mixed up.

Games were everywhere around me: my parents had spent countless hours in arcades, we had several friends and relatives with consoles, and there was always one at home. So although my story starts in the fifth generation, in those years I also played some friends’ Super Nintendo, the Atari 2600 of others who weren’t big gamers but had money, my cousin’s Mega Drive… Those years mix experiences from several generations, and as a kid I had no idea which console was newer or older.

In fact, at school I envied a friend who had the original Game Boy (the big grey one), even though I had the Game Boy Pocket, which is supposedly the better model. But in my child’s head, the bigger console had to be better.

So my first influences are a bit of a mix, although the Nintendo 64 was the console I spent the most hours on. And over the years, seeing that I liked games a bit more than the people around me, I played everything I could, new consoles and old ones whenever I had the chance.

On Leyendas & Videojuegos you’ve spent more than ten years telling the stories behind games. Which retro story surprised you most while preparing a video? And how do you explain a classic to someone who has never held a cartridge?

I wouldn’t know where to start. Part of the fun of my channel is sharing all those stories, and over the years I’ve discovered loads of them. I could list a few highlights without picking one.

Namco patenting mini-games on loading screens left me baffled, the bug that caused a pandemic in World of Warcraft is a hilarious story, and the way Nintendo uses the structure of traditional Eastern poetry to design its levels is something few people care about, but I find fascinating… The list is endless, and the proof is all the years I’ve been sharing those stories.

When it comes to sharing these classic stories with my audience, my approach has always been the same: as far as possible, everyone should be able to follow it, whatever games they’ve played or whatever they already know.

It doesn’t always work, some topics are very specific, but I always try to give all the context needed so that even people who don’t play games can understand a story, because interesting stories are interesting whatever medium they come from.

Are you one of those who think older games were better? They were harder, but did they also have more soul? Or is that nostalgia talking?

I think it’s nostalgia that thinks that. It’s almost objective that today’s games are better; it’s a numbers game: consoles are more powerful, designs are more refined and developers have more experience. Everything points to the resulting games being better in every way.

That said, the charm of some retro games is undeniable, both because of nostalgia and because of the limitations they had back then. Things like colour palettes, chiptune soundtracks or systems that made consoles smoke have stayed in the collective imagination as the mark of a bygone era, which many remember as something better.

People like Yacht Club Games, with Shovel Knight and now Mina the Hollower, manage to evoke those feelings by recreating the restrictions developers had 20 and 30 years ago. You can enjoy that retro flavour in modern games without having to put up with the crust of systems that hadn’t settled yet.

Even so, every now and then you feel the urge to go back and play a round of something on the Super Nintendo or the Nintendo 64, an almost religious ritual that no modern game will ever replicate.

How do you see the rise of artificial intelligence and this world of fast consumption we live in, compared with when we played without the internet? What do you miss from back then? Or are you more excited about the future and innovation?

It’s no secret that I’m against AI, at least the way it’s being over-adopted right now.

Right now, the use of generative AI reflects a lack of care and is proof that something lacks quality, rather than something positive that will add to the industry. The clearest example is what’s happening with Level-5, a company that was once respected for the quality of all its games and is now using AI in everything it does. That has led to its fall from grace with the community, which also points out everything wrong with its new games precisely because of AI.

And despite all that, I don’t want to be the typical grump shaking his fist at the sky and denying progress. AI is speeding things up in programming, research and many other fields, so what I’m looking forward to is a future where the over-adoption calms down, we stop putting AI where it isn’t needed, like phone apps or YouTube, and it stays where it can genuinely help creative people work better.

What worries me most is the convenience and immediacy AI brings. You can clearly see that the internet prefers a quick, shallow answer to the friction of really researching and learning, and I think that can only bring bad things.

Your retro essentials: the most exciting, the scariest, the most addictive and the most frustrating.

For these we’d have to define what counts as retro, because if I name a Wii game some readers will be horrified. But the Wii came out in 2006, twenty years ago now, so for many people it would count as retro. Still, I think my answers would be:

• Most exciting: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
• Scariest: Turok 2 (I’m still traumatised by that game, and it isn’t even a horror game).
• Most addictive: Tetris.
• Most frustrating: Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped.

How do you see retro culture in Spain right now? Is it a real boom or just hype? Which place or which people should we get to know? And what do you think it’s missing?

The truth is I’m not very involved in the social side of retro. I know RetroBarcelona and I’m friends with the organisers, I know a few retro YouTubers and meet them for lunch when I go to events near them. I have some contact in general, but the way I relate to the hobby is more personal and private.

I collect and buy retro games to play in my free time, sometimes to make content and sometimes just out of passion, but I don’t tend to share that day-to-day with anyone. There’s no particular reason; it’s just how I enjoy games.

Even so, if you get the chance to visit a RetroBarcelona, it’s always a good idea. The OXO Museo del Videojuego in Málaga is a must, and I can recommend channels like La Poción Roja or TuberViejuner as a gateway into retro.

As for what it’s missing, I’d turn it around and say what it has too much of: I think the retro world needs to leave gatekeeping behind.

I could talk about this for hours, and of course it doesn’t happen everywhere, but around retro there’s more than one purist who thinks that if you didn’t play Sonic on the original Mega Drive you can’t be a retro fan, and plenty of collectors who smell too much of old cologne. I’d love people to be a bit more accepting and let even kids who are 15 now enjoy those classic games their own way, without asking them for things they couldn’t possibly have lived through just to keep them out. Nobody gains anything from that old-timer attitude.

You also design board games, and Growing Season sold out. How much of the kid who played the Nintendo 64 is there in the games you make today?

Well, all my games are based on video games.

Obviously the mechanics are adapted to the medium, but Growing Season is based on Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, Riverwood Town comes from Dorfromantik and similar puzzle games, and everything I’ve learned over the years about designing and developing video games is in every game I make.

I’d love to tell you about specific retro designs or mechanics that served as a base for my games, but it would be a lie. In the end, my knowledge of games in general, retro and modern, is the catalyst for those board games. I can’t point to many specific games, but the base I’ve built up in my head by playing everything is what has led to my designs.

Has designing changed the way you look at the classics? With a designer’s eye, which game from your childhood seems like a small masterpiece?

Of course. Over the years you start seeing patterns in everything you play, especially modern games, which are more refined and apply design almost by the book.

Retro games are different, because those design rules weren’t settled yet, so it’s fun to see the rough edges of an industry that still had a lot to learn and refine.

Even so, there are timeless masterpieces, and I think the most important of all, and the one that has influenced me most, is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is getting a remake soon. Playing it now is hard, the controls are clunky and some things are a bit odd, but what that game created has not been seen in any other in video game history. Many titles have contributed to the industry, but I don’t think any as much as Ocarina.