Why we’re going back to the games of our youth

As much as some people more or less cease to listen to new music in their 30s, I have noticed a retreat to safe, familiar gaming territory among some of my fellow millennial gamers.

Retro collections are started, or resumed; jewel-cases of PS1 classics or cardboard boxes with SNES or Mega Drive games have started to colonise the living-room shelves. People are replaying things from their university days, or sticking to comfort games such as Stardew Valley. Many of the friends I used to game with never bothered to pick up a PlayStation 5 at its launch, and now that current-generation consoles are becoming prohibitively expensive, they see no need. With thousands of great older games, why bother playing something new?

My job, and an insatiable desire for novelty, has kept me in constant contact with new games, but nonetheless, I have been spending a lot of time lately with the titles I played in my youth because people keep remaking them. Lylat Wars (N64, 1997) and Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox, 2001) have both had summer 2026 glow-ups, in the form of Star Fox on Switch 2 and Halo: Campaign Evolved on the other consoles and PC. These are games I played for many, many hours back in the day, and I remembered them beat for beat (or so I thought – it turns out I did not remember how to navigate the deadly lava planet that ended my first Star Fox run).

I was not enormously enthused by the prospect of either remake, because I’d rather play an original game in either of these series than rehash my rose-tinted recollections from 25 years ago (let’s just gloss over how old that makes us feel, shall we?). But, it turns out all those years have given me a fresh perspective. Both of these remakes are very good. And not just because I played them at the time and remember them fondly, but because each of them does things that new video games don’t. They feel novel, because in 2026, they are.

When was the last time you played an arcadey on-rails space shooter? When was the last time you enjoyed an atmospheric single-player FPS with intelligent computer-controlled enemies? These genres have fallen out of fashion – space games are now wide-open exploreathons such as No Man’s Sky (which celebrates its 10th anniversary this week), and multiplayer shooters have crowded single-player ones out almost entirely. In this context, Star Fox and Halo feel fresh. They’re not awkward transplants from another time.

Halo: Combat Evolved (2011), a game that has had a ‘summer glow-up’ this year. Photograph: Bungie Studios

Neither game really needed all that much massaging. Velan Studios in New York, entrusted with a characterful if visually basic Nintendo 64 shooter, has changed almost nothing about it: we fly through the same webbed map of planets, with the same enemies and bosses, firing off the same simple yet effective lasers and bombs and flight manoeuvres. A Star Fox playthrough takes maybe 60 to 90 minutes and you can play it over and over, like a generous arcade cabinet. In reconstructing the game, Velan has made it look very beautiful, spliced in some new cutscenes and dialogue, and added multiplayer and challenge modes that give some structure to your replays, but quite miraculously, it barely feels different. And it’s great.

Halo: Campaign Evolved deviates more from Bungie’s original space opera. It’s been rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 with different vehicle handling and more overwrought cutscenes. But the essentials remain: high drama, perfect weaponry, and intelligent enemies that react interestingly to how you play, diving out of the way of fire or ordering a change of tactics. I never minded dying, because each firefight would be different on every playthrough. I still hate the Flood – the mindless zombies that infect the game from the midway point onwards – but despite their unwelcome incursion, I had a blast playing through this game again with my partner. I haven’t played a better co-op multiplayer game than the original Halo in all the years since, which is honestly quite sad.

I have no desire for things to return to the way they were in the late 90s and early 00s; despite its expansion and consequent unwelcome corporatisation as a business, gaming as an art form is far broader and more interesting now than it was then. But these remakes show there are things to be learned from the games of the past, and a lot that is enviable about their design philosophy. Old games don’t necessarily need to be fixed to be appreciated anew. Refreshing them is often enough.

What to play

A ‘comforting rhythm and purpose” in Pokémon Pokopia … Photograph: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company/Koei Tecmo

I truly thought I was done with Pokémon Pokopia, having spent 40 hours with it back in March. When I downloaded the new expansion – an underwater area called Bubbly Basin, which turns out to be the ruins of Cerulean City, home to Misty from Pokémon Red/Blue – I did not expect to be consumed by it yet again. The rhythm and purpose of this game is just so comforting: explore, restore, revive. I have enjoyed it so much that I went back to the rest of the game with new enthusiasm for attracting new Pokémon and rebuilding the ruined planet that humans left behind for them.

Available on: Nintendo Switch 2
Estimated playtime: 10+ hours

What to read

Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on 27 August, on Netflix. Photograph: Nintendo

• Rockstar Games will finally show off more of Grand Theft Auto VI on 27 August … via a broadcast on Netflix. Well, that’s new. I can only imagine the £££ exchanged for the few hours of exclusivity that the streaming giant will enjoy.

• The Washington Post’s Gene Park spent some time with The Weeknd, who has been documenting his gaming habits on an Instagram alt account – even meeting developers. He wants everyone to know about the horror fishing game he’s currently obsessed with.

• Metroid turned 40 at the end of last week – and so did Samus Aran, one of the earliest female protagonists in video games. Maddy Myers writes about her personal heroine.

What to click

• ‘People in Japan thought we made footy up’: Pro Jank Footy, the video game taking Australian rules to the world

• Convince an AI it’s not alive in psychological horror game Prove You’re Human

• Sam Neill filmed role in Legend of Zelda film adaptation before his death

• EA Sports FC 27: what does the next instalment of the world’s biggest football game have in store?

• Pony Island 2 Panda Circus: gallop out of hell in this phantasmagorical follow-up to 2016’s indie hit

• Nazis and Happy Feet collide in Penguin Colony, a psychological horror game set at the world’s end

Question Block

First-time parent? avoid stressful games … Photograph: Sony Interactive Entertainment

This week’s question comes from reader Leo:

“My wife and I are big gamers – and we’re having our first kid in September. What should my partner and I play as new parents? Is it even possible?”

I mean, anything is possible if you put your mind to it – my partner played quite a bit of Death Stranding while bouncing around the living room with our second baby strapped to him, in an unlikely case of life imitating art. But it is reasonable to downgrade your expectations for how much time, attention and energy you will have for video games when you have a new baby in the house. When my nine-year-old son was a baby, I wrote this article about how to play games when you’re an exhausted new parent, and though the specific game recommendations are a little out of date, I reckon the advice remains sound. For instance: “Anything even slightly stressful, emotional or difficult might make you cry, so leave the competitive shooters and Dark Souls runs for a while.”

If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us at [email protected].