The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Retro Game Collections

One thing you’ll notice if you ever browse digital gaming stores is that there are a lot of Retro Game Collections. Hell, I’ve reviewed a few of them in the last 2 years or so. From Capcom's Arcade Stadium to the Anniversary line by Konami, hell even Turrican got one recently, there’s no shortage of retro game collections for those looking for an old school fix.

In fact, we’re getting three big ones later this year with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection, Capcom Fighters Collection and Sonic Origins. They all look excellent, aside from Origins baffling price structure. But all these new collections come as a shock to me. Because as prevalent as they are now, there was a time where they were on the cusp of dying out.

The idea of packaging games together has been around for years. Many gamers who grew up with an NES probably remember owning the Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt combo pack that came packaged with some units. Sega would do something similar with their Mega Games line-up which packaged some of the best-selling Mega Drive games into one cart at a value price.

But those were compilations of games released in the same generation. The idea of compiling gams from generations prior wasn’t a common practice during the 8- and 16-bit generations.

You could make the argument that it started with games like Super Mario All-Stars or Mega Man the Wily Wars, but those don’t really count. They were collections of older games, but they were remade from the ground up with new graphics and slight gameplay tweaks. A retro game collection tries to preserve the games as they were, not trying to remake or update them.

The PlayStation 1 was really where the idea of collecting older games together started to gain traction. A lot of these were Arcade collections. One of the most famous examples being the Namco Museum.

It was a five-disk series of Namco’s older arcade titles from the 80’s. Games like Galaga, Rally X, Tower of Druaga, Mappy and the almighty Pac-Man were just some of the games released in the series, with each disk having its own game line-up. Now that alone would have been cool, but Namco Museum took things a step further in how it presented them. Rather than pick the games from a menu, Namco Museum presented things like, well, a museum.

The five games all had full 3D virtual museums you could walk around in, with various secrets and bonus behind the scenes content you could interact with. This is one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen, and I am shocked they never did this again.

Namco Museum was very much ahead of its time. We never did get an interactable museum again, but the idea of having a bunch of extras and behind the scenes stuff would prove to be features future collections would use. Namco Museum was sort of the baseline from which a lot of them would base themselves on.

But not every PlayStation collection did this. One I remember playing as a kid was the Arcade Party Pak which was a simple collection of old Midway arcade games and nothing else. It wasn’t bad, it Rampage and Smash TV which were worth the price of admission on their own. It was still a fun time, but it was a basic collection.

A lot of collections were like this back then. It was the early days, back then it was a novelty just to have all these games on one disc. There weren’t even that many games, but it was still good value considering a lot of arcades were dying and the older games were becoming harder to find.

It was also great for older gamers who may have grown up with these games and could share them with their kids, as well as being good for the kids to experience the classics. I would have never experienced Pang if it weren’t for the Pang collection, and I love those games now.

They weren’t limited to just arcade games either. Square Soft, after coming off the success of Final Fantasy VII, started to port some of their classic games and released them as double packs. These were not great conversions, but they did include Final Fantasy II and V, which made them the first-time westerners got to play them. So, they had some value, at least at the time.

Even the Sega Saturn got a couple of classic collections of its own, mostly from Sega, but since I never owned a Saturn I can’t tell you much about them. A YouTuber named Sega Lord X did a video on the subject not that long ago that I recommend you check out if you want to know more about them.

But there is one collection I want to highlight, Sonic Jam. This was a collection of the mainline Sonic games released on the Mega Drive, and it was a great collection for its time. It wasn’t just a straight port. The games all included extra modes and gameplay updates. Sonic 1, for example, allowed you to use the Spin Dash despite it not being introduced until Sonic 2.

But what made it special was that it had a fully playable 3D Sonic area that doubled as an extra’s menu. You could see it as Sega’s answer to Namco Museum, and like that it was a cool feature to have. Doubly so here since the Saturn never got a fully 3D Sonic game. But as good as Sonic Jam was, it isn’t the Sonic Collection most people remember. That would be Sonic Mega Collection.

This is when we hit the sixth console generation where retro collections started to take off in a massive way. Sonic Mega Collection was one of the first major releases and also one of the best. It was, originally, a GameCube exclusive that included all of the classic Sonic Games from the Mega Drive, including spin-off titles like 3D Blast and Spinball, as well as bonus games like Flicky and Ristar.

I loved this collection as a kid. Not only for games, but for all the extra features. Mega Collection had a ton of bonus content like videos, artwork and even 100 covers from the Archie comics series. It was a great collection and a good celebration of Sonic’s history, at the time at least.

My only issue with it was you had to unlock some of the games in the most annoying ways possible. In order to get Sonic 3 and Knuckles, widely considered the best game in the series, you had to boot up Sonic 3 and Sonic Knuckles 20 times each. Why? Just have it unlocked from the start.

Despite that I still loved Sonic Mega Collection. For a lot of Sonic fans, it was their introduction to the blue blur’s golden years. And that was the entire point. The game was designed for younger gamers who hadn’t grown up with these games. It’s why it was initially a GameCube exclusive; a lot of GameCube owners would be Nintendo kids who never owned a Mega Drive, and therefore never have played Sonic games. It only made sense to release it on Nintendo’s then most recent system.

Sonic Mega Collection would later be ported to PlayStation 2 and Xbox with a few additional games under Sonic Mega Collection Plus. I never owned that version, but it was nice to have it on other platforms for those who didn’t own a GameCube. Which in all fairness was a lot of people.

There would be one other Sonic collection made for sixth generation consoles called Sonic Gems Collection. This… this one was weird. It was basically a collection of the more obscure games in Sonic’s catalogue. The majority was composed of some Game Gear games, but there were 3 big games in the form of Sonic CD, Sonic the Fighters and Sonic R.

It was cool to have the more obscure games in the series, but most of these weren’t that great. The only one really worth owning the collection for was Sonic CD since it was the first time it had been re-released. And Sonic CD is a divisive game in the series. Some love it and think it’s the best and others outright hate it, so it wasn’t a guarantee it would be worth the purchase.

Also, for some reason, the international cut out some of the bonus games. The Japanese version came with Bonanza Bros and all 3 Streets of Rage games. Oh come on, that would have made it so much better. Stupid Sega making Stupid Sega mistakes.

Sega would release also release the Sega Mega Drive Collection. This was a collection focused on other games from the Mega Drive library like Golden Axe, Ecco the Dolphin and Shinobi 3, with Sonic 1 and 2 thrown in because you can’t have a Sega collection without Sonic. There would be other Mega Drive collections that would make this obsolete, but for the time it was decent.

But it wasn’t just Sega making these compilations. A lot of other companies started throwing their hats into the ring. Capcom released some that were pretty damn good. One of them being Mega Man Anniversary Collection. This was a collection of all the classic Mega Man games, including the 2 arcade titles. They did one for the Mega Man X series as well.

Sadly I never got to play these because neither of them came out in Europe. There were a few collections that I never got to play either because they never came out over here, or I just never got around to getting them. I couldn’t play everything after all.

But the ones I did get to play I really enjoyed. Capcom Classics Collection was a set of games featuring some of Capcoms arcade titles. They were decent little collections featuring some of the better games from the companies arcade era, as well as Super Ghouls and Ghosts for some baffling reason.

Then there were the Street Fighter collections. There was Street Fighter Anniversary Collection which came with Hyper Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3 Third Strike and a heavily edited version of the Street Fighter 2 anime movie. Then there was Alpha Anthology which came with every Street Fighter Alpha game and Super Gem Fighters Mini-Mix.

I never owned Anniversary Collection, but I played a lot of Alpha Anthology growing up. It was a fairly bare bones collection with little in the way of extras, but each game did have a few additional modes and it even had a few secret games like Alpha 3 Upper.

That’s just it though, a lot of these collections didn’t have many extras, if they had any at all. Most you would get is a brief history of each game and maybe some artwork. Some obviously did better than others, I already mentioned what Sonic Mega Collection had, but a lot of these collections were simply content with packaging a bunch of games together.

Nothing wrong with that, especially given how many games you got with these. Take Activision Anthology for example. This was a collection of all the Activision games made for the Atari 2600, minus the licensed games, and came with a whopping 76 games. Jesus Christ that’s a lot. That’s more than what collections give you today.

Well, I actually tell a lie. Activision Anthology did have 76 games, but only the PC and Mac versions had the complete list. The other versions had some games but not others. You still got plenty of games, the PS2 version still came with 40+ games, it was just a weird decision.

Activision Anthology wasn’t the only game that did this. Taito Legends 2 did the same thing. This was another one I had growing up. I never played the first one, but I played the sequel a lot. They were collection of Taito arcade games like Bubble Bobble, Darius and Space Invaders.

Taito Legends 2 had 39 games, which is pretty good, but technically it had 43. This is because the PlayStation 2 and Xbox/PC versions had exclusive games between them. I still have no idea why they did this. Maybe they couldn’t fit them on the disk? Maybe. Oh well I got G-Darius on the PS2 version, so I was happy.

I could go on about collections made during this time. Midway made a couple, Atari made one, SNK did some for the Fatal Fury and Metal Slug series. it seemed like everyone was getting involved in this. I didn’t even cover the various handheld collections. You couldn’t escape these things.

And then the seventh generation happened. This was when the boon for videogame compilations started to die down a bit. They were still coming out, just not as frequently as before. And even the ones we did get were released near the beginning of the generation.

Like Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection. This was a sequel to the PlayStation 2 Mega Drive Collection and is one of the greatest collections ever made, if not the best. 50 games in total along with some extra unlockable ones and bonus content. This to me is the gold standard when it comes to collections like this.

Sadly, this was the only major one that I can really think of. There were a handful of releases, but most were middling affairs that were little more than shallow re-treads of previous compilations. Look at the Namco Museum games on Wii and compare it to the PS1 series, and you can tell which one had the most effort put into it.

What the hell happened? Well, it’s hard to nail down anything to one singular reason, but if I were to hazard a guess it would be the rise of digital distribution.

Downloading games via the internet had been around for a long time on PC’s. But on consoles the idea didn’t take off until the seventh generation. Both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles had their own online stores where you could go to buy games both old and new. The PlayStation store in particular had a whole line-up of classic PlayStation 1 games that were sold on the cheap.

And then there’s the Wii’s Virtual Console. For those who might be too young to remember this, it was service that let you download classic games from a variety of different console from the NES, Mega-Drive, Nintendo 64 and even the Turbo-Grafx 16. The games were fairly priced, easy to download, and it had a great variety of titles, including some that were never released in certain territories.

The Virtual Console was not perfect by any means, the emulation was not the best, but at the time it was a great service. I was obsessed with it growing up and would try out as many classic games as I could buy.

And it isn’t like the Virtual Console wasn’t a big priority. Nintendo went all in on this thing releasing new games every week or so. It was one of the big selling points of the Wii and arguably the catalyst for the retro game revival we see today.

You can see the problem though right. Why bother releasing big collections of classic games when you can just port to the Virtual Console for cheap and sell them off individually for more profit. And since the Wii was the best-selling console at the time it made a lot of sense.

That isn’t to say there weren’t any videogame collections, they were just a lot more rare and not quite as interesting. The best one to come out at the time was Kirby’s 35th anniversary collection. It had all the classic mainline titles and a few extra challenges. Combine that with a colourful presentation and an extensive history of the series and it is arguably the best anniversary collection Nintendo ever put out. And I never got to play it because it never came out Europe. Still bitter about that.

But even then, Kirby’s collection only had 6 games. A far cry from what we had before, and yet still more than what we got from most others. Look at Final Fight Double Impact. it only came with 2 games. 2 entire games, Final Fight and Magical Sword, that’s it. it did come with some cool extra’s like a remixed soundtrack, but only having 2 games was a massive step back to what we had before.

A lot of collections during this time were like this, and there is a reason for this. Around this time there was a big emphasis on remastering games. Instead of simply porting the games over, they would instead be touched up with better resolution to make them look a little nicer.

When you look at collections from this era, most of them are remastered collections of games from the previous generation. The problem was that the quality of the releases, varied. There were some really good ones, most of Sony’s line-up was decent, the Devil May Cry collection was good, and the Metal Gear Solid collection was amazing. But when they were bad, they were fucking awful.

The Silent Hill Collection is probably the most infamous. This was a remaster that completely and utterly fucked up what made the series great to begin with. Removing the fog, a core defining element of the series horror, is like making a Sonic game without any of the speed. Oh wait, they did that, and it sucked.

The whole production of that collection was a mess. I recommend Matt McMuscles “Wha Happun” video on it if you want the full details. It’s such a shame because the Silent Hill series is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror series of all time. It deserved so much better,

But the one that hurt me the most was the Ratchet and Clank Trilogy. The games played fine but they were filled with bugs and weird graphical errors that made it the least ideal to play these games. This was baffling because the Sly and Jak trilogies were excellent, so I don’t know what happened here.

So yeah, the generation was where classic game collections were out and remastered collections were in. Which brings us to the more recent past of the eighth generation. Sometime during this period, we began to see individual take a back seat and slowly saw collections come back.

I think the reason for this was largely due to the decline of the Virtual Console. While at its peak the Virtual Console was a great way to play classic games, near the end of the Wii’s life cycle it was starting to wane. Releases started to slow down, and new platforms were introduced that weren’t supported that much. And with the Wii U being a commercial failure, its own Virtual Console went largely ignored.

You know what else didn’t help, the indie scene. The eighth generation was when indies started to come into its own, and a lot of those indie games were not only just as cheap as some of the retro games, but also offering up a similar experience with modern conveniences. Look at Shovel Knight for a prime example of this.

It was getting harder for the older games to catch people’s attention now, outside of nostalgia. Why play an old crusty retro game, when you can play a brand-new game that offers the same type of gameplay but with more refinements.

It’s also possible that companies weren’t making much profit from Virtual Console releases. Given the emulation behind it was made by Nintendo themselves I imagine they would get a cut of the profits. Now this is pure speculation on my part but considering platforms like Steam get a small cut from all sales made on their platform, it’s not that far-fetched.

But the Virtual Console had created a new host of fans for these older games. So, the best way to capitalise on this, and to help compete with indie scene, was to go back to doing collections. And with modern emulations allowing for save states and rewind functions, this meant they could add modern conveniences to make them more palatable to newcomers, something the Virtual Console didn’t allow.

One of the first major titles in this resurgence was the Mega Man Legacy Collection. This was a collection of all 6 NES Mega Man games along with some extras like an art gallery, music player and some extra challenges that remix some of the levels. It was a decent little collection that spawned a sequel that included the rest of the series, aside from Mega Man and Bass, though that may not have been a bad thing.

They followed it up with the Disney Afternoon collection, which was similar but with all the NES games based on the Disney Afternoon. It was also a very good collection, especially given these are licensed games that don’t see re-releases that often.

We saw more and more collections as the generation went on Konami would make Anniversary collections for Contra and Castlevania, Mega Man would get more Legacy collections for the X and Zero series, Street Fighter would celebrate its 35th anniversary with a beefy collection of all the classic Street Fighters, SNK released a 40th anniversary of some of their older titles, and that’s only a few of them.

It's great seeing them return, but modern collections aren’t without their issues. One of the big issues is input lag. I don’t know the specifics since I’m not a tech guy, but a lot of older games have some form of input lag when played on modern televisions because most were designed to run on old CRT sets.

Some are obviously worse than others, and to be fair the input isn’t that noticeable in most collections. You’d have to be super into these games to even notice it most of the time. I didn’t even know the Mega Man Legacy Collections had input lag until I heard about it a few years later.

Second is the price of some of these collections. Most are priced fairly but a couple of them are a little ridiculous. Take the Darius Cozmic Collections for example. There are two of these, one for the arcade games and one for the home console ports. Fair enough, would have liked to have seen one collection but having two is fine. Until you realise that both collections are £34.99 and £44.99 for the arcade and console versions respectively.

That’s way too much for either set. If those were the prices for the games combined, I could understand, but individually? No thank you. Thank God sales exist otherwise I never would have picked these up.

The prices for some of these collections are a major sticking point for a lot of people. Even upcoming releases like the Cowabunga Collection and Sonic Origins have had some controversy over their prices, especially Origins. But I think that’s a discussion best saved for another day since it’s an issue I can’t fully cover here.

And I think I’m going to end things here. There are a lot of classic collections out there and there was a lot here I didn’t cover. I didn’t even touch the plug and play console which is an entirely separate discussion on its own, and I mainly stuck to home consoles since that’s what I mostly played growing up.

I just wanted to write this to talk about my experiences with classic collections. I’m glad we’re seeing a lot more of them these days despite some of their issues. Hopefully we see more of these in the future so we can make some of these games more easily available. A Castlevania DS collection would be awesome, and there’s plenty of more obscure franchises that could use some more love.

I’m not sure how long this current boon will last, but I am looking forward to what we have coming soon. Now if only we can ask these companies to have less overlap. We don’t need 20 ways to play Sonic 2 on one console Sega, 5 is plenty.