Retro Revisited: Reinventing the past for the modern gamer
Gamers of a certain age often hark back to bygone days of youth fondly remembering the games they played as children. How many of us have said “games aren’t as good as they used to be”, but is this true? And more importantly how can we re-visit these games today and full fill the ideal of rekindling past loves while attracting a new audience? With “Jetpac: Refuelled” for Xbox Live Arcade we have tried to do just that. We look at the design and ethos behind it, the artwork and audio and attempt to draw conclusions that we feel will help push re-imagining retro games forward.
Presented by Nick Burton: Senior Software Engineer
After completing a Computing Systems Degree, Nick spent 4 years researching 3D Volume Visualization and Surface Reconstruction in academia. In 1998 Nick left research behind and moved into the Games Industry where he now works as a Senior Software Engineer for RARE, which over the course of the past two decades has grown into a huge creative force behind today’s consoles and become a household name to games players worldwide. With nearly 10 years experience working on the Nintendo 64, GameCube, Microsoft XBOX and XBOX360 Nick’s main areas of expertise are graphical FX and game polish though he is also interested in XBOX Live Arcade development, XNA, computer vision and academic relations. Nick recently completed work on ‘Kameo: Elements of Power’ for launch with the XBOX360 and Jetpac: Refuelled for Xbox Live Arcade and is now working on his third, and as yet undisclosed XBOX360 title.
