Nostalgia Games: Replaying The Past

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyse the function of a “nostalgia game” – games that intentionally reference to the past to broaden their appeal. The two games chosen for analysis are Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight (2014) and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). Shovel Knight exemplifies a game purposefully designed as a celebration of classic videogames on the NES form the late 1980s to early 1990s by using retro aesthetics and old game design conventions. Breath of the Wild demonstrates how a game series looks to its roots for innovation – the original Legend of Zelda released in 1986. The analysis will be divided in two sections for each game. The first section looks at the recurrence of game mechanics and references both games make through the concept of “remediation” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) and how the games use nostalgia. The second section looks at the micro-temporalities of the games and how they reflect the games they are referencing. These micro-temporalities are referred to as “seriality” (Denson & Jahn-Sudmann, 2015). The wider purpose of this thesis is to lay the groundwork for future research into the field of nostalgic videogames.