With the announcement of the metaverse, many people are now speculating what living in Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality world will be like. It’s expected that by 2030, more than one billion people will be in this new form of social media, but we still don’t know much about it.
The best way to make predictions about the metaverse could be to look to fiction. In Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, the author came up with a sprawling metaverse concept in which gamers existed in a massive integrated ecosystem. In that vision, there was a heavy focus on the retro. Judging by the current state of mainstream entertainment, there’s a good chance that the metaverse could replicate Cline’s Oasis.
The Modern Entertainment Industry is Full of Retro Options
As the gaming industry has evolved drastically over the years, developers have always paid tribute to the titles that came before. Old-school games have never gone out of fashion, and many of the top franchises have stayed front and center of the mainstream. Indeed, many retro games are more popular now than they were back when they were first released in the 1980s and 1990s.
The popularity of retro is visible for all to see, but it’s completely obvious when you look at sales of rereleased consoles from the early gaming era. For instance, Nintendo brought back the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super NES recently, both of which sold more than four million units.
Modern entertainment platforms that want to attract a lot of players in the modern age need to have retro options to appease the vast number of people in search of them. This is true in the mobile gaming industry, where Apple Arcade and Netflix Games both have old-school-inspired offerings.
This can also be seen when playing slots for real money in games such as Sweet 16 Blast and Alien Wins, which both go with the retro theme because the developers know this is a winning formula. They have the simplicity of early slots, but also some modern mechanics in line with the internet era.
Metaverse Could Easily Include a Range of Old-School Elements
There are loads of ways that retro elements could be implemented, and the best way to think about them is to look to Ready Player One. In the book, people who entered the Oasis were able to create their own avatars, many of which were based on characters from popular culture of the 1980s. This could be a fun aspect to include in the upcoming metaverse and may be a way to spark interest in more players.
In Ready Player One, the protagonist also encountered old-school gaming machines within the VR world. A key part of the story is when he plays a game of Pac-Man and gets a perfect score. There’s a good chance that there will be virtual gaming machines dotted around the metaverse for people to enjoy.
Ready Player One will have given Mark Zuckerberg numerous ideas for his metaverse. For it to appeal to a broad range of people, it will most certainly need some retro elements. There’s no limit to what it could include.
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