When Namco released Museum Vol 1 in 1995, it felt like a turning point. Bringing together some of the company’s most affectionately remembered arcade hits including Pac-Man and Galaga, this PlayStation-powered compilation arrived just a year after Sony’s console debuted, and sat on shelves next to sophisticated 3D confections such as Tekken, Wipeout and Jumping Flash. It wasn’t the first time that vintage games had been repackaged for a new audience (or, more likely, the same audience that played them the first time around), but having everything served up on a PlayStation-shaped platter moved the goalposts: the retro revival had crawled out of its hobbyist niche and become mainstream entertainment.
Maybe there was something in the air at the time. The Beatles’ allencompassing Anthology retrospective also arrived in 1995, just as Oasis were establishing their status as the biggest band of the period while sounding an awful lot like ’70s rock gonks Slade. If the Gallaghers were just a phase we went through, though, obsessing over old games was not.