Sonic, Street Fighter, and FF7 are easily era-specific icons (speaking in a general gaming sense, not in terms of Nintendo importance). Them having continued success or not has little to do with it. No matter what happened to them after it, Sonic is still a 90s platformer mascot icon, and Street Fighter is still remembered as a big-time arcade hit. Their attachment to those origins in the public eye is so overwhelming that they are worthy of the label "retro icon" (again in a general gaming sense) and are unlikely to ever shake it.
So is Donkey Kong. So is Pokemon. So is Star Fox. So did Animal Crossing three years ago. If NH is never matched in ubiquity again but the series continues to get successful games, in fifteen years time, it's not going to be "retro". It will just have had a strong peak.
Those aren't retro series. They are series that have had peaks in certain eras, as has Sonic, SF, and FF7.
Sonic just got two Hollywood movies. It's had like five different tv shows. The series has existed for thirty years and has many fans half that age. It's not "retro", it's a consistency prevalent series. The old games and the content therein or thereof are retro. One of Sonic's most popular characters didn't even exist until ~ten years after its peak.
SFV has sold seven million copies. That's less than II, and the zeitgeist around the series is less, but it's not insignificant enough to not make it still a very successful current thing.
I mean the proof is in the pudding. Pokemon isn't retro. Like you said, Gen 1 is retro. As are probably the next couple. Which is my point. That doesn't make the whole series retro.
Again the explosions of success they had in their early days is so overwhelming that it's hard to think of them without association to that era. Even if they are still successful today, their peak of success in the past could be so great that it dwarfs the current success, or at least makes it apparent that much or most of the current success is completely owed to that initial performance. It goes back to Excite still being classified as a retro by much of the community despite having a release as recent as the Wii era.
Association with an era doesn't preclude disassociation with another era.
If you think about Batman movies, you might think about Burton, Nolan, and the new one. If you look at Michael Jackson's discography, just because Thriller was Thriller that doesn't eliminate the Jackson 5 or Bad or any of the other ones. David Bowie had success across like six decades even if the 70s was his peak. Doesn't cast Space Oddity or Let's Dance or Blackstar into nicheness.
Excite isn't a suitable parallel because those new games all sold poorly while series like SF and FF7 have put up millions of units and stay in the public mind.
You're acting like the peak of the series renders the rest forgettable. These are active, triple-A series that you're calling retro. That makes no sense.
I'd say Gen 1 is definitely retro; Pokemon itself is simultaneously retro icon and current multimedia giant on a scale that few IPs can match. Pokemon itself may be considered retro by general audiences who only know about Gen 1 for the most part, but probably not so much by your average in-tune Nintendo fan, sure. But again there are no hard-and-fast rules here, and everything is on a scale, not necessarily dichotomous. I'll add that Pokemon's current success is vastly huger than that of Sonic, Street Fighter, or FF; it's not even in the same category.
And if something is a current multimedia giant then calling it a retro icon is deliberately only looking at part of its output, which isn't the point when judging the whole of the series.
Not to mention that the notion of retroness depends heavily on what audience you're a part of. We've already gone over how it changes depending on who you talk to when it comes to things like DK, Star Fox, and now Pokemon. As I'm writing now I realize that part of this difference in perception might be because I frankly don't play or care much about many third party games, so the way I think about something like Street Fighter might be closer to the way the total non-gamer thinks about it than someone who's more invested in that series and its current releases. Kind of like how someone who stopped paying attention after Gen 1 would more likely still think of Pokemon as clearly retro. Then again, I still think of Excitebike as being retro despite paying very good attention to Nintendo history, though in that case the current success is fairly negligible compared to the NES success.
I mean to some Nintendo is retro, because you only play it when you're a kid.
If you come at things from your personal level of familiarity, that's a bit disingenuous, because that will vary based on the individual. We would have to look at all of them from the same vantage, whether distanced, wherein maybe Street Fighter would seem retro, but then again so would Donkey Kong, or with more familiarity, where... for example, ever since FF7R was revealed, it was one of the most high-profile games coming, and that may have been fuelled by nostalgia, but it also kept it in the zeitgeist and translated to success. So it's not just a vestige of the 90s, even if the original is what kicked it off.
Anyone could brush something off as retro if they didn't stay informed about it, but that may not be treating every subject the same, so it's not a reliable measure. I mean, to me, Dragon Ball is retro, because I stopped paying attention after the DBZ anime. But I know the series has continued and still has a big fanbase. So calling the whole series retro wouldn't be apt.
I basically already said that, I think. It's just that if you want people who don't play a lot of video games (or maybe just not a lot of non-Nintendo games) to recognize and care about the big crossover character you're adding, then a retro icon like Pac-Man is probably the best bet. That said, the number of true retro icons (on the level of Sonic or Pac-Man) not in Smash is dwindling at best, completely gone at worst. So even if you accept the non-causal correlation between base game third party choices and retro iconicness, we could still see the picks move more modern.
Pac-Man
is a good bet. But not for the retro part, for the icon part. And a character doesn't have to be old to be big.
Pac-Man is an icon that happens to be retro. Steve is an icon that isn't retro. Both would be good draws. Master Chief is somewhere in the middle. He is a good draw. But then again, even some Among Us crewmate would be a good draw, because the character has become big.
Someone from Fortnite, someone from LoL. They might not be who we want, but they would be good draws, because these are huge games. Frankly they'd probably be more effective lures at this point than whoever is left from the 80s.
Anyway, this is getting to be quite a lot. I'm questioning how important this argument is tbh...especially because I'm not even claiming that the relationship between third party reps and retro status is anything more than "not a total accident."
I suspect we're at an impasse anyway, so feel no obligation to continue if you don't want.
"Smash" doesn't define it at all. The "retro pick" is purely a fan term.
And the fans generally define it as "NES character that hasn't made an appearance since". Which, personally, I think is a dumb thing to have a dedicated slot for in the first place. That description is the description of a bad character choice, and is not a thing they should be adding a new one of in every game.
Well, by Smash, I mean Sakurai. And we used his parameters of NES era. And no, it's not purely a fan term. It's how ICs got in. It might be how Pit got in. It doesn't exist currently, so there is no real point in speculating how it would be filled, but... it was a thing. There once was indeed a spot specifically carved out for an NES character. I mean, we call it retro, I think Sakurai called it "classic", but it's referring to the same thing.
If it was purely a fan term predicated on nothing, it would actually coincide with how people generally think of "retro", as in, something that shifts with time, not something that doesn't extend past like the Game Boy. Many characters would fall under that umbrella now... Saki, Alexandra Roivas, Ray MK, Lip, Jill... and if the DS starts counting then Barbara, Starfy, Isaac, etc.
But that's not how Smash has treated it, so it's not how we treat it.
