GoKawiilIntroductions
In my last post I wrote about how Retro Game Engine started. It was not some grand “engine initiative,” but as a stubborn little D3D12 + Win32 prototype that slowly turned into a full pipeline. This post is the other half of that story. We covered the “how”. Now I want to dive into the “why”.
If I’m being honest, I didn’t build RetroEngine out of a desire to reinvent the wheel. I built it because, once I reconnected with a real CRT, I couldn’t u nsee what modern engines were doing to the image…not out of incompetence, but out of design.
Modern engines are incredible. I’ve used Unreal and Unity for close to a decade. I love them. This isn’t a dunk piece meant to say my engine is any better or even close to those. I’m not insane or naïve. Those engines are like a multi-purpose tool. You can do so much with them. Retro Game Engine is more like a Philips screwdriver. Its a tool with one purpose. At then end of this though, if I succeed, it will do its job better than any multi-purpose tool could.
The Moment the Filter Broke
Lets set the stage, so to speak. The spark that ignited this entire endeavor wasn’t some recent binge where I was obsessively tuning scanline sliders in unreal at 2am (it would be fair to think that was the case). Nah this wasn’t present momentum leading to a trigger point…it was hindsight.
For years I had seen CRT filters, built advanced post-process materials, and watched other people do the same. They looked cool, they scratched the itch in a way. They always seemed good enough when I compared them against the mental image from my childhood memories. I assumed any gap was pure nostalgia, not anything tangible.
The day that changed was the day I dragged home a $35 Sharp CRT from 1998, plugged in an old console (SNES), and actually started playing. I was immediately hit by a wave of experiences that are hard to articulate. In short, it was magic.
Motion didn’t look like a clean sequence of frozen frames played in rapid repetition. Bright objects didn’t just glow, they behaved like a physical light under glass. Pixels weren’t “pixels” in the way modern displays train your brain to expect. That is the part that really jumped out and stuck with me. The part that turned into an itch in my brain. Not “visual fidelity”. We are all aware modern displays are sharper. The thing that annoyed me was what came downstream of the old limitations.
Those limitations were real, physical ones. They didn’t just shape the hardware, they shaped the art direction. Games had to collaborate with the player’s imagination. They had to be bold with clean silhouettes and strong color choices. They had to have distinct worlds with less noise and more identity.
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