Replaying the Past Through the Language of Legal Proximity

Retro-style video games often draw on the appearance, conventions, and cultural memory of earlier games. This creates a copyright question: when does reference to a shared historical style become proximity to protected expression? This article examines how modern retro-style games publicly construct their relationship with earlier copyright-protected works. It combines a comparative copyright-law framework with quantitative content analysis of 740 official Steam descriptions, equally divided between retro and modern samples. Descriptions were manually coded for five positioning strategies: Derivative, Transform, Unique, Rights, and Silence; the article also includes illustrative notes on cosine-based visual-similarity screening and AI-disclosure analysis. The findings show that retro games are especially marked by transformative rhetoric, which appears much more often in the retro sample than in the modern sample. Rights-related language is more closely associated with institutional production, paid distribution, derivative positioning, and earlier release years. The visual check indicates that inspiration-based descriptions may coincide with measurable scene-level proximity, although such scores remain preliminary and cannot establish infringement. The article concludes that retro-style games should be assessed through a graded framework of legal proximity, moving from general reference to historical style and genre vocabulary toward source-specific reconstruction of protected expressive elements.