Report on ReAnimate'24: 2024 Summer School on Retro Gaming History, Critic, and Development

For many years, there has been an interest in ''old'' games, either real old games or recent games with an ''old'' look and feel. The retro gaming community has grown from very niche to mainstream, following the general gaming trend. Retro gaming has also entered the general psyche with books, movies, documentaries, articles, etc. becoming mainstream. However, despite this mainstream status and some recent books, retro gaming remains under-studied in academia and existing research rarely enters mass media. We proposed a summer school dedicated to retro gaming, which invited both the humanities and engineering fields to provide unique insights on retro gaming, both theoretical and practical, and opportunities for cross-fertilization among research fields. This summer school welcomed anyone interested in retro gaming. In particular, students in the humanities learned about general game development and the particularities of retro games while students in engineering learned about the history of gaming and theories about games and game design. This summer school, supported by the ACM SIGSOFT and Cloanto, featured lectures in the mornings and practical, hands-on sessions in the afternoon given by experts on (retro) games as well as site visits, panels, and discussions to foster exchanges, create a community, and promote the studies of retro games.