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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

#236: Retro

Whether you’re generation Tetris, Tamagotchi, or Tomb Raider, I bet there’s some kind of video game or console that reminds you of your childhood. I hope, too, that we all still know of vinyls, cassette and VHS tapes, and floppy disks, even if they’re past their prime.


I’m not usually very sentimental about technology, but there’s something fascinating about obsolete tech. Something nostalgic and sad and full of mystery and untold narrative. In that spirit, let’s pay a visit to our inner attic, dust off some forgotten hardware, and see where it takes us.

This week's prompts

Start your story with a character finding a retro piece of tech they don’t recognize.

Mystery – 33 stories

Write a story about someone finally gaining access into their family’s very old computer.

Mystery – 36 stories

Write a time-travel story where a character from the present finds themselves in the 80s or 90s.

Historical Fiction – 37 stories

Write a story about a grown-up sharing their favorite childhood video game with their child.

Funny – 20 stories

Write about a character who isn’t nostalgic about their past at all, and show readers why.

Angst – 54 stories

Stories

“A New Game” by Michael Freeman

Submitted to Contest #236

“Honey, are you sure she’s ready for this?” My wife, Elizabeth, posed this question as she leaned in the doorway to our living room. She was watching me, her beloved husband of 8 years, attempt to untangle the mass of cords that now covered the hardwood like a pile of spaghetti. “Of course she is.” I said untying the last knot that had entangled a controller to the old Gamecube with the power cord. “Gracie is a Cartwright, and as such she was born to play video games.” “Yes, Mike, but she is also only 5. Not to mention that you can get...

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“When Then Was Now” by Denise A Nisbet (Wallis)

Submitted to Contest #236

When Then Was Now Denise A Nisbet Our family’s baby looks at the world with big blue eyes. Fingers in mouth, she focuses on something we can’t see. Then she looks into my eyes and laughs uproariously. I laugh back at her and wonder what her world will become? Because no-one, fifty-odd years ago, could have dreamed of the world we live in now. When I was a bit older than our baby, my family moved to Toongabbie. The name comes from the Toogalal band of the Dharug peoples who lived there. It had good water and food for them, so of c...

2 comments 2
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“Ruby Red Scar” by Tyler McGraw

Submitted to Contest #236

Eyes pierce through my flesh everytime I walk through a door. When I’m just trying to buy groceries, pump gas into my car, walk into the bank, I can feel it. I can feel their gaze fixated on me. Their eyes, it feels like a stab in my heart. Everytime. Everytime I walk through a door. It never gets better. They always stare. They always judge. They always talk. I mean everyone likes to be the center of attention sometimes, but not me. At least not in this way. I can hear their whispers. I can feel their eyes, and I force myself to look down s...

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“Isabella” by Tammy Haskins

Submitted to Contest #236

It was Isabella’s junior year in high school. She stormed out of class after a group of teenage mean girls was standing outside her class calling her abhorrent names. Fed up with their bullshit, she stood up, kicked some desks over, and said, “I'm sick of this shit.” Wouldn’t you know it, the teacher sent HER to the office.Mr. Grayson, the Vice Principal, had gone through the last 2 and half years of endless bullying with Isabella. He was the only person that ever made a difference in her life during her high school years. She felt like...

3 comments 3
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“Powerful Men with Powerful Guns” by Steve Rogers

Submitted to Contest #236

Note: Contains religious and political satire.The Angel sat looking dispassionately out from the top of Papoose Mountain across the sandy desert and mountain ranges. He could just make out the lights of Las Vegas in the pre-dawn gloom where, without doubt, the revellers were having the time of their lives. It was bitterly cold, but the Angel did not shiver. The light breeze carried the faint aroma of juniper and, the even fainter, sweet scent of cactus flowers making, ironically, one last effort at reproduction.Without his wings he had been ...

1 comment 1
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“DOWN MEMORY LANE” by Glenna Agnew

Submitted to Contest #236

 THE PAST IS THE PAST ( a.k.a.) DOWN MEMORY LANE We sat around the fireplace, our marshmallows dangling precariously over the flames, suspended on small crooked branches gleaned from the nearby woods. What had started as an epic marshmallow roast over a huge bonfire had ended abruptly when the heavens opened up and a torrential rainfall wiped the fire out in mere minutes. Gail had grabbed the marshmallows, Melody the wine and I grabbed the tray with the rest of the fixings for the s’mores. We had already eaten the more than slightly ...

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“It Watches” by Abby Williams

Submitted to Contest #236

Content warning: allusion to childhood abuse and SA.  “That’s what’s wrong with her–you and your mother!” My father shouted angrily, his fat pointer finger inches from my mother’s face.  The sentence came frothing out of his mouth, hot spit landing like acid on her cheeks.  His words were daggers–said to her but embedding themselves into my back, as I cowered in the corner, head between my knees, crying and waiting for the threat to pass.  He’d inevitably leave again.  Storming out to God knows where, slamming the d...

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“Combative” by Kay Mastro

Submitted to Contest #236

When I was 16 years old, my dad killed himself, not in the way you’re thinking though. It wasn’t with a gun, or a rope, or drugs. It was slow, and it was painful. And it took him years, and it wasn’t always intentional, but he did it. Every day I think to myself, how could he treat his body like this? He has two kids, a wife, a normal yet exciting job in a career he is passionate about. Had. He had all that.  He was fifty-two when he died. The day is seared into my brain like a brand on an animal. The hot iron of June twentieth torches...

2 comments 2
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“Yours Truly, Twenty-Nine” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #236

My dearest Nineteen, There’s a boardgame on my shelf gathering dust. Last year, I lugged it up and down the French Riviera in my suitcase—squeezed between summer dresses, Daisy Dukes and dreams—and finally, here, to Alicante. I’ve opened it once to read the instructions; you need at least three players, and that’s two too many. And yet it strikes even me as peculiar. Why did I buy it? knowing that I have nobody with whom to play. I must have dreamt something up that day, for it’s never the coat on display that we buy, but the self we imagi...

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“Doomsday” by Lipika Agrawal

Submitted to Contest #236

Henry kicked the stone hard. Flying off its spot, it landed a couple of meters away. He was sitting on his skateboard all alone in his backyard. As he approached the stone to pick it up again, he absentmindedly stepped on it. And that's how he found the device.  When the stone didn't go deep into the ground, he tried to dig a hole for it, only to find a weird device buried not too deep in the ground. Picking it up, he brushed the dirt off it. It was dark olive green in color and didn't have any visual display whatsoever. Fitting perfe...

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“Ma Bell” by Charles Sheehan

Submitted to Contest #236

Ma Bell The young girl’s red-haired head popped up from the opening on the floor. She looked around the attic, taking in everything and committing it to memory. Once satisfied, she turned her attention to the elderly man, who sat with his back to her, on a cardboard box in the middle of the floor with a single light bulb over his head. “Grandpa, what are you doing up here?” He wiped a forearm across his eyes as he turned toward her. “Belle, does your mom know you’re up here? I seem to recall her telling you not to climb on the attic ...

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“Old Tech” by Chuck Thompson

Submitted to Contest #236

“You call this technology?” Captain was taken aback by the vehemence of the query from the room. “Captain, Old One requests an audience with you and the other captains.” “What does it want?” Captain knew Old One from stories his predecessor told him. No one could tell him if Old One was male or female or even StarOne. “It says it has a story for you. An old story.” In its hooded shimmering gray cloak, Old One stood a head above the others. Broader across the shoulders than even the strongest warrior, it stood tal...

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“Grammy's Game” by Tanya Humphreys

Submitted to Contest #236

Geraldine’s eyes flew open as she whooshed upwards through the fading dream she’d been having. ‘A noise? Was it a noise that just roused me?’ She lived alone in the large Victorian though a waitstaff of three dwelled on the property in the large guest house over the four-car garage. Butler, Jameson, maid, Felina, and Maxxy the cook. Oh, and of course there was Jimmy, her best friend, an aging but spry Mastiff she’d adopted after the death of her husband. She was sixty-six years old, but her hearing was like that of a cat’s. She heard a ...

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“Byte of the Past” by Ashley Kenkelen

Submitted to Contest #236

Matt sat at his desk, the rhythmic scrape of the pencil sharpener filling the room. As he honed the point, intrusive thoughts barged into his mind like uninvited guests. Disturbing images flashed—fragments of what seemed like a past trauma. Uncertainty gripped him, and he couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling that these thoughts weren’t mere figments of imagination but buried memories clawing their way to the surface. “I’d know if something like this happened to me; I’d just know,” Matt muttered, his voice a mix of conviction and self-reassu...

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“An Answer” by Frances Joseph

Submitted to Contest #236

Her belly screeched. It was painful to forego food hour for the second day in a row, but today she was particularly optimistic. Yesterday, at Fourteen hour, her supervisor had left the Manufacturing lab, and she had removed the electric charger from the machine that produced tooth-cleaning gel. These portable rubidium chargers could run any apparatus on the ship, so surely it could provide power to an ancient technology as well; of course, she was assuming the early form of computer also used electricity. Perhaps it didn’t. Maybe it produced...

1 comment 1
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$250

Prize money

180

Contest entries

80

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - Feb 09, 2024 EST

Won by Jennifer Fremon 🏆

Title: Frozen Lemonade

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

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