Pixel Cherry Ninja

Dear friends, I genuinely thought racism had come to an end within the retro and FPGA gaming scene. I’ve been covering retro and FPGA gaming on YouTube for almost five years now, and for the most part, the community has been welcoming and passionate. But unfortunately, there are still people deeply invested in hate. Growing up in London during the 1980s and 1990s, I experienced a lot of racism as a kid. Thankfully, things improved massively after around 1995, and over time society became far more accepting and multicultural. That’s partly why it has been disappointing to still come across this kind of behaviour within parts of the retro gaming scene in 2026. When I first started my YouTube journey, a group of developers approached me and shared their early work with me. It was genuinely exciting being part of that early creative energy. They would even ask me to showcase videos on my channel, which I was always happy to support. However, once they discovered my ethnicity, I noticed a very different attitude towards me. At first, I convinced myself I was imagining it, but over the years the behaviour became harder and harder to ignore. I’ve watched this particular group grow increasingly hostile towards certain ethnicities, to the point where they even named software after a well known white supremacist group. They also repeatedly highlighted the ethnic backgrounds of people they disliked, purely to reinforce division and hatred. The retro gaming scene is supposed to be about shared nostalgia, preserving gaming history, creativity, and bringing people together through a common passion. The vast majority of people in this community are good people, which is why it’s so sad that these kinds of groups still exist within our hobby. I know I won’t be the only person who has experienced this kind of behaviour in gaming communities over the years. If you’ve been a victim of it too, then I’m here for you, whoever you are.