After moving to West Virginia last year, Steve Kuo signed up for a new insurance plan that would cost him $500 a month. But there was one upside: He knew he was entitled to a free preventive visit. He wanted to take advantage of it, so he made an appointment at a clinic near his new home.

But then when he got there, they asked about his medical history and he mentioned prior kidney problems. When he received a bill a few weeks later, he had been charged twice for the same appointment: Once as that free preventive visit, once as an “office sick visit” because of the kidney conversation. He was flummoxed — and very annoyed, as he shared on social media. “No copayment means no copayment, exactly as stated in the insurance guidelines,” Kuo told me over email. “What is written and agreed upon should be honored.”

He is far from alone. On Reddit, I easily found more than a dozen examples in just the past year of people getting a surprise bill for what they thought was going to be a free visit. 

One woman posted a nearly $1,000 bill she’d received for what she thought was going to be a preventive gynecology visit. Another woman said that she ended up facing roughly $3,000 bills because she was given an ultrasound (which she said she didn’t request) at a preventive visit, and then her blood draw was sent to an out-of-network lab. Another person lamented that they had been billed $170 for an office visit because they had briefly mentioned back stiffness.

It’s not supposed to be like this. Americans don’t get much when it comes to our healthcare, but most of us are supposed to be entitled to at least one thing: Once every year, no matter your health insurance, you can go to the doctor with the goal of preventing future health problems by discussing important vaccinations, cancer screenings, and cardiovascular health screenings. The Affordable Care Act made that the law in 2010.

But more than 15 years later, people all over the country are walking into their doctor’s office, thinking they’re entitled to that one free visit every year, and walking out being billed for a sick visit, blood labs, and more. Researchers estimate that Americans spend tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars every year on services that are supposed to be free under the ACA.

Dr. Yalda Jabbarpour, a family physician in the Washington, DC, area and medical director of the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies, told me she still deals all the time with people’s confusion about what a preventive visit really means.

“Every single time I’m in the clinic, this issue comes up with a patient. And it’s sad that it comes up,” Jabbarpour told me. “In my mind, the blame is not to be put on the patient. The blame is not to be put on the physician. Really, this points to a bigger system issue that we need to solve.”

How could a seemingly simple promise of one free annual doctor’s visit result in a situation so convoluted that patients and doctors are still struggling with it nearly two decades later? And how might we fix it?

Patients are getting surprise bills from their doctors — and they’re pissed off

The goal of the ACA was to expand coverage and make sure health insurance would be comprehensive to actually help people stay healthy. As part of that project, the authors of the law added a mandate for insurers to cover those services, including an annual wellness exam. The problem is, they did not define what the parameters of that preventive visit actually were, said Alex Hoagland, a healthcare economist at the University of Toronto. 

“It didn’t establish a clear definition of…all the diagnosis codes and procedure codes and how frequently you get that combination within a year,” he said. “They don’t define what actually is preventive care and what’s not.”

That has left each insurer to define a preventive visit on their own — and that’s where the perverse incentives that leave patients in a lurch begin. Preventive visits are supposed to be reserved strictly for screenings and talking about other preventive measures you can take to protect your long-term health, but you may get billed for an “office visit” or a “sick visit” if you talk about any specific symptom you’re experiencing, the same as if you had come in because you had the flu. 

Health insurers have an incentive to keep the definition of preventive care as narrow as possible, so they have to pay fewer claims without any contribution from the patient. At the same time, doctors want to be paid for the actual services that they are providing. If somebody does bring up a bigger health problem during a preventive visit, then the doctor reasonably wants to be paid accordingly. 

“I know, particularly in the healthcare space, it’s really popular to blame one party or another, and here I don’t think it’s a matter of corporate greed or physician incompetence or whatever,” Hoagland said. “It’s just a natural mismatch of incentives.”

So the reality is that “one free doctor’s visit” sounds straightforward, but, in practice, it’s much more complicated. You as the patient might think of it as one visit, but in our fee-for-service healthcare system, where providers bill based on each specific thing they do, it’s not. The conversation about your vaccination may be free — but asking about your back pain is not. If you get blood tests ordered, that’s another line item. The list goes on. “It’s not like you walk into a doctor’s office and it’s just one thing that happens, right?” said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “It’s multiple different things that are happening when you go into a doctor’s office.”

Part of the problem may be that it’s one free visit. We Americans are consumers at heart: Tell us we’re going to get something for free and we want to take advantage of it. But having just one free visit may also lead to people bringing a laundry list of questions to that preventive visit, because they think of it as their only chance to ask everything of their doctor. 

That makes it easy for the discussion to tip over into a sick visit — and not only does that lead to a surprise bill, it can also crowd out the conversation about prevention that the visit is supposed to be focused on.

“What ends up happening a lot…is that a patient comes in for their annual visit, and in their mind, that is their time to bring up every single thing that’s been happening during the year, because they see it as the free visit to bring up everything that’s happened during the year. For some patients, that takes up the entire visit,” Jabbarpour told me. “They leave, and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, we forgot to do all the screening things: the vaccinations, the cancer screenings, and the cardiovascular risk screening.’ And then something happens down the line because you never address those screenings.”

A 2021 study by Hoagland and Paul Shafer, both of Boston University at the time, estimated that Americans with employer-sponsored insurance had in 2018 alone paid between $75 million and $219 million in medical bills that should have been free. They were more likely to be charged for things like contraception or cholesterol and diabetes screenings, with individuals sometimes paying hundreds of dollars for those services.

Hoagland told me he had been billed for preventive visits because he has type 1 diabetes and the system automatically categorized his appointment as a diabetic visit. Earlier this year, he co-authored a study that found people with chronic conditions were more likely to be charged for preventive care. Corlette said that she too had recently been charged for what was supposed to be a preventive visit after she mentioned an issue as an aside. And these are folks who study health care for a living.

“It was literally maybe a 10-second conversation where I would ask the doctor a question about something,” she said. “And that triggered it.”

Colonoscopies are another dramatic example of how this issue plays out in real life; Corlette told me the procedure was one of the first services where this fuzzy line between prevention and treatment under the ACA became obvious. People go under for what is supposed to be a preventive colonoscopy. But then their doctor finds a polyp and decides to remove it — good clinical practice, but as a result, their patient could end up being charged thousands of dollars because the colonoscopy was no longer preventive once that polyp was snipped.

“All of a sudden, that would trigger what the patient thought was a preventive service into a cost-sharing obligation,” Corlette said. “Colonoscopies can be thousands of dollars. That was when we were first like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is a more complicated area than I think the lawmakers that drafted this provision originally envisioned.’”

How the US could fix our preventive visit headaches

The ACA’s preventive visit promise was clearly well-intentioned and it’s worth remembering that, if you look in the aggregate, more Americans are getting more free preventive care than they did before the law was passed. The problem, as much as anything, is expectations: People think they’re entitled to a free visit and are understandably frustrated when they get billed for it.

“The difference is before the Affordable Care Act, maybe they anticipated some kind of cost-sharing,” Hoagland said. “But after, they expect it to be free.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Corlette’s team at Georgetown University recently released a proposal that Americans be entitled to three primary care and two urgent care visits every year with no cost-sharing. This approach has two virtues, she told me: It will help people feel like they are actually getting value from their insurance — the very complaint that Steve Kuo raised — and, because we know primary care helps prevent problems down the road, it should also improve people’s health in the long term. Take the pressure off that one free visit and let people see the doctor a few times a year without worrying about being charged.

“In employer-based insurance, a lot of people feel like, ‘What the hell am I getting for my premium each month?’” Corlette said. “We wanted people to feel like they’re getting good value, and we wanted to get to better population health.”

Hoagland also endorsed the idea of at least one free physician’s visit every year, no matter what’s discussed. In the long term, Jabbarpour said she’d like to see copays eliminated entirely for primary care. 

But any payment reforms are not going to happen immediately. What can we do right now?

For one, doctor offices could make an effort to be as transparent as possible. Jabbarpour’s MedStar system has started calling people a couple of days before their appointment with a brief script that tells the patient that they could be charged if the conversation with their doctor touches on additional medical problems. If your doctor’s office doesn’t proactively bring it up, ask when you schedule your appointment or when they call you to confirm it. Worst-case scenario, ask your provider what they consider preventive care when your visit begins. You might also want to educate yourself on what services are generally considered preventive and should be available for free: Your insurer may make that information available on their website, or KFF has a database you can peruse.

It’s not a perfect solution. “What ends up happening is patients come in, and they say, ‘I know I’m not supposed to talk to you about anything else, so I’m not going to tell you about anything else.’ And you don’t want that to happen,” Jabbarpour said. You should ask your doctor directly: What do you consider to be preventive care? Establish boundaries at the start. That way, you can at least be aware if you are going to get charged because the conversation crossed the line to discussing an active health problem.

And if you want to see the underlying laws change, start organizing. Contact your state and federal reps and ask them what they are doing to ensure this stops happening. Things could be different: Jabbarpour said she hopes to one day work in a health system where the cost of a single primary care visit isn’t so high-stakes, where doctors and their patients can manage their health according to their particular needs, rather than worry about how to bill for one specific conversation that covers the whole range of somebody’s health — like primary care is supposed to do.

“I think some patients can be managed by seeing us once every year, once every two years, and some patients need to see us monthly,” Jabbarpour told me. “To put all patients in the same box and say you can only see your primary care physician once a year if you want it paid for, it makes zero sense.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

My favorite restaurant, here in Madison, Wisconsin, closed this week. 

It was not my favorite because it had the greatest food I’d ever had, nor the most memorable ambiance. But I loved the Mad Rabbit Cafe because it had become my anchor in the neighborhood — it felt like home to me and a core group of friends as surely as the century-old houses lining the surrounding city blocks. Most importantly, it was entirely vegan — a rarity in this city, which, despite its ultra-progressive politics, embraces Wisconsin’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” It was a refuge where my most closely held values found expression.

That closure is part of a national trend. US plant-based restaurants appear to be going through a contraction, amid the tumultuous aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and, perhaps, an anti-plant-based cultural vibe shift.

VegNews magazine reported that data from HappyCow, an app that lists vegan and vegetarian restaurants, finds the number of vegan restaurants in three of the country’s top destinations for vegan dining — New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon — decreased by between 21 and 25 percent from 2022 to late 2024. Those cities alone make up a significant share of America’s vegan restaurants. Then, in 2025 and 2026, some of the country’s most renowned, long-running plant-based restaurants also announced that they’d shut down: Modern Love and Candle in New York City, the Vegan Joint in LA, Millennium in Oakland, a more than three-decade-old institution (though it later reopened as a leaner operation), among many others. 

According to a Vegan Society report, in October 2025, HappyCow (which is like Yelp but for plant-based dining) listed 1,717 all-vegan restaurants in the US. As of this writing, HappyCow lists 1,509.

Madison has never had anything like the vegan riches of New York or San Francisco, but even we are having our own vegan recession. When Mad Rabbit opened in early 2024, the city had four fully vegan restaurants; now, depending on how you count, one or two remain (and even the one that’s unambiguously vegan is a food-court-style stall). I visited Mad Rabbit at its last Sunday brunch, where it served what many people have described as the best tofu scramble they’ve ever had, and a crowd-pleasing rotation of crepe specials (this month, it was mango lassi). It’s a culinary niche that, once gone, is hard to replace in a mid-tier city like this one. 

Mad Rabbit’s owner, Nate Anger, told me the business hadn’t been in particularly bad financial shape; it was profitable for each of the three years in which it operated, but not profitable enough to justify the punishing time commitment required to run it. Managing it had taken over his life, as it’s wont to do for many people in the food service industry. “I live here. I spend far more time here than anywhere else,” he told me in a recent interview at the restaurant. “I’ve missed my kids’ baseball game and tournaments and school band recitals.” I looked around at the oddball, DIY space he’d conjured — walls covered in houndstooth print, an Alice in Wonderland-like vortex, and art of rabbits in mischievous-looking moods, one brandishing a pair of large knives (the sort of room you wouldn’t want to encounter while stoned). 

The animal rights movement has two very different emotional registers: the grief and terror of looking squarely at factory farming, and the joy of discovering how much creativity, abundance, and pleasure can exist outside it. All-vegan restaurants represent perhaps the fullest embodiment of that second feeling — like “a little heaven,” as Krupa Panchal, co-owner of Bombay Food Junkies, a vegan Indian spot in suburban St. Louis, put it to me. 

Even as vegan businesses struggle to survive, plant-based options at non-vegan restaurants have become far more mainstream than they were a decade or two ago. Set against the stagnating (if not declining) share of Americans who identify as vegan or vegetarian, that raises difficult and even paradoxical questions for the animal movement.

For that reason, the mass die-off of plant-based restaurants has been much dissected and lamented in the vegan community. As I faced losing my own — a possibility I’d always feared and tried to forestall by supporting it as much as possible — the problem became much more visceral for me. I found myself thinking about why it mattered to me so much: What is lost when these places disappear, and what does that tell us about whether the plant-based movement can grow and endure?

What vegan restaurants are for

The vegan restaurant predates the word “vegan” itself — and so, apparently, do questions about whether they can be financially viable. More than a century ago, French anarchist Georges Butaud co-founded the Foyer Végétalien in Paris, writing in a 1923 letter that he was unsure whether it would attract a sufficient “clientèle végétalienne” to sustain itself. Why start such a business at all, when the audience for plant-based food is so vanishingly small? “I already have some positive results. A few people have become vegan since we opened,” Butaud wrote. The restaurant “is a school where we reciprocally teach one another…I have believed in the usefulness of creating it, and I will be happy if, over the months to come, the number of vegans increases.” 

Many vegan restaurant proprietors today still share that ambition — to be good enough to help the movement grow. 

Long before it became routine to find plant-based options on normie restaurant menus (iceberg lettuce leaves don’t count), plant-based restaurants compensated for vegans’ exclusion from mainstream cuisine. But they have also aimed to provide proof of concept of the diverse, surprising possibilities of plant-based food for a larger audience, showing that plant-based food need not be confined to marginalia. 

Today, of course, restaurants are far more central to our daily lives than they were in Butaud’s time. Americans consume about a third of their calories and the majority of their food budgets outside the home, and food-serving businesses are perhaps our most important third spaces. Meanwhile, the problems associated with animal agriculture and overconsumption of animal products grow unabated in America and around the world. The US alone slaughters 10 billion land animals for meat every year, the overwhelming share of them raised in appalling conditions, and those farmed for milk and eggs endure no better. Reciting these grim facts tends not to be a very fruitful path toward making friends or convincing people that veganism can be a positive and enjoyable lifestyle. Plant-based restaurants, on the other hand, make veganism feel less like a prohibition than an invitation; hospitality rather than horror. 

Anyone who has ever gone vegan knows what it’s like to incessantly be asked the well-meaning but bewildering question: “What do you eat?” (And, I get it! It’s confusing for those of us who grew up viewing food free of animal products as side salad or overcooked green beans.) Plant-based businesses have long been laboratories for answering it, developing techniques that draw richness and variety from ingredients not often treated as the main event in Western cuisines.

The more than 50-year-old Moosewood Restaurant (although mostly vegetarian, not fully vegan) was an early conduit between restaurant experimentation and home cooking, its recipes spreading far beyond Ithaca, New York, through its enormously popular cookbooks. Soul Vegetarian in Atlanta, opened in 1979, developed a plant-based soul food repertoire that helped cut a path for dozens of other vegan soul restaurants across the US; the Chicago Diner, in the city long identified with stockyards and slaughterhouses, helped popularize plant-based versions of American diner and deli staples. And chef Miyoko Schinner, at her erstwhile San Francisco restaurant Now & Zen, experimented with plant-based cheeses long before launching Miyoko’s Creamery, one of the most acclaimed and influential vegan dairy companies of the past decade. 

The 21st century in particular has seen a flowering of vegan restaurants serving every palate and national cuisine, in every possible aesthetic — punk, hippie, psychedelic, fussy and upscale. They still expand my mind today, showing that a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to discover all the ways we can eat without the exploitation of animals.

The longtime Grasshopper restaurant in Boston, whose pan-Asian fare draws partly from Vietnamese Buddhist temple cuisine, makes mock meats that are worlds away from the rubbery substitutes that many Americans associate with the category (it closed its beloved, homey restaurant space in 2024, later reopening a stall inside a food court). Mad Rabbit changed even this longtime vegan’s idea of what tofu could be. Chicago-based Penelope’s Vegan Taqueria makes, as far as I’m concerned, the most exceptional Mexican food — vegan or not — this side of the Rio Grande. V-Grits, a Southern comfort spot in Louisville, Kentucky (RIP, 2024), provided evidence that some of America’s most exciting plant-based food could be found far from the big coastal cities best known for it. 

So why are so many of these places shuttering now? 

The vegan restaurant death spiral? 

Theories abound about the great dying of vegan restaurants.

Some of the casualties, it must be said, just weren’t very good in the first place. The raw vegan boom of the 2000s and 2010s, for example, produced numerous establishments built around that especially unforgiving constraint — no cooking. The result was often less-than-thrilling food (which isn’t to say it’s never good!), all in service of a restriction with scant evidence of health benefits to support it. Lots of these restaurants have closed in the 2020s, reflecting diminishing demand for that particular variant of vegan food. 

But the 2010s weren’t merely a golden age for zucchini noodles and date-walnut brownies — vegan restaurants of all stripes were multiplying, as was interest in the new generation of plant-based meats (Beyond and Impossible). It really did appear, for a minute there, that the future might be plant-based, vindicating decades of animal advocates’ work to push veganism into the mainstream. 

“I felt like veganism had really hit a big stride” in that period, Anger, the Mad Rabbit founder, said. Everyone was streaming documentaries advocating for plant-based diets — Forks Over Knives, Cowspiracy, What the Health, among others. Some polls suggested the share of Americans who called themselves vegan was growing. Anger said his market research led him to believe that the overall trend line for veganism would continue going up, even a little. Instead, “it just rolled right back over.” His restaurant had a core customer base of committed vegans, but its heavy reliance on regulars also showed how limited its reach was; stagnating interest in veganism may have been putting a ceiling on its growth. Keith Uruski, owner of Nooch, a vegan restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, open since 2018, told me that the business had thrived in its first few years, but has since slowed considerably, and he hasn’t paid himself in three years.  

In the years leading up to the pandemic, the assumption that the audience for vegan food would keep growing shaped much bigger bets than Mad Rabbit. Vegan chain restaurants including Veggie Grill, Native Foods, and Planta had pursued aggressive growth plans in the 2010s and early 2020s but eventually retrenched, closing locations and abandoning the scale they’d once envisioned. (Again, some of this may be merit-based rather than evidence of a broad rejection of veganism — YMMV, but I found Veggie Grill, at least last time I had it pre-Covid, to be mid.) “Most dedicated vegan chains are now in kind of a managed decline,” Lizzy Bartlett, senior director of menu research and insights at Technomic, a food service industry research firm, told me.  

The cultural winds have certainly shifted. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has probably contributed to a thermostatic swing away from “unnatural”-seeming diets and simulacra of traditional foods, like plant-based meat and milk. I also think society has deep carnist antibodies that activate whenever meat-eating faces heightened moral scrutiny. In the last few years, that’s taken the form of a protein obsession that has hijacked the minds of otherwise rational people, convincing them tofu and beans lack sufficient protein to build muscle.

But perhaps my favorite explanation was articulated by Financial Times journalist Henry Mance last year: “The decline in idealism,” reflected in the reelection of Donald Trump — the triumph of our collective id.  

There’s a risk of reading too much into all this, however. Many restaurants, vegan or not, suffered during Covid and from prolonged inflation in food and energy prices. This year, consumers are spending less at restaurants because of elevated fuel prices due to the war in Iran. Panchal, of Bombay Food Junkies, said that her sales have been down in 2025 and 2026 compared to the years prior, but she doesn’t believe vegan restaurants have been faring worse than non-vegan ones. Some vegan businesses have recently closed in St. Louis for personal reasons rather than failing in the market, she told me.

This is part of the natural life cycle of independent restaurants — many disappear within a few years, and even highly successful ones eventually run their course. US cities had many vegan restaurants open in the 2000s and 2010s, so we might now be seeing a wave of closures that reflects the aging of that cohort. 

Preliminary results shared with Vox from a 2026 survey of the global vegan restaurant industry, by the nonprofit Vegan Hospitality, also complicate the idea that plant-based restaurants are being killed off because of waning demand for vegan food. In responses from about 59 vegan restaurants (a self-selected group, to be sure), mostly in the US and Mexico, roughly four in five said they’d still choose to be fully vegan if they were opening today. Of 13 businesses that were closing or had been sold, six said that being vegan actually helped them, and four said it made no meaningful difference.

And there’s some tension between the “death of veganism” hypothesis and what may be one of the biggest forces now disadvantaging dedicated vegan restaurants: the widespread adoption of plant-based options on omnivorous restaurant menus. That it’s now easier to be vegan at mainstream establishments is “unquestionable,” Anger said. He viewed Mad Rabbit’s competitors as not just fully plant-based businesses, but any restaurant that offers “more than two or three” vegan options; it was located just a block away from one of Madison’s best-regarded restaurants, a Laotian place with several very good plant-based offerings.

Likewise, Michael Fifelski, general manager of Red Sushi in downtown Madison, which has a solid list of vegan options, told me, “Our vegetarian and vegan rolls actually are quite popular” — a foundational part of the menu. There can be a real advantage to simply letting vegan food blend in — Amanda Byrd, the manager of Everly, an eclectic, globally inspired restaurant in Madison, told me that its top dish, a butternut squash and forbidden rice curry, is incidentally plant-based. In many cases, “if you de-emphasize the vegan statement, but the dish happens to be vegan,” it will sell better, Claire Conaghan of the food industry research firm Datassential said.

Though nothing compares, for me, to the feeling of total alignment that comes with dining at an all-vegan restaurant, there is also something affirming about seeing plant-based food finally taken seriously by the wider culture — and vegan dishes surviving on their own merits alongside everything else on the menu.

Do vegan restaurants still matter?

In a world where you can find a satisfying vegan entrée at Chipotle or Taco Bell or your local brewpub, are fully vegan restaurants still needed? What purpose do they serve?

The most fundamental problem beneath the downturn in vegan businesses is simply that the vegan population does not seem to be growing much at all. Polling on the question is messy and often inconsistent, but according to Gallup’s 2026 survey, 2 percent of Americans call themselves vegan, the same figure as in 2012, when the firm first started asking the question. If expanding the number of people who abstain from animal products remains an important goal (a point debated within the animal movement, though I think dietary change still matters a great deal), then which is more likely to move that objective forward: vegan restaurants, or an abundance of vegan options at omnivorous ones? Which does more to increase the number of plant-based meals consumed rather than animal-based ones and generate excitement about vegan food?  

I put those questions to Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, who writes the Substack “Regression to the Meat.” He’s one of the most intellectually honest researchers anywhere on meat reduction. His answer, via email, is that we don’t really know: “I have no idea how to weigh the pros and cons of, when I’m choosing between meals, 1) signaling to the world that vegan businesses are viable or 2) signaling to a particular business that their vegan options are viable. That’s a hard problem!” (It might be “a microeconomic structural equation modeling paper waiting to be written,” he added.)

Reducing prevailing levels of meat consumption even a tiny bit, much less convincing people to become vegan, is really, maddeningly hard, as Green has written. One frequently cited obstacle to growing the animal rights movement — its “central unsolved problem,” as one movement leader recently put it — is that it lacks much in the way of an in-person social world and sense of community. Vegan restaurants alone can’t fix that, of course, but they are among the few physical institutions the movement has. At their best, they provide a space where a private dietary choice can be reinforced by a shared sense of identity — a place to run into someone you already know or meet someone new, at a speaker event or social mixer. These spontaneous, embodied connections made Mad Rabbit such a warm presence in my life, and its final days all the more melancholy.

That function may be especially useful when plant-based restaurants are rooted in traditions people already belong to — cultural, religious, or otherwise — and help them view veganism as continuous with an identity they already have rather than as something alien to it. As Green has suggested, “let’s tap into pre-existing identities, explain how plant-based diets are consistent with them, and then take folks somewhere to enjoy convenient, delicious plant-based food together.” 

On the other hand, plant-based options at omnivorous establishments matter for almost the opposite reason. People often struggle to stay vegan because eating differently isolates them from non-vegan friends and family; restaurants that can accommodate mixed-diet social groups help remove that social penalty. These options also need a customer base — if no one orders them, they’re unlikely to remain on menus. 

I’m enough of a weirdo that I try to almost exclusively support plant-based restaurants whenever I eat out. I desperately want them to survive, and at the end of the day, no one is more invested in advancing the craft of plant-based cooking than vegan restaurants themselves.

Not everyone needs to be like me — in a world where almost all people still eat animal products, a healthy ecosystem needs both places built entirely around veganism and those where plant-based food is woven into broader food culture. It needs, most of all, excellent vegan food, wherever it might be found. And now that veganism has made at least a small breach into mainstream dining, vegan restaurants still offer something their meat-serving counterparts cannot. They’re like miniature utopias where the normal order of things is inverted and, for the length of a meal, we can see what a future without animal exploitation would look like. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Todd Waller wasn’t expecting to spend the latter half of his 30s living with roommates. But in late 2022, following a breakup with his girlfriend, he needed to find a new place to live, quickly. 

A social worker based in the Atlanta metro, Waller started googling “efficiency apartments” and stumbled onto an ad for PadSplit, a company founded in 2017 that lets property owners rent out individual furnished bedrooms in single-family homes by the week. “It said I could get approved right away and move in tomorrow,” he recalled. There was no security deposit required.

All of a sudden, Waller found himself living with six other people and able to save a lot of money. His rent was just $180 per week, or less than $800 per month. Though he earned a decent salary, he never really had anything left over after all his bills were paid, and the new financial breathing room made the tradeoff of housemates feel worth it.

After a while, Waller decided he would be willing to upgrade to a nicer PadSplit unit, one with more amenities but still with roommates. Now he pays $1,250 a month to live on one side of a 2,000-square-foot home, with access to his own private bathroom, a private entrance, and a renovated kitchen. Three other people live on the other side of the house, and he rarely interacts with them.

“My house is awesome; I pay $500 less a month than I would if I were renting [a place of my own] without roommates, and I just was able to buy a new car,” he told me. He knows one day he’ll move somewhere else and perhaps even buy his own home, but he likes that he feels he can make that decision comfortably at his own pace.

With rents outpacing wages in most of the country, legislators are increasingly looking at co-living — sometimes called house-sharing or adult dorm rooms — as an overlooked piece of America’s housing stock. Zillow counts roughly 21 million “empty nest households” — or homes where older residents living with no children have at least two extra bedrooms. Some lawmakers want to make it easier for those homeowners to rent them out, which could put workers closer to their jobs and help seniors stay in houses they can no longer afford alone. Others are eyeing a different kind of vacancy: Post-pandemic remote work has left about a fifth of American office space empty, and there’s growing interest in turning some of it into apartments. 

Many advocates for people experiencing homelessness also argue that co-living is a needed solution, something that could help people going through emergencies avoid the scary slide into shelter living, especially models where you can move in almost immediately and without a deposit. PadSplit surveyed its renters in December and found a population that mostly works (83 percent were employed) and mostly hadn’t been to college. The median income was $32,500.

That co-living needs advocates at all is a legacy of the last century. Renting a single room in a boarding house or residential hotel was once an ordinary way to live in an American city, but in the decades after World War II those rooms became shorthand for poverty and vice, and cities responded by banning new ones and paying landlords to get rid of the old. Half a century later, many people still see sharing space with strangers as a last resort, or feel embarrassed about having roommates past a certain age. And discriminatory zoning codes written in that era are still on the books in most communities, enforcing traditional nuclear family arrangements when it comes to single-family housing, by defining “family” as people related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Those rules can be wielded against home-sharing, and against specific renters neighbors want to keep out.

But these longstanding barriers are starting to finally give. Doubling up with people you aren’t related to is less unusual than it used to be. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of households sharing space with nonrelatives grew by more than 500,000. Lawmakers desperate for anything that adds more housing supply also seem less picky about where it comes from. Companies like PadSplit are putting private capital behind the model, and a wave of new laws and litigation — much of it led by conservative legal groups arguing on property-rights grounds — is making it harder for cities to tell homeowners who can and cannot sleep in their spare rooms. 

For the first time since cities banned cheap rooms, the people trying to bring them back have the momentum, and the next couple of years will go a long way toward deciding whether co-living stays a niche workaround for people like Waller or becomes something a lot more people are able to consider.

The return of SROs

At the turn of the 20th century, as American cities swelled, immigrants, day laborers, and factory workers crowded into downtowns looking for somewhere cheap and temporary to sleep. A small room could be rented by the day, the week, or however long someone needed it. Some “boarded” in private homes while others took beds in bottom-rung hotels known as flophouses. These arrangements varied widely, but became broadly known as single-room occupancies (SROs).

The turn against them came after World War II, as middle-class white families decamped for roomy new houses in the suburbs, and SROs grew more closely associated with shoddy housing for the poor and the deviant. New York and other cities started banning SRO construction in the 1950s. By the 1970s, SROs were a regular media villain, even as they still housed hundreds of thousands of people, including the mentally ill who had been turned out by the closing of state asylums. Cities started to offer landlords incentives to convert their SROs into luxury rentals. Between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, roughly a million of these affordable market-rate units disappeared from the market across the country.

The idea that perhaps cities made a mistake in banning these lower-cost housing options has been simmering in urbanist policy circles for the last 15 years, particularly as the homelessness crisis has gotten worse. The Furman Center at NYU argued in 2018 that reintroducing SROs could help address the housing shortage. The architecture critic Karrie Jacobs argued in 2021 that cities had blamed a kind of housing for problems that belonged to the people living in it. “The notion took hold that if you eliminated the housing, the marginal people would simply vanish,” she wrote in Curbed.

Still, lawmakers have dragged their feet on actually making it easier to rent these kinds of units again, and until recently the people pushing for it had little to show beyond op-eds and white papers. What’s different now is that the fight has moved out of the world of policy papers and into places where it can produce actual results, including a lawsuit that could reach the Supreme Court.

Suing over who counts as family

In early 2022, a home-sharing startup called HomeRoom was renting out two houses in Shawnee, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. The company rented rooms one at a time to unrelated adults who wanted cheaper housing, and at a local city council meeting that year, Shawnee’s community development director asked whether the city should support such arrangements in single-family neighborhoods at all. Two months later, the council passed an ordinance banning “co-living groups,” which it defined as four or more unrelated adults sharing a home. 

Under the ordinance, if even one adult in a house wasn’t related to the others by blood, marriage, or adoption, the whole household counted as unrelated.

While the new law forced HomeRoom to evict its tenants, it also put Val French, a Shawnee homeowner, in a bad situation. She lived with her husband, their two adult sons, and one son’s girlfriend. Because the girlfriend was related to no one, the house was now deemed in violation of the city’s occupancy rules. Her son and his girlfriend had to move out, and French couldn’t rent the empty room to anyone else.

French and HomeRoom sued in federal court in May 2023, with assistance from the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. They argued that their right to choose who they live with is protected under the 14th Amendment, but they ran into legal precedent from a 1974 Supreme Court case, Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, which upheld a Long Island village’s nearly identical rule against six college students sharing a house.

The decision came down in the same years cities were clearing out their SROs, and it has given local governments cover to decide who counts as a family ever since.

A federal judge dismissed the Shawnee suit in September 2023, citing Belle Terre, and this past April the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the dismissal. A few months later, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case and reconsider Belle Terre once and for all. The precedent has already frayed in places — state courts in California, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have struck down local “unrelated occupants” limits under their own laws — but it still governs everywhere else. 

There is “a fundamental liberty right to choose household living companions — whether as an articulation of the right of intimate association or independently — that is deeply rooted in American history and tradition,” PLF’s lead attorney on the case, David Deerson, told me. 

The Supreme Court hears only about 1 percent of the cases it’s asked to take, and even if it took this one, the plaintiffs would be asking a conservative majority to recognize a new constitutional right, which that majority has spent the past few years insisting courts should almost never do. 

Deerson’s argument is aimed at that skepticism, though. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it held that an unwritten right counts only if it is “deeply rooted in history and tradition.” Deerson and his allies are arguing that living with people you aren’t related to qualifies as such because, for most of American history, boarding houses and lodgers were typical staples of family life. Belle Terre is also a short opinion written by William O. Douglas, a liberal justice whose legacy has little connection to today’s conservative justices. 

The legislative front

A Supreme Court reversal would be the cleanest fix for co-living, but advocates aren’t waiting on it. State legislatures have already shown they’ll act: Iowa barred cities from enforcing relationship-based occupancy limits in 2017, Oregon and Washington followed in 2021, and in 2024, Colorado lawmakers passed a law prohibiting cities from restricting how many unrelated roommates can live under one roof absent a clear health or safety reason. 

The Pacific Legal Foundation worked on that last bill too, and has since turned it into model legislation for other states. They colloquially call it the “Golden Girls bill” since occupancy caps like these would have prevented the four unrelated women of the hit 1980s sitcom from sharing a house. 

This year Pennsylvania lawmakers introduced their own version, with supporters citing not private property rights but the potential to ease the state’s affordable housing shortage. As legislators considered the proposal, Pacific Legal Foundation published research showing that nine of the 10 most populous cities in Pennsylvania capped the number of unrelated adults who could live together. The state House passed the Golden Girls bill this summer, though the Pennsylvania Senate version has not yet received a vote. 

The objection lawmakers hear most is the same one that animated Belle Terre — that lifting occupancy caps could turn quiet, orderly, neighborhood homes into de facto frat houses. That college partying concern killed Connecticut’s proposed Golden Girls bill this year. While the bill cleared the state Senate, it never got a vote in the House, amid reported concerns from the speaker about college students moving into wealthy neighborhoods. “What if a neighbor is unhappy about four unrelated people who are 19 years old or 22 years old living in the house?” state House Speaker Matt Ritter asked in an interview with the Connecticut Mirror. 

Pennsylvania’s sponsors tried to head off those fears by amending the bill to exclude protections where someone is enrolled at a college or university. In other words, the law would have covered Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia from Golden Girls unless one of them signed up for a class at their community college.

Nevertheless, advocates are expanding their push. Jim Manley, state policy director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, told me he expects Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Utah to take up new versions of the legislation in 2027.

And occupancy caps aren’t the only co-living target. Sam Hooper, a lawyer who has been lobbying state legislatures to re-legalize SROs, and his former colleagues at the Institute for Justice are now focused on the ROOM Act, model legislation that would bar cities from restricting SROs and other co-living arrangements, including rules that make it hard to convert offices into apartments. A version was first introduced in Rhode Island earlier this year. 

For Meagan Forbes, Institute for Justice’s director of legislation, the goal is for co-living to be treated like any other form of housing. “Other local laws can regulate things like noise and fire safety, but current regulations just go way too overboard in preventing this kind of housing,” she told me. 

Hooper, who drafted the ROOM Act, says he wanted to “take a massive sledgehammer” to existing restrictions. The resistance he runs into isn’t only the frat-house worry, but older cultural fears that SROs would recreate the poor tenement conditions of the early 20th century. “I think there’s this real problem of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in housing policy,” he told me. “People accuse us of wanting people to live in undignified housing, but they just struggle to understand that it can be a perfectly fine option for many people at different points in their life.” Hooper credits his own London co-living experience in his 20s with introducing him to some of his best friends and his wife. 

Even so, he cited a broad political coalition backing him up, from property rights champions in conservative states to Democrats and progressive YIMBYs drawn to the housing justice and homelessness angles. There are business leaders interested in workforce housing, he said, and he noted that the AARP testified for the ROOM Act in Rhode Island. “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to keep this bipartisan coalition that hasn’t succumbed to the culture wars,” Hooper added.

Not every co-living proposal is about removing rules. DC’s Senior Co-Living Program Establishment Act, also nicknamed the Golden Girls bill, would pay senior homeowners $300 a month to rent a room to another senior, plus up to $2,500 for home modifications. 

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the federal housing package that became law in July, doesn’t touch occupancy rules. But it does fund a pilot program for converting vacant commercial buildings into housing, which could make adult dorm office conversions easier.

The demand question

While momentum for co-living is real, demand is also complicated. Americans are doubling up more than they were before the pandemic — about 8.2 million households in 2024, up 4.3 percent since 2019, according to analysis shared by Zillow. Yet the share made up of unrelated adults living together actually fell slightly, by roughly 50,000 households, while homes shared with couples or families grew by nearly 400,000. In other words, when Americans need to save on rent, they still mostly turn to people they already know.

PadSplit is betting that changes. Atticus LeBlanc recently announced his company is expanding into New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, three of the most expensive rental markets in the country.

“Does that mean things have gotten more desperate, that it’s forcing this cultural acceptance?” he asked me in an interview. “I think there’s certainly an argument to be made there. But you could just as easily make the argument that, holy cow, we are really, really wasteful with space.”

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

My best friend confessed his love for me one year ago and I rejected him because I was unhappily in love with another man, and I was never really physically attracted to my best friend. He was devastated. I am happy our friendship survived.

Over a year later, I find myself thinking about how it would be like to be in a relationship with my best friend. He is the only man who ever showed me genuine love and support, and I wonder what if I try…maybe I will fall in love with him. However, I am concerned about hurting his feelings again. Is it selfish of me wanting to try this love out because it promises security and appreciation?

Dear Fanning the Flame,

I can’t blame you for being curious about the common “friends to lovers” storyline. It’s often portrayed as the best kind of pairing: Two people have the foundation of their friendship plus a newfound love; the romantic relationship is like a soaring addition to an existing sturdy house. 

But real life is not always like the movies, and it sounds to me like you haven’t actually had an awakening of desire for your friend. In fact, it’s the opposite: He once expressed feelings for you, and you confronted a lack of physical attraction for this person. Now you’re wondering if it would be possible for you to fall in love if you tried. I think you’d agree that your timing is suspect. After a breakup, it’s common and understandable to seek out comfort and intimacy. Still, I detect a philosophical streak in your question beyond the issue of whether or not this would simply be a rebound. 

If your friend has always appreciated you, made you feel safe, and loves you — could that be a form of love that’s better than what you had in your last relationship? Maybe that is what love is.

Is it? Over a long night of drinking some 2,400 years ago, one group of thinkers allegedly debated the true nature of love, as Greek philosopher Plato describes in The Symposium. 

Aristophanes, a playwright, tells a story that most closely aligns with the love we see in the rom-coms of today. He said that humans used to be larger creatures with four arms and four legs. After annoying the gods, Zeus cuts all the humans in half, creating the two-limbed bodies we have today. The result is that people wander the world looking for the one person who used to literally complete them. If you followed Aristophanes’s fable, you shouldn’t try to be with your friend unless you felt that deep longing that one has when meeting their other half. 

The rest of the dinner party companions have more circumspect ideas. Phaedrus, a Greek aristocrat, thought that true love inspired people to become the best possible version of themselves. Pausanias, a military man, thought that love driven only by attraction to someone’s body was “vulgar love”, and that “noble love” was the love of someone’s values. Eryximachus, a doctor, asserts that love is also about moderation, and it needs order, much in the way the natural world does. Finally, Socrates says that even if you start out with physical infatuation, you can eventually transcend that and end up loving wisdom itself, the highest form of love. As I read it, the men are grappling with how to make love make sense, while acknowledging that it can make us lustful and impulsive. Shouldn’t its best manifestations instead be practical and virtuous?   

You could easily justify trying to date your friend with these theories that try to wrangle and tame love. For example, if your friend inspires you to be the best version of yourself, you could decide that’s enough to go for it. You could also decide that because you admire your friend’s character, and not his body, that’s a noble love, and better than the vulgar love of attraction. 

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his 19th-century essay “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” that he distrusted the feeling of being desperately in love. He considered romantic love to be a biological drive disguised as a real emotion — one whose goal is to trick us into procreating. You could even see your lack of attraction as an indication that you’re able to act more rationally, and not be deceived by that cunning trickster, passion. 

I know you’ve recently gone through a breakup, but I hope you can feel how bleak these views can become: to see love only as the window dressing for the propagation of a species, or as just a bridge to the love of wisdom. 

This cynicism has other consequences. Wondering if you could redefine love in a relationship with your friend isn’t like a wine-fueled dinner party bouncing around thought experiments. It involves your best friend and his own feelings too, and could risk not only hurting him, but also robbing him of a better romantic partner. 

For Simone de Beauvoir, the 20th-century existential philosopher, the most important aspect of life was freedom: We are technically free to do whatever we want, and it’s the choices we make with that freedom that determine our authenticity, or lack of it. De Beauvoir worried about forms of love that stole freedom from other people. In narcissistic love, she wrote in The Second Sex, a partner doesn’t love the other person, but loves the fact that the other loves them. It’s a relationship built on the self-interest of one of its members. 

I want to gently point out that it sounds like there may be aspects of the narcissistic relationship in your dilemma. While it may be intriguing to consider what it’s like to date a friend, you don’t seem to be as romantically interested so much as you are interested in his interest in and support of you. Actually involving yourself in such a dynamic could take his freedom, as well as your own capacity to learn from your break-up, then find a partner you’re genuinely drawn to for their own merits.  

I’m not saying friendship isn’t an important ingredient in love. Many of the most successful, very long-term partners I know have developed a deep friendship with one another. This friendship helps them stay kind to each other and have fun over many years when work, health, or stress can interrupt more passionate times of connection. But those same couples also had the undeniable spark of attraction at the start of their relationships too. They didn’t have to try. Sometimes they tried not to feel as strongly as they did, and still weren’t able to stop. 

Even in cases when a relationship first launches platonically, if something more is there, the undeniable, reciprocal pull tends to emerge soon thereafter. In H.G. Wells’ 1911 novel, The New Machiavelli, which was largely based on a real-life affair Wells had, he writes about a college graduate called Richard who meets a young woman, Isabel. The two become friends and are entranced with each other’s minds. But they quickly start to notice more between them, despite trying to push such thoughts away.

They fail at this attempt. Richard has a moment of realization, when he turns to look at Isabel’s face one day. “And something — an infinite tenderness, stabbed me,” Wells wrote. “It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. …From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.” I think you owe it to yourself, and your friend, to pursue connections that have this quality, especially at the start. 

You should also make room for and appreciate your friendship. If it never becomes romantic, that doesn’t make it a lesser relationship. The couples therapist, Esther Perel, calls friendships their own kind of love story. She once described a simple exercise to help appreciate that bond. Take a few minutes and think about a friend who isn’t a family member or romantic partner. “Recall a time when that friend reflected you back to yourself, created space for joy, or helped you remember who you are,” Perel suggests. Then, send a message to that friend about that moment, and thank them. 

Having a good friend by your side in the aftermath of a breakup is a gift. Work on maintaining and nurturing that friendship, and make sure you spend some time helping him with his life too. Don’t fixate on whether you should attempt to fall in love. The truth is, for better or for worse, if you love him, you won’t have to try.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I’ve always been interested in the history of love, by which I mean the differences over time in how love has been expressed and discussed. William Reddy, a historian of emotion, has an excellent book called The Making of Romantic Love; you can also check out a syllabus for a class at Duke University he taught on the subject. 
• For a deeper dive (and refresher!) on Plato’s Symposium, I found that there was no better person to turn to than Melvyn Bragg and his guests on the BBC In Our Time episode on the philosophy of love. 
• Arranged marriages are an interesting window into understanding the growth of love. Mansi Choksi’s nonfiction book, The Newlyweds, follows three couples in India who attempt to marry for love; here’s an excerpt that was published in Harper’s Magazine. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Update 1.7.26: Die erforderliche Unterstützung von mindestens 2.000 Vorbestellungen wurde zum 30.6.26 erreicht – wir werden in Kürze die Planung zum Spieletest-Sonderheft “Die 80er Jahre” beginnen. Das Erscheinen ist für Ende November/Anfang Dezember geplant. Alle Crowdfunder können im Juli den ersten Newsletter erwarten. Wer noch upgraden will, kann das direkt in seinem Konto (die Sonderheft-Bestellung anklicken) machen.

Und wer bislang noch zögert: Wir lassen das Crowdfunding noch eine Weile offen, aber irgendwann in der mittleren Zukunft wird es die höheren Stufen nicht mehr geben, und der Preisvorteil durch die reduzierten Versandkosten fällt weg.

Dieser Link führt euch direkt zum Crowdfunding.

Vielen Dank, dass ihr uns die Verzögerung des Crowdfundings um zwei Wochen (ursprünglich war der Start am 16. Mai geplant) nicht übel genommen habt! Heute früh ist nun das Crowdfunding zum Spieletest-Sonderheft Die 80er Jahre gestartet. Der Hauptgrund für die Verzögerung war die Erweiterung auf fünf Stufen und das Abtesten mehrerer physischer Beilagen. Am Ende haben wir uns nun aber dafür entschieden, den “Firelefanz-Faktor” sehr gering zu halten und nur das Poster zu machen ab Stufe 3, das wir dafür aber von DIN/A3 auf DIN/A2 vergrößert haben. Die Hauptunterschiede liegen nun beim Heft selbst (es gibt drei Varianten: normales Cover, anders layoutetes Cover mit Prägedruck, und das feste “Buch”-Cover für Stufe V) und etwaige “besondere Würdigungen”.

Sicher fragt ihr euch, was es mit der Abstimmungsteilnahme ab Stufe IV auf sich hat: Wird das Spieletest-Sonderheft Die 80er Jahre nun etwa durch Schwarmintelligenz erstellt? Das natürlich nicht. Aber es ist beim vorherigen Sonderheft in seltenen Fällen zu knappen Entscheidungen gekommen (etwa, welches von zwei wichtigen Spielen noch in ein Genre aufgenommen wird), bei denen wir auch eine Münze hätten werfen können. In solchen Fällen werden wir dieses Mal die Vorbesteller der Stufen IV und V abstimmen lassen und uns an das Ergebnis halten.

Und jetzt zur Beschreibung des Hefts – die einzelnen Stufen und ihre Unterschiede findet ihr beim Crowdfunding.

Das Sonderheft 80er Jahre

Unser 2. Sonderheft liefert etwas, das ihr im normalen Retro Gamer nicht findet: Retro-Spieletests. Und zwar gleich 100 davon – mit jeweils mindestens einer Seite Umfang, und von erfahrenen Spieleveteranen-Autoren wie Anatol Locker, Heinrich Lenhardt, Michael Hengst, Hardy Heßdörfer, Roland Austinat und vielen anderen. Gebündelt ergibt das den perfekten Überblick über das wichtigste Spielejahrzehnt überhaupt, denn in den 80ern legten 8- und 16-Bit-Spiele den Grundstein für alles, was danach kam!

Beim 80er-Jahre-Sonderheft steht weniger die Kaufberatung im Vordergrund als vielmehr die Zeitberatung – sind die Klassiker von damals heute wirklich noch eure Freizeit wert? Aber natürlich geht es auch um Einordnung und Würdigung, ihr erhaltet einen guten Überblick über das komplette Spiele-Jahrzehnt. Bei den Tests nutzen wir das altbewährte “objektive” 100er-System und bewerten aus heutiger Retrofan-Sicht: weder durch die rosarote Brille, noch als pingelige Erbsenzähler. Wir erwarten für eine hohe Wertung einfach, dass das Spiel heute noch Spaß macht. Zur Abrundung gibt’s auch noch unsere streng subjektiven Wertungsgesichter zu den Tests – subjektiv kann auch ein mit 71% bewerteter Klassiker noch “Super!” sein.

Wieso der Fokus auf Spieletests statt unserem normalen Mix aus einer Vielfalt von Interviews, Making ofs und Co.? Weil wir euch eben nicht nur „mehr vom Gleichen“ verkaufen wollen. Und weil wir in der RG-Redaktion wehmütig an Magazine wie die Happy Computer Spiele-Sonderhefte zurückdenken, die gekonnt Bekanntes und Unbekanntes zusammenfassten, Marktüberblick und Lesespaß vereinten. Das Sonderheft stammt vom bekannten, leicht erweiterten deutschen Retro-Gamer-Team.

Wieso “Crowdfunding”?

Aktuell ist das Sonderheft ein zwar konkreter Plan, aber noch keine Realität – erst mit euren Crowdfunding-Vorbestellungen stellt ihr sicher, dass wir wirklich loslegen können und uns über den (Früh-) Sommer und Herbst hinweg mit viel Liebe um die 80er Jahre und ihre Klassiker kümmern. Wir werden Ende Juni 2026 Bilanz ziehen, ob wir bereits genügend Geld einnehmen konnten, um als kleiner Verlag bei diesem Projekt finanziell halbwegs abgesichert zu sein. Und da wir das Interesse an den 80er Jahren für etwas geringer einschätzen als an den 90er Jahren, sind die zusätzlichen Crowdfunding-Stufen noch wichtiger als beim ersten Sonderheft. Sollte das Projekt je nicht finanziert werden, erhaltet ihr euer Geld natürlich zurück.

Apropos Geld: “Wieso verlangt ihr so viel Geld?”, fragt sich vielleicht der eine oder andere von euch, gerade in wirtschaftlich schwierigen Zeiten wie diesen. Doch wir haben beim Sonderheft höhere redaktionelle Kosten als beim normalen Retro Gamer, wo etwa die Hälfte der Artikel Lokalisierungen sind (die uns günstiger kommen als neu geschriebene Beiträge). Zudem ist die Seitenzahl höher, und wir haben (vermutlich) keine einzige Anzeigenseite im Sonderheft. Vor allem die deutlich geringere Druckauflage (im Vergleich zu den etwa 18.000 beim Hauptmagazin) erhöht die Kosten pro Heft deutlich, weil es viele Fixkosten gibt. Die bessere Papierqualität kostet zusätzlich.

Dieses Sonderheft gibt es nur hier im Shop, nicht am Kiosk – die Entscheidung, ob wir wie beim 90er-Jahre-Heft wieder in den deutschen Bahnhofsbuchhandel gehen, steht noch aus.

Passend zur Titelstory in Retro Gamer 3/26 zu Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) spielt Hagen Gehritz für euch das auch dort gelobte Remake von Bluepoint Games von 2018, das dieses faszinierende Werk gekonnt auf PS4 gebracht hat. Viel Spaß!