Really? Because the way I understand it is that gaming and other computer nerdom was heavily ostracized as a hobby during the “good old days.” Even during the 90s, when I got my start, I don’t remember seeing anyone older than their early twenties in arcades, and the adults with the computers and the boxes with the 4 floppy disks with Heretic on them were the ones all the other adults told us to stay away from.
Can you quantify “most older people” who played computer games, and compare that to today’s figure?
I’m 50+, started with Pong, Space Invaders, Atari 2600, C64, Vectrex, pretty much all the Sega and Nintendos. I played arcade games (Pacman, Gauntlet, 1942, Outrun, Space Harrier, Dragon’s Lair, etc etc). I also played pinball a lot and did quite well with it, one of my friends actually became world champion with it (which kinda soothed my ego as I tended to lose to him fairly often).
I had and made quite a few friends doing that stuff, mostly of my age and some even older but on the whole gaming was a fringe thing and seen like something “for kids”. It’s really only when consoles came of age (PS1 and up) and MMO’s became a thing where older, normie, people got pulled in to it.
I started with pinball machines in smoky back rooms at a nickle a game. These things didn’t even have flippers. You just shook the livin’ ■■■■ out of them to get the ball to drop where you wanted it. And if you hit it right, you could win up to twenty five cents for your nickle.
Lol…what ‘good old days’ were those ? Do you mean the period of mass unemployment in the 80s when the 33% basic rate of income tax was being extracted to pay for all the supposedly ‘free’ education ?
Early gaming computers were being sold in mass in the early 80s. They were not some niche thing hidden away in the back room of electronics stores. They were widely displayed in prime place in the shop windows. Loads of people bought them…and played early games like Donkey Kong. A few years later, all schools in the UK had the BBC Master computer in them ( by law )…so the idea that there’s a whole generation of fuddies today who never saw a computer in their life is just palpable nonsense.
The idea that early gaming was ostracized is just baloney. Many now famous games sold out within weeks. There was huge demand. And even before that…you say you recall the arcades in the 90s, well I recall Brick Out and Pong in the pubs in the 70s. Practically every pub had Space Invaders machines. So playing computer games was not some activity just for nerds locked away in Mom’s basement. The idea that there’s any older people today who have never, in any form. played a computer game before is just laughable nonsense.
Later on, I can still recall playing Doom on the LAN at work…as far back as 1994…and discovering this new fangled thing called the internet. People were already gaming online even back then. The thing that truly kicked off online gaming was the WON network…with the advent of Sierra and Half Life…which in time evolved to become Steam.
There’s just so many absurd urban myths about oldies who have never used a mobile phone or a computer. I can recall being ‘on call’ at work in the early 90s and having to go around with this big heavy device that weighed half a ton…and loads of people had them on the train to work. Most workplaces had computers…even if only to do the accounts. And millions of people had computers at home. So stop re-inventing a past that I know about as I lived through it.
I lived in Ireland for a few years in my childhood in the early 70s. There was one TV channel ( RTE ), and the telephone was a device without a dial, where you had to crank a handle and ask for the operator at the other end to connect you to the number you wanted. These days people have sheer magic at the fingertips yet still somehow manage to get bored.
