Are you an "older gamer?"

[JohnathanStrange]

With my newly purchased Apple IIc I picked up my first computer game:



Along with Ultima IV from above, Bard's Tale holds a special place in my gaming nostalgia:

Kudos for going beyond looks and charm! You enjoyed it?

[crumsteel]

In my mid 30's and I do feel old for gaming, but I love it. Most of my friends golf or watch sports now. I find myself playing games with their 10 - 15 year old kids while they are off doing something.

[KC]

I'm 40 and started with Air Sea Battle on a 2600.  After the Atari flameout in the 80s, I became an exclusive Apple 2/PC gamer.  I got back into consoles with the original Xbox and now have all three latest generation consoles.

[Jeff]

I grew up thinking Intellivision baseball was heaven-on-earth.  I've been a 'gamer' ever since.

So yeah... I'm an older gamer and then some.

Same here. I played so much Intellivision Baseball that my brother & I literally wore the gamepads down to an unreadable and unusable condition. We also played lots of other Intellivision games. Before that, we even had one of the first Pong machines, from around '76 or '77.

I had my first PC and first PC games back in 1984. Back then, they were called "IBM Clones" or something. My first PC game was APBA Computer Baseball, a text-based conversion of their board/card game. It was my heaven-on-earth at the time.

I'm 42 and have been a gamer for over 30 years, pretty much my whole life if you count board & card games before the digital age.

[JCAnejo]

All I have to add is this was my first home game

[Rowdy]

33.  Bard's Tale on an Apple II was what hooked me.

[Isgrimnur]

32.  

Vic-20 returned and replaced with a C=64, plenty of hours typing in BASIC and MLX programs.  No keypad on the C=64, so we had little dot stickers to tell us which keys were the numbers.


Rootin' Tootin'


Space Taxi

Atari 2600


Demons to Diamonds


Warlords

Family's first PC was 386/20

My first PC was a 486 DX2/66 with a 405 MB hard drive.  I started with a Diamond Viper V330 video card and wound up gradually upgrading to get 2 3D Monster II 12 MB cards run in SLI mode.  AH, that was grand until one of them went south.

[CeeKay]

I'm 31 but with my advanced Brown genes, I look 21 

fixed 

[Laner]

Vic-20 returned and replaced with a C=64, plenty of hours typing in BASIC and MLX programs.

Gah - MLX, how I hate thee.  My dad, God bless him, would sit there and read out endless strings of random characters out of Compute!'s Gazette while I typed them in. 

[Ironrod]

I am 48 and don't think someone should be considered an older gamer til they hit their 50's. 

51 here, with a 5+ year-old-PC. I'm not much of a gamer anymore because I can't afford to keep up. 16 colors is plenty.

[disarm]

my first game was one of these handed down from neighbor when i was about 3 or 4 years old...a 1977 APF TVFun (generic Pong) that is tucked in a closet at my parents house now, and still in working condition



we followed it up a few years later with a TRS-80 Micro Color Computer...



still have that one as well...complete with the 16k RAM expansion and cassette data recorder.  you could actually get it to play a few lame games if you were willing to take the time to program them all in BASIC.  sadly, that was the last 'computer' my family owned until we picked up a well-used 286 quite a few years later.  i missed out on having a C64 in the house, but played my fair share of great games thanks to an uncle that was cool enough to have one.

at only 30 years old, i may not have as many years behind me, but i've spent my fair share of time playing some of the classics

[Razgon]

36 years old here - We couldnt afford a video game machine when I Was a kid, so I drew one on the dinner table and pretended to play games there... Zinoxfabli and Blablastbla were great games...

[Pong]

36 years old here - We couldnt afford a video game machine when I Was a kid, so I drew one on the dinner table and pretended to play games there... Zinoxfabli and Blablastbla were great games...

A friend of mine pretended playing Sonic infront of a tv because his parents didn't want to buy him a master system...he was 11 at the time. Probably one of the saddest things I ever heard.

[Razgon]

36 years old here - We couldnt afford a video game machine when I Was a kid, so I drew one on the dinner table and pretended to play games there... Zinoxfabli and Blablastbla were great games...

A friend of mine pretended playing Sonic infront of a tv because his parents didn't want to buy him a master system...he was 11 at the time. Probably one of the saddest things I ever heard.

heh, well, the above is actually more or less true - I did the same thing- used to draw arcade machines on the table in school and pretended to play them to pass time ;-)

[Dramatist]

40 here, I started with playing pinball with my dad.  Got a pre-2600 Atari video pinball and breakout game first, then a 2600.  Didn't get my first computer til about 1992, but I went to the local Jr. College when I was a kid on Sunday afternoons and played ASCII star trek and Adventur on the main frame.

[hentzau]

Saved up my money in high school to buy myself a TRS-80 Mark 1.  4K of memory, baby!!!  Woo-hoo!!!  And not a full version of basic, but a stripped down version!  I would spend hours typing in programs from Computerworld magazine, and then only find out after that that they wouldn't work.  And the whole saving them to cassette tapes...always an adventure.  Half the time they wouldn't load back after you saved them...

[toger]

54 here (and female!). I've been playing non-stop since my 30s when I discovered Castlevania on the NES... although I suppose I really started with the Vic-20 but that whole having to program the damn thing every time I wanted to play something sucked the fun right out.

[mytocles]

54 here (and female!). I've been playing non-stop since my 30s when I discovered Castlevania on the NES... although I suppose I really started with the Vic-20 but that whole having to program the damn thing every time I wanted to play something sucked the fun right out.

OMG, NOOOOO!

Lmao, tell me there really is another 50's (both born in, and age) woman posting here!

Yup, I'm 50+ and female - though I started with Zelda on the NES - though I did get into Castlevania on the original GameBoy version.

Welcome! 

[YellowKing]

First gaming system was an Atari 2600 when I was 5 or 6 years old. I wanted that thing so bad after seeing it at a friend's house. We were poor so I know my mom had to have sacrificed a lot to get it for me.

After that I hit TRS-80s, Commodore 64s, Apple IIes and the like. Then it was on to the NES, and the rest is history. I owned at one time or another most of the major consoles up to the 360 today.

My first true gaming PC was a 386/16 with 4MB of RAM and a 40Mb hard drive. It had a 5 1/4" floppy and a 3 1/2" floppy, an 8-bit Soundblaster (or whatever they were back then), and a 15" VGA monitor. I was the envy of all my friends. 

[rickfc]

54 here (and female!). I've been playing non-stop since my 30s when I discovered Castlevania on the NES... although I suppose I really started with the Vic-20 but that whole having to program the damn thing every time I wanted to play something sucked the fun right out.

OMG, NOOOOO!

Lmao, tell me there really is another 50's (both born in, and age) woman posting here!

Yup, I'm 50+ and female - though I started with Zelda on the NES - though I did get into Castlevania on the original GameBoy version.

Welcome! 

Dude, we totally have some chicks on the board!  w00t!   

[Jeff]

A big thanks to mikeg, Ironrod, mytocles, and toger for making me feel young again 

[DamageInc]

I started playing video games in the 70's including trips to Sears to play Pong and Atari before my brother and I got it for Christmas in 1975/1976 (can't remember so yeah I'm old)
I also had a Trash 80 and our High school had a complete computer lab with 28 IBM PCs in 1982 (I think it was actually created in 1978)
I have been hooked ever since. If I was playing at home I was going to arcades and pizza/sub restaurants that had the machines.

I feel very fortunate to have grown up with the history of gaming

The games that stick out in my mind the most are Adventure, A talisman series from Activision( I can't remember the name) and for the PC Out of This World

[JohnathanStrange]

I never played arcade games much - except for my old nemesis Robotron (which was getting on in years by the time I got around) - but my father said they were quite popular in the seventies/eighties. I mean REALLY popular; not just present but sought out. So he was a gamer in that sense and I think if he were in his twenties, he might be an FPS player or Guitar Hero, but no strategy or RPG or RTS games for him.

So I wonder if all those arcade fanatics; if they really existed in those legendary numbers the old ones (my dad and his age cohort) talk about: did they make the transition? 'Cause to hear dad tell it, there were lots of arcades and legions of gamers. Some should have survived.

[kronovan]

I am 48 and don't think someone should be considered an older gamer til they hit their 50's. 

51 here, with a 5+ year-old-PC. I'm not much of a gamer anymore because I can't afford to keep up. 16 colors is plenty.

Phew! Glad to hear I'm not the oldest gamer here, you guys both beat me by a few. Game consoles hardly existed during my childhood and the few that did aren't even worth mentioning. Honestly I think I spent an entire 5 minutes playing pong on my aunt's Odyssey before I got bored; still think to this day she was a fool for buying it.

 I really didn't get my hands dirty with video gaming until the C-64 arrived sometime in my teens. Until the N64 and Playstation era I avoided consoles; just couldn't see the point of them when you could game, program and word process on a computer. In looking back, it was probably mplay sessions on my brother in law's Super Nintendo that finally changed my mind.

[Purge]

not quite mature here yet.


_{shut up Purge.}

Nuff said.

32, I started playing on a buddies Colecovision, my cousin's Vectrex, and then finally had a Hyperion "luggable" with a 3" b/w screen and flipdown keyboard. Oooo, Sopwith Camel FTW.

[Orgull]

I'm 35 and I'm just getting started.

My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20, with the cassette loader. 

EDIT: I actually typed my age wrong... sheesh.

[mytocles]

A big thanks to mikeg, Ironrod, mytocles, and toger for making me feel young again 

Oh, thanks a lot Jeff! But you left out tgb1.1 - from page 1.  Until dbt posts here, I believe tgb1.1 "wins."

I must admit I'm a tiny bit surprised at the age demographic, even though I knew we had a wider spread of years here than most forums.  What I forgot was that all the people who've been here since we were GoneGold and then ConsoleGold have aged.  It wasn't just me, lol!  We have a ton of 40-ish folk here.

I wonder why Ron didn't choose GoneGray for our new name, or maybe GrayingTrend?   

Yeah rickfc, we (women) totally rule here now, so watch your step - there are TWO of us! 

[Fellstrike]

I'm 23, started playing on my dad's friends Atari 2600 when I was like 4/5.  I liked it so much, my parents got me a NES ... I've been hooked ever since.
I remember when EverQuest came out, me, my mom, my dad & one of my dad's friends all got into it at the same time.  Nothing like getting punished because my guild jumped my mom's guilds raid.

[Geezerone]

I started playing video games in the 70's including trips to Sears to play Pong and Atari before my brother and I got it for Christmas in 1975/1976 (can't remember so yeah I'm old)
I also had a Trash 80 and our High school had a complete computer lab with 28 IBM PCs in 1982 (I think it was actually created in 1978)
I have been hooked ever since. If I was playing at home I was going to arcades and pizza/sub restaurants that had the machines.

I feel very fortunate to have grown up with the history of gaming

The games that stick out in my mind the most are Adventure, A talisman series from Activision( I can't remember the name) and for the PC Out of This World

Yep the 70's was the height of video arcades (my high school and college years).  Even during the early '80s we used to go to arcades during lunch breaks from work.  What hooked me on PC (of a type) gaming was playing the Zork series during the real early 80s on CP/M machines (precursers to DOS).  These games came on 12" hard sectored floppies!   

[warning]

54 here (and female!). I've been playing non-stop since my 30s when I discovered Castlevania on the NES... although I suppose I really started with the Vic-20 but that whole having to program the damn thing every time I wanted to play something sucked the fun right out.

And toger is awesome by the way.  FYI and all that.

[Tscott]

When I got the chicken pox in 1st grade, my aunt and uncle let me borrow Pong so I'd have something to do while I was stuck home away from school all day.

[Azhure]

54 here (and female!). I've been playing non-stop since my 30s when I discovered Castlevania on the NES... although I suppose I really started with the Vic-20 but that whole having to program the damn thing every time I wanted to play something sucked the fun right out.

OMG, NOOOOO!

Lmao, tell me there really is another 50's (both born in, and age) woman posting here!

Yup, I'm 50+ and female - though I started with Zelda on the NES - though I did get into Castlevania on the original GameBoy version.

Welcome! 

I'm another female gamer, about to turn 50 next month.   People look at me really weirdly when they realise I play computer games seriously, its only online that I know anybody else my sex and age who plays.   First game I really got into was Wizardry on an AppleII back in the early 80's and I've been playing games since. 

[toger]

54 here (and female!). I've been playing non-stop since my 30s when I discovered Castlevania on the NES... although I suppose I really started with the Vic-20 but that whole having to program the damn thing every time I wanted to play something sucked the fun right out.

OMG, NOOOOO!

Lmao, tell me there really is another 50's (both born in, and age) woman posting here!

Yup, I'm 50+ and female - though I started with Zelda on the NES - though I did get into Castlevania on the original GameBoy version.

Welcome! 

I'm another female gamer, about to turn 50 next month.   People look at me really weirdly when they realise I play computer games seriously, its only online that I know anybody else my sex and age who plays.   First game I really got into was Wizardry on an AppleII back in the early 80's and I've been playing games since. 

I just knew I wasn't the only one lurking. You just have to ask the right questions before we'll de-cloak.

And warning...   

[rickfc]

54 here (and female!). I've been playing non-stop since my 30s when I discovered Castlevania on the NES... although I suppose I really started with the Vic-20 but that whole having to program the damn thing every time I wanted to play something sucked the fun right out.

OMG, NOOOOO!

Lmao, tell me there really is another 50's (both born in, and age) woman posting here!

Yup, I'm 50+ and female - though I started with Zelda on the NES - though I did get into Castlevania on the original GameBoy version.

Welcome! 

I'm another female gamer, about to turn 50 next month.   People look at me really weirdly when they realise I play computer games seriously, its only online that I know anybody else my sex and age who plays.   First game I really got into was Wizardry on an AppleII back in the early 80's and I've been playing games since. 

I just knew I wasn't the only one lurking. You just have to ask the right questions before we'll de-cloak.

And warning...   

There be cougars prowlin' the GT stompin grounds, y'all!

No, I don't really talk like that.

[Zero]

Woohoo...not the oldest!  I'm in my late 30s...first video game console was a donkey kong game, black and white screen - would play it for HOURS.  That was back in 1981 (I think).  I still have it, and it looks like this:



I wonder how much that is worth!  I also had an intellivision, Atari 400, Commodore 64......man that was a long time ago.

[Nth Power]

I'll be 35 next month, but I still feel young most of the time.  My body sometimes reminds me I'm not as limber as I once was though.

My parents wouldn't go for Ataris or Commodores, but they did get an Apple IIe.  They weren't big on games and wouldn't let me buy any.  So, I'd play my friend's copies of Ultima, Bard's Tale and Might and Magic to name a few.   And Karateka...I used to love that game.

[Giles Habibula]

I'm 48. I was a late PC bloomer. I'd wanted a PC for years before I finally broke down and had one custom built in 1993 (age 33 then). It was a 486/25 running DOS 6 and Win 3.1. 4 megs of ram, a cartridge 1X CD rom drive, and a 170 meg hard drive. I still have that rig, and it still works. Even the original HD still works. First game was Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe that came with the Soundblaster CD/soundcard kit. Flying around in SWotL made me go "Wooahhh!" and I just then realized how much potential the PC had for gaming and simulations.

I was completely befuddled by the damn thing for over a year.
Ironically, I got DOS down long before Win 3.1. Win 3.1 was a huge mystery to me. I never did master even the simplest of tasks, while DOS seemed relatively straightforward, aside from the config.sys and autoexec.bat editing, which took another 6 months to get down.

[PaulBot]

Ah you youngsters. Most of you weren't even born when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I remember watching it live. I remember when the Atari 2600 first came out and my parents bought one. Playing Pong was incredible.

Call me an older gamer if you want - I don't mind at all, but I'm still YOUNG cuz my age doesn't start with a "5" for a couple more years!!

[Tals]

41 here - started gaming on a ZX81 with 64K RAM pack and external keyboard

First memorable game on it was space invaders where the invaders were 'A' characters

Also played some Maze thing which was quite neat.

Favorite machine in the early days was the BBC B with either Elite or Chuckie Egg - now that was a fine game

http://www.repton3.co.uk/chuckieegg.php

Tals

[mytocles]

Ah you youngsters. Most of you weren't even born when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I remember watching it live. I remember when the Atari 2600 first came out and my parents bought one. Playing Pong was incredible.

Call me an older gamer if you want - I don't mind at all, but I'm still YOUNG cuz my age doesn't start with a "5" for a couple more years!!

OW, PB! Just remember when you get to the 5-0 point, that I told you this:  it is my considered opinion that one night you go to bed when you are 30 or so... and when you wake up, you are suddenly 50!  Or that's what it will feel like eventually, lmao.

So now do we start the whole - "what didn't exist when you were a kid" discussion?  Well, I do remember our first television for starters.  I also remember Ike - and he was neither a GT member nor a hurricane!

This is too much reality for me, it must be time to go fire up Infinite Undiscoveries again.