I (35 years old, grew up playing PC and GameBoy games since the late 80s) had no trouble accepting that the games I can play are either the once per year birthday presents or whatever pirated floppy my friends at school gave me that worked on a PC XT clone with a monochrome monitor (and lot of those that worked played way too slow on my computer).
As a kid from the 80s, my parents prohibited video game consoles except for a GameBoy during Thanksgiving trips. It took me years of work as a child to successfully overcome their restrictions and get games onto the family computer.
At one point I synthesized a hybrid of every Jazz Jackrabbit level and bonus level into a single launcher sceeen, something the publisher hadn’t because DLC and GOTY weren’t things yet.
I was bored out of my skull as a child and applied every ounce of that boredom to making my life interesting. My parents didn’t ban games because, apparently, I had to work hard to play them at all.
I would have been much less interested in computers if I’d had a Nintendo console that I could just play games on, to the point that I might have become a math professor instead of an IT guru.
TLDR: Take care not to conflate 80s-90s PC gaming with “one-click” gaming such as consoles, Steam, etc. Their effect on children can vary wildly.
My parents never let me have video games growing up because they thought it would be a waste of time. They let me get a gameboy for some reason though, I guess cause they couldn't imagine someone wanting to stare at a 2x2 black and white screen for any length of time. Even when my friends got n64s, we spent most time playing Pokémon or Zelda on game boy, because the games were just so good
I recently downloaded roller coaster tycoon for my gf, as we both used to play it when we were younger. She doesn't really play games, but during our 4th date at an amusement park we found out we both played it as children. That game was written in assembly by one person
Not really a point here, other than that nostalgia and craftsmanship can be far more powerful than the latest hardware or software
Sure. Closing in on my 50s too. I generally don't have patience for most games of that era either. I think quite a few of those games still stand up but when I play them now it's more of a historical engineering thing where I am understanding and figuring out how they pulled off certain effects, etc.
I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES
gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my
childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life
and time is precious.
Getting back to the point of the linked article, there were some special things about how these games looked and played on real hardware on real CRTs. One was the look. Two was a true zero-latency experience. While we may have "nostalgia" about the CRT look, there are also objective differences there.
And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how
otherwise productive I could be being right now...
I feel this too. But I also feel this way about reading books at this point in my life, I'm ashamed to say. I hardly read any more. But I don't blame the games, or the books. It's clearly me that has changed.
Random adjacent anecdote: I got a Game Boy GameShark for Christmas when I was 8 years old (so ~1999) and distinctly remember my father furrowing his brow as I explained to him that the whole point of the device was to cheat at video games. He was initially skeptical as it involved "cheating" at games which he regarded as a negative behavior given his experience playing sports, but after explaining that it was basically a software hacking device designed to expand gameplay possibilities he understood and softened his stance. Emergent properties of gameplay are far more interesting than merely "winning" a game, especially when it involves using Pokemon summoned from memory that was never intended to be addressed or rooms in the dungeons of Koholint Island that were discarded halfway through development.
Born in 1992, I felt this way as well. I literally spent months playing Crash Bandicoot when I was 9-13 years old.
When I finally got a computer, I realized I don't like the aesthetic of the newer games at all, and so got into programming without ever finishing a single game on the computer.
We must be nearly the same age. I remember entering pages of poke codes from a magazine for a game on my Commodore 64. Those really were great (if tedious) times :)
I'm almost the same age, I had a PC, a console (first my older bother's NES, then a SNES, a GameBoy, a Saturn, a PlayStation and a GameBoy Advance) and I played with Arcades as well, each one was good for some genres of games, PCs hardly received Japanese games in 90s, including fighting, shot 'em ups, some cool puzzle games, platform (although you cited Commander Keen) and some JRPGs that were absurdly good.
The PC had it genres as well, strategy, the nascent FPS genre and adventures were far better in the PC. I tried to play as many as I could in every platform, turn out that I never played much attention to quality if I had fun playing them (this partly explain why angband is one of my favorites). Maybe I'm an oddity to have played them all.
Outside of the hours and hours of fun it provided (which everyone can relate to their first gaming system), I can blame it for introducing one thing: Piracy.
Buying games never crossed my mind. You copied them from friends, and that was normal and accepted. My parents didn't understand that it was, technically, stealing. They actively promoted it. I had 5 or 6 friends who also had C64s, and I don't remember anyone buying any games...ever. One of my friend's fathers had thousands of games, in dozens of "disk boxes", with every title printed out in a 2 inch binder so you could locate it.
Pretty bad, in hindsight. And yet, the software industry survived. Who knew?
I'm probably quite a bit older than you, but +1 for King's Quest.
The first time I ever loaded a game was on my dad's IBM PC XT when he wasn't around. He had those old slide-out floppy disk drawers. One of them was labeled "games". I had watched him put floppies into the disk drive and switch on the computer. One day he was out and I cheekily decided to try out his computer without permission. I must have been around six years old.
I opened the games drawer and pulled out a floppy of King's Quest I, put it into the drive, and switched on the PC (with glorious CGA graphics). It loaded successfully. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do anything in that game and the first eureka moment was when I was standing in a field and typed "pick up carrot".
The most notable takeaway from that experience was, I thought there was a real world running inside the computer and from that day the only thing I really wanted to do was mess with computers. I played all the king's quest games, KQ4 (The Perils of Rosella) came quite a bit later, and I loved it.
To me a good game is an experience to immerse myself in, and for some reason I have never managed to do so on portable devices such as mobile phones.
I played my first videogames on an Atari 2600. I remember Defender, Space Invaders, Night Driver, Pac Man, Adventure and River Raid. Then Super Mario Bros, Zelda, Battle City, and a multitude of titles on those '1000 games' Japanese cartridges with physical switches on NES and later SNES, many of these in [black and white][1]!
The SNES was my last console. My parents gave me a 386 PC-XT where I played a [version of Space War][2], Sopwith, Rogue, Falcon 1.0, Double Dragon 2, Sim City 2000 and Doom. On later computers I played Daggerfall, XCOM, TIE Fighter, System Shock, Thief, Subspace, Grand Theft Auto, Jagged Alliance, Far Cry 2.
Presently I'm enjoying Elite: Dangerous and Metal Gear Solid V on a Macbook Pro.
I sympathize a lot with what was written. I grew up on the Nintendo consoles (my father got an NES from my mom for their first anniversary, which was less than a year before I was born). I really enjoyed playing games straight through my N64 I had as a young teen. But games after that lost a lot of appeal.
At the time I thought it was because I was growing up and just wasn't into it any more. Sure, I used to think spending hours playing Super Mario RPG, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo Kazooie, or Megaman X was a fun afternoon. Maybe I just grew up.
But there have been a few games that have come out since that I have really, truly enjoyed. Games like Psychonauts, Portal, Pikmin, and maybe a few other non-P games (e.g., Twilight Princess which is a half-P). Increasingly I have begun to feel like I didn't stop loving games, the games I loved just didn't exist anymore or were too hard to find.
I like using a controller. I like playing something I laugh at. I like playing something that stitches together a few basic motions/controls in complex ways to challenge me. I like playing games that are fun with friends or fun for friends to watch you play.
So for now, I mostly try and keep an eye on indie games that are cheap on Steam that work well with an Xbox 360 controller (which is really quite nice) on my Mac Mini. Occasionally I come across something fun and well done. But whereas I could rattle off 50 games I would love to play with my kids one day that I consider "classic", almost none of them were created post-Xbox. That's a shame.
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