Listen to an old man ...

[FutureExile]

Let me tell you about a time, one long before many of you were born. A simpler time. A time when you would spend half-an-hour trying to load a game from a cassette tape onto your VIC 20 before being unceremoniously dumped to a crash screen. It was a time when your mom would berate you for "playing the Atari" while everyone else in the house was trying to sleep. A time when you and your urchin friends would monopolize the only Vectrex machine in the Sears toy department until a balding, red-faced security guard with anger issues threw the whole mob of you out of the store. Those were good times. And I miss them.
Enjoy your PS4s, your Xbox Ones, your Oculus Rifts, your Twitter feuds, your freemium Kardashian games and your sexting apps. I'm sure everything is as amazing and wonderful to you now as the ColecoVision and Apple II seemed to me then. Because they are wonderful and they are amazing. But one day everything you now love about video games will be considered quaint or even primitive. But you will remember them differently. You will remember them as little boxes of pure magic.
And you will try and tell your children, your nieces and your nephews about your adventures playing Halo and your amazing skills at Call of Duty. But they will just roll up their eyes and go back to playing inside their personal holodecks or surfing the internet with their government-mandated cyborg implants. And then you will be the old person posting on some message board one sleepless night, boring other people with talk of the good old days.

 

[subskipper]

Never boring old man. I'm getting there myself, much faster than I ever thought possible.

 

[Kallie]

Ah, the days of spending half an hour waiting for a game to load from tape, only to have something go wrong as it got to the end, meaning you had to rewind the tape and start all over again...

Thanks - now I feel old

 

[Evonisia]

This will never happen! When my Sister or cousin or somebody has children I'll be sure to impress said children by saying that Halo 3 actually had great enemy NPC personality. They won't be bored just because Halo 7 has enemies which literally shed tears when you shoot their friend. Honest.

 

[Ten Foot Bunny]

Oh gawd, the tape failures! I may have been a dainty, sparkly eyed lass of five, but those made me so angry that I'd give the TV a dirty look for a couple of minutes (because GamEr r4ge!!).

But that was nothing compared to how my mom would react when she'd spend an hour typing out the game code from a book, recording it to a tape, getting an error code when she tried to play, and found that the book itself - not her transcription - contained the error and the entire endeavor was a waste. Then we'd just play Atari.

I was feeling old enough with my birthday coming up in 13 days, but this really cemented it. lol

 

[CardinalPiggles]

30 minutes man that sucks. I'm pretty sure my Commodore 64 didn't take that long to load up, although it crashed often enough. Floppy disk master race yo.

 

[BarbaricGoose]

You know what we called Let's Plays in my day? "Stop hogging the Gameboy!" Nobody wanted to watch someone else play Pokemon Red, even if they were the funny one of your group. I STILL don't--fuck that shit; it's my turn already.

Sorry, I got no Atari stories. Though I do remember VHS tapes going bad and getting all weird soundng, or the VCR eating and, subsequently unraveling, my favorite taped TV shows. That hurt me.

Captcha #800-some: Peak Day Pricing. Am I human yet, Escapist?

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

30 minutes man that sucks. I'm pretty sure my Commodore 64 didn't take that long to load up, although it crashed often enough. Floppy disk master race yo.

To be fair it depended on the game. My ZX Spectrum would load up, say, Paperboy in around 15 minutes, but something like Operation Wolf would take the full half-hour.

 

[Racecarlock]

One day, I hope that there will be essentially a combination of gaming and lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is one where you're aware you're dreaming and can sometimes change it by doing whatever. Like flying or giving yourself super powers.

Yeah, I'm hoping for the matrix but with respawning so you don't die when you're killed in it and also you can disable pain too if you like. That would be awesome.

What would be great right now, though, would be some kind of full body suit that has perfect force feedback. Like a bluetiger motion simulator that you could wear. Imagine those awesome racing game steering wheels with force feedback, but you're wearing it. Wouldn't that be awesome to feel the car moving all around your body? Except when you crash, I guess. Wouldn't it be cool to feel the gun or sword in your hand as you destroy enemies?

The wii got it wrong with motion controls, but only because those controls don't have force feedback. What we need is something that does. That would be great.

 

[carnex]

Ah, the good old times, the happy times with my ZX spectrum 48k, than Commodore 128. I was lucky that my brother got it with Commodore 1541 floppy drive. That thing was a life saver, loaded in hyperspeed compared to tapes Too bad in Europe disk versions were scarce. Still, awesome times.

I would write something hilarious and scary about times that were and that are but it's on one of the topics that would get me 3 day ban so you are denied a good laugh by board mods

 

[Guffe]

The good old times of playing against your friend, who also had played exactly 15 hour of Pokemon on the GameBoy, to see who had the better 15 hour pokemon team on the school ground while between lessons
So yeah... I am one of those young ones I guess.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

Let me tell you about a time, one long before many of you were born. A simpler time. A time when you would spend half-an-hour trying to load a game from a cassette tape onto your VIC 20 before being unceremoniously dumped to a crash screen. It was a time when your mom would berate you for "playing the Atari" while everyone else in the house was trying to sleep. A time when you and your urchin friends would monopolize the only Vectrex machine in the Sears toy department until a balding, red-faced security guard with anger issues threw the whole mob of you out of the store. Those were good times. And I miss them.
Enjoy your PS4s, your Xbox Ones, your Oculus Rifts, your Twitter feuds, your freemium Kardashian games and your sexting apps. I'm sure everything is as amazing and wonderful to you now as the ColecoVision and Apple II seemed to me then. Because they are wonderful and they are amazing. But one day everything you now love about video games will be considered quaint or even primitive. But you will remember them differently. You will remember them as little boxes of pure magic.
And you will try and tell your children, your nieces and your nephews about your adventures playing Halo and your amazing skills at Call of Duty. But they will just roll up their eyes and go back to playing inside their personal holodecks or surfing the internet with their government-mandated cyborg implants. And then you will be the old person posting on some message board one sleepless night, boring other people with talk of the good old days.

Believe it or not, you aren't alone.

I remember those days you speak of. My first console was a PONG machine, I had the Atari VCS as well as the Colecovision (because Time Pilot was the best). I lived through "The Crash" and the subsequent years where there weren't many home games other than C64 homebrew stuff.

Those were fun times.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

Yeah, I'm hoping for the matrix but with respawning so you don't die when you're killed in it and also you can disable pain too if you like. That would be awesome.

And when that happens, kids who weren't born the first time you gamed with call you a "noob" for not playing the experience with the Pain attachment turned on. Or whatever the popular derogatory slang of the day happens to be.

It's already happened to me. When Street Fighter 2 was big, I was in college. I played it like a digital religion, and was pretty good for my local scene. Nothing like the EVO players of today mind you, but good enough to be known around my arcades anyway.

Now, with my achy hands and arm pain, I get beat down any time I even consider an online match. lol.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Nonsense. I'll never be an old man. We're on a verge of discovering the cure for aging. I'm gonna live forever. Or, until someone or something kills me.

 

[SadisticFire]

This is what I fear most. Where my favorite games, Fallout, Just Cause 2, even minecraft is going to be regarded as old, shitty and unplayable. But on the other hand, I want to embrace what ever is the next housing for games. Older generations gave us shit for our hobbies, let's all agree not to give them shit for their hobbies?

 

[Zhukov]

I already cheerfully abandoned the games of my youth in favour of the superior offerings of today.

I'm confident in my ability to continue this process.

 

[jklinders]

I remember the old tape drives. And my first console which was a Colecovision(which especially for it's day was fantastic). I remember being awed by the graphics in certain NES games. Having gone back and played some the old games again, I now know some of them were truly great and others were only good because of when it was and my young age.

it's not all nostalgia that makes me remember them well, but I see the bad as well as good now.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Man, of all the threads I could relate to, why does it have to be the one about old fart gamers?

 

[small]

ah tape drive and playing on a monitor that displayed things in shades of green. you also cant forget buying magazines and typing out games and programs as well.. i still remember that 2000 line text rpg

i mostly remember the bards tale.. fighter has hit bandits and killed 99 of them haha those were the days and writing down when on the tape the levels were so i could fast forward

 

[BarkBarker]

I have sworn to raise my children with an understanding of the mass complexity and strides humanity has taken, in all facets of our life. See that tablet that can do anything? YOU CAN'T HAVE ONE. I could afford it easily, but you have no appreciation for the power at your fingertips and that jades people to think their life is the standard, I even to this day always like to remind people that "the Internet isn't super fast or reasonably priced (loose use of the term reasonably) for the whole world and ignoring customers is gonna bite people so hard in the butt when they can't control their own stupid bloating budgets".