Ay, Sigi, you're part of the Old Guard, now. No doubt about it.
I'm 51 and grew up playing video games so I'm confused by this post. GenX is the beginning of computer gaming culture, kid.
Well, I'd say the first "gaming generation" was probably around the time of the PS2. Before that, it was a real niche, at least in the New England area. I was one of the only people I knew throughout 1980s that played any kind of game. It was very unpopular and unattractive. In uni, I had a good handful of friends that had Nintendos, Playstations, or a PC, but only a few were really "gamers". Most would play a bit, but often didn't play much of anything.
I'd say the first "generation of gamers", where it was the norm for a decided majority of people to play all sorts of different games, was around 2000. I had been teaching high school and middle school for about 5 years before that, and only smatterings of kids played games. All of a sudden, come the turn of the millennium, almost every student I taught was into it. A common echo in my classroom became, "Oh, my god, Mr. P. -- you play games!?"
From that point, things skyrocketed. I'd say games became more popular than movies after that. True: I'd say that the mid-to-late 1990s was the "golden age of gaming" in regard to game concepts, innovations, depth, and variety, but I wouldn't really say that the first gaming generation had begun.
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If however, we're talking about being older than video games altogether, then I'm not sure we have many members here on the forums that are that old. 1971 hallmarks the very first coin-op machine. I know that the first version of Rogue was created in the 1960s, though. I'm sure we could find something earlier than that.
My cousins had an Atari 2600. I started PC gaming on a Commodore 64. I still remember that it was popular for pizzerias to have a table with Pac-Man in the lobby.
Personally, I don't think that we can really refer the first few decades as "gaming generations" though, as most people largely weren't interested, and there were many that had never played a video game in their life.
Actually, pinball originated in the 1930’s. Chess dates back to a game played 1500 years ago. Go is reputedly over 4000 years ago. But you youngsters wouldn’t remember that era — everyone believes their generation discovered everything.
Pretty sure we're talking about computer games, not any game but your info is interesting.
It was definitely not niche and yes perhaps in your neck of the woods it was, but arcade games were ubiquitous in New York City where I was raised in the '70s and '80s. All my friends had Atari consoles starting around 77 or 78.
PS2? What? I'm pretty sure there are several million people that would disagree in many countries.
If we are talking electronic games, my first “gaming” platform was a TI-30 calculator. No, it didn’t come with actual games. (My parents bought in when I was a junior in high school after they “caught” me going to school early to use the one school computer to write a BASIC program to perform the miserable calculations my physics homework required.)
But I used it as though a game. With it, I rediscovered an elementary fixed point algorithm to solve x = cos x. I discovered how to extract the full 11 digits of accuracy the calculator carried (even though it only displayed 8). I memorized the first eleven digits of pi. I discovered messages you could write by using the correct sequence of numbers and reading the display upside down. I experimented with what you could make the calculator do by pushing multiple buttons at once…. This actually proved useful when, after several years of loving abuse, the off button quit working. No problem — I knew a three key combination that substituted!
Oh, and it wasn’t too bad at physics homework, either.
But I used it as though a game. With it, I rediscovered an elementary fixed point algorithm to solve x = cos x. I discovered how to extract the full 11 digits of accuracy the calculator carried (even though it only displayed 8). I memorized the first eleven digits of pi. I discovered messages you could write by using the correct sequence of numbers and reading the display upside down. I experimented with what you could make the calculator do by pushing multiple buttons at once…. This actually proved useful when, after several years of loving abuse, the off button quit working. No problem — I knew a three key combination that substituted!
Oh, and it wasn’t too bad at physics homework, either.
I figured it would be different in different places. All I know is, between 1996, when I started teaching, and 2001 when I'd say it really kicked off, the vast majority of kids in any classroom that I taught in, from grade 5 through grade 12, were totally not into gaming. There would always be the two or three "geeks" that like video games, which set me up for lots of rapport with those kids ("I'm a way bigger geek than you!") The main draw was always sports. Then it would be some form of skateboarding, biking, or skiing. After that would come Visual Arts, Music, or Theatre...and stuff like Cheerleading, Gymnastics, and Dance were coupled in with this. Then the "weirdos" who like things like strange board games or card games. Lastly, and bottom social rung, were the poor kids who liked video games or even worse...Dungeons & Dragons or computer games. They would be the kids treated like real outcasts.
Yes, bullying was a major issue around upstate NY and Boston where I worked. Leave it to adolescents trying to "identify".
From my perspective, I'd find it hard to call that a "gaming generation". When it really took off was primarily the PS2, from what I saw. Almost every kid was suddenly talking about PS2 games, other games, planning trips to internet cafes to play the original Counterstrike or Starcraft. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic were being played at lunchroom tables with crowds of kids watching. I used to give away shareware versions of Lemmings to people that did really well each semester, and the kids would chomp at the bit for the disks. It was a pretty night and day switch. Within a few months, games, and consoles, and video cards, and overclocking were common discussion.
That's where I'd say there was a "gaming generation" -- a whole, almost global adoption of video gaming as a universally recognized passtime as opposed to an eccentric hobby. Parents within 10 years or so of that switched from telling their kids, "Your half-hour is up! Shut down the game and do something else," to chit-chatting with me about games when they came in for meetings or PTA events or whatever. It's perhaps an odd lens to view it through.
But, that's when I started thinking, Finally, people recognize these works of art for what they are. 'Bout time!In the end, though, I fully believe that there was a thriving gaming culture in NYC even in the '70s. That would be the place it would happen! (I still remember the Atari system at my cousins. We spent many an afternoon trading the joysticks for Combat or Joust tournaments. Pitfall was pretty good, too, a I remember. And they had E.T. Which is an experience everyone should have. Couldn't decide if it was a game, a riddle, or a joke.)
Here's an article that I love. It's over ten years old now but still relevant enough.
Generation X Is Sick of Your Bullshit
I can confirm that even in Africa during the 80s there were at least five kids hanging out in the corner shop throwing all our pocket money into machines in search of three letter notoriety. This was probably because the tape had streched on my brother's spectrum and my buddies' dad needed to use his IBM for "real work" so we couldn't play california games.I figured it would be different in different places. All I know is, between 1996, when I started teaching, and 2001 when I'd say it really kicked off, the vast majority of kids in any classroom that I taught in, from grade 5 through grade 12, were totally not into gaming. There would always be the two or three "geeks" that like video games, which set me up for lots of rapport with those kids ("I'm a way bigger geek than you!") The main draw was always sports. Then it would be some form of skateboarding, biking, or skiing. After that would come Visual Arts, Music, or Theatre...and stuff like Cheerleading, Gymnastics, and Dance were coupled in with this. Then the "weirdos" who like things like strange board games or card games. Lastly, and bottom social rung, were the poor kids who liked video games or even worse...Dungeons & Dragons or computer games. They would be the kids treated like real outcasts.
Yes, bullying was a major issue around upstate NY and Boston where I worked. Leave it to adolescents trying to "identify".
From my perspective, I'd find it hard to call that a "gaming generation". When it really took off was primarily the PS2, from what I saw. Almost every kid was suddenly talking about PS2 games, other games, planning trips to internet cafes to play the original Counterstrike or Starcraft. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic were being played at lunchroom tables with crowds of kids watching. I used to give away shareware versions of Lemmings to people that did really well each semester, and the kids would chomp at the bit for the disks. It was a pretty night and day switch. Within a few months, games, and consoles, and video cards, and overclocking were common discussion.
That's where I'd say there was a "gaming generation" -- a whole, almost global adoption of video gaming as a universally recognized passtime as opposed to an eccentric hobby. Parents within 10 years or so of that switched from telling their kids, "Your half-hour is up! Shut down the game and do something else," to chit-chatting with me about games when they came in for meetings or PTA events or whatever. It's perhaps an odd lens to view it through.
In the end, though, I fully believe that there was a thriving gaming culture in NYC even in the '70s. That would be the place it would happen! (I still remember the Atari system at my cousins. We spent many an afternoon trading the joysticks for Combat or Joust tournaments. Pitfall was pretty good, too, a I remember. And they had E.T. Which is an experience everyone should have. Couldn't decide if it was a game, a riddle, or a joke.)
Edit- afterthought- we were a bit of an anomaly though because we were the skater/bmx/weed kids but we also liked d&d maybe we were just into being different.
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Don't forget to park the drive or it may be sooner than you think
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That is the best article!
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Hah, one has to appreciate and/or love the occasional cyclic logic.
In order to not forget something, I need to do something which I've forgotten.
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Pardon me miss, seem like you're an 'old gamer' then.
While I'm significantly younger I'm also still a gamer.
Lets be happy gamers together all of us
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If you start glowing your eyes I know you're for real.
Never heard of that god before though, so you must've done something wrong... Perhaps you played too many games.
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I'm a little bit in this case. I have a console very early (Amiga, Master System I/II,...) and my buddies too, but we mostly played when there were nothing to do and above all when the weather was bad...(mostly in winter, because days/nights/evenings with my buddies seemed to be a way better hobby and we had better things to do than stay hours in front of a screen). So I can't say that I was a real "gamer" but rather a casual player.
I started to really play when I had to leave for a "unknown city" for a new job in 2000's (and unfortunately, leaving my buddies too). So I bought the first Xbox to occupy my "lone and sad" evenings during the week while waiting the week end. And since, well, I'm a gamer... (I played more this year than I have ever played before 2000's years for sure^^)
So I have to agree with @SigilFey (limited to my experience and buddies), games started to be really "popular" after 2000's.
Some of us 'oldsters' have a favorite coffee cup or two. Mine says ' My memory is not what it used to be...Also, my memory is not what it used to be'. Yep, favorite coffee cup.
errr...what did I just say? nevermind...it will come back to me.
As a 55 year old I can say I've been a heavy gamer since I was a teen in the early 80's spending my lunch money playing Asteroids/Defender/Missile command/Galaxy etc. all day and If you were good your quarters lasted
However what is gone is competitive MP gaming like I did in the early 2K. That is definitely a young person's game the reflexes and hand eye coordination aren't what they used to be and that younger group will smash every time.
Today I continue to game hard but it's all about single player, good story and characters and eye candy from a high end rig us older fellas can afford. Love cyberpunk for all those reasons, bugs and all and I'm on a 3rd playthrough lol. Gen X all the way baby, the first true video gamers
Same..almost exactly lol...Coin op for days, NYC. I'm with ya, GenX, 70's kid, 80's teen Only knew a select few that had parents who can afford a 2600 but we all had that one friend...wepa
However what is gone is competitive MP gaming like I did in the early 2K. That is definitely a young person's game the reflexes and hand eye coordination aren't what they used to be and that younger group will smash every time.
Today I continue to game hard but it's all about single player, good story and characters and eye candy from a high end rig us older fellas can afford. Love cyberpunk for all those reasons, bugs and all and I'm on a 3rd playthrough lol. Gen X all the way baby, the first true video gamers
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Same..almost exactly lol...Coin op for days, NYC. I'm with ya, GenX, 70's kid, 80's teen Only knew a select few that had parents who can afford a 2600 but we all had that one friend...wepa
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That's what I remember. I'm GenX -- born in the '70s -- and I was one of maybe 5 kids I knew growing up that were into video games. By the early 1990s, most people I knew had owned a Nintendo or Sega Genesis or something, but it wasn't "big".
So, I was taking "gaming generation" to mean "the first generation that was into gaming as a majority". By comparison, I wouldn't say that the "driving generation" began in 1886, when the first automobile was produced. Even in the Roaring '20s, owning a vehicle was still uncommon in the US, and only really available to upper economic classes. It wasn't until the 1940's that most people in first-world countries owned a vehicle, world-wide. That would be the start of the "driving generation", IMO.
And the only reason I'm making this distinction is because it changes the body of people that can accurately respond:
- If the question is aimed at people that were into gaming before it became really popular and widespread, that's basically Baby Boomers and Generation X.
- If the question is for people that were alive before there were video games at all, we'll need people from the Silent Generation. Not sure we have many people on the forums that were born prior to WWII.
i didn't have one either heh. my parents were technophobes and i couldn't even have toys with batteries!?As a 55 year old I can say I've been a heavy gamer since I was a teen in the early 80's spending my lunch money playing Asteroids/Defender/Missile command/Galaxy etc. all day and If you were good your quarters lasted
However what is gone is competitive MP gaming like I did in the early 2K. That is definitely a young person's game the reflexes and hand eye coordination aren't what they used to be and that younger group will smash every time.
Today I continue to game hard but it's all about single player, good story and characters and eye candy from a high end rig us older fellas can afford. Love cyberpunk for all those reasons, bugs and all and I'm on a 3rd playthrough lol. Gen X all the way baby, the first true video gamers
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Same..almost exactly lol...Coin op for days, NYC. I'm with ya, GenX, 70's kid, 80's teen Only knew a select few that had parents who can afford a 2600 but we all had that one friend...wepa
remember the optimo tobacco stores with the tiny arcade rooms in the back because they were moneymakers? hehe kids in the cigar/ette shops playing videogames...such a fond memory
I have to say that I've been reading through this and have been enjoying it, especially the discourse between SigilFey and AlleineDragonfyre. It hits a bit of nostalgia for me because I was growing up in northern Rhode Island (spitting distance from Massachusetts) in the 80's and 90's (I graduated high school in 1998). My wife grew up in Galway, NY (about half an hour north of Schenectady) in the same time period.
Honestly, I think both of you are largely correct, and any differences in opinion largely come down to selection bias and perspective. Having been a teacher, SigilFey has a broad selection and the perspective of an impartial observer. AlleineDragonfyre says "well, my friends all had..." yes.. your friends, that you selected.
Put another way, my experience was similar - in the 90's all my friends had Nintendos and at least one home computer. But we were the chess club / computer club / freaks and geeks / MTG / Dr. Demento / D&D / weird sense of humor crowd. We didn't fit in with the stoners, jocks, or popular kids. (My wife insists that, at her school, there weren't cliques like that, but I respond that she was too busy being valedictorian and 3 sport jock to be aware of the dregs like us). Huge selection bias there. Now, there might have been other kids who were into those sorts of things (and, in fact, I knew a couple), but they could never acknowledge that, because it would have destroyed their reputation in the school.
Anyway, all that said, the only real useful contributions I have to make are:
1. The Strong Museum (Rochester, NY) has an excellent selection of exhibits, including a lot of toys and games from this period, and 2 arcades (one pinball, one video cabinets). We go at least once a year and haven't been since before the new expansion, so we're looking forward to it. I highly recommend it. It's worth the trip.
2. If you want to play those old games in the comfort of your own home, check out the MiSTer project. It's a collaboration of a variety of people who are working to reverse engineer the old boards from arcade systems and consoles and reimplement them as FPGA logic. This means that, with the appropriate ROMs (many available from archive.org) you can play a cycle accurate version of, say, original Pac Man. Some of the ports are better than others, but the breadth of the library and the fidelity of the experience is improving at an impressive rate. Because it's done "in hardware", the latency is both predictable and small - there are timing tests where people with a high speed camera showed that it can actually have lower "Mario jumping latency" than the original NES. This includes HDMI output conversion - it only adds something like a 1 frame delay. I built one of these systems at the start of the pandemic (because I figured we were going to be spending a lot of time on the property) and it actually all packs nicely into a box so I've been taking it to various places we've gone as things have opened up - it's quite fun to hook it up to a hotel TV and play old games.
Ruminating on the next generation, I'm really curious to see how things will go. My kids (twins, age 8) are both growing up with varying interest in video games and the old systems. One son really likes actually vintage old stuff - he has a whole collection of Tiny Arcade cabinets, including some vintage Coleco ones from the 80's. The other one is much more interested in games like SimCity (though we play Cities: Skylines) where we share keyboard control and play together. But they love playing old games on the MiSTer and playing old arcade cabinets and the like.
Despite liking all the old stuff, however, they also haven't known a time when there wasn't ubiquitous fast WiFi and at least one 3D printer humming away in the background - stuff that was the realm of Science Fiction when we were kids.
Time will tell.
Cheers, all.
Honestly, I think both of you are largely correct, and any differences in opinion largely come down to selection bias and perspective. Having been a teacher, SigilFey has a broad selection and the perspective of an impartial observer. AlleineDragonfyre says "well, my friends all had..." yes.. your friends, that you selected.
Put another way, my experience was similar - in the 90's all my friends had Nintendos and at least one home computer. But we were the chess club / computer club / freaks and geeks / MTG / Dr. Demento / D&D / weird sense of humor crowd. We didn't fit in with the stoners, jocks, or popular kids. (My wife insists that, at her school, there weren't cliques like that, but I respond that she was too busy being valedictorian and 3 sport jock to be aware of the dregs like us). Huge selection bias there. Now, there might have been other kids who were into those sorts of things (and, in fact, I knew a couple), but they could never acknowledge that, because it would have destroyed their reputation in the school.
Anyway, all that said, the only real useful contributions I have to make are:
1. The Strong Museum (Rochester, NY) has an excellent selection of exhibits, including a lot of toys and games from this period, and 2 arcades (one pinball, one video cabinets). We go at least once a year and haven't been since before the new expansion, so we're looking forward to it. I highly recommend it. It's worth the trip.
2. If you want to play those old games in the comfort of your own home, check out the MiSTer project. It's a collaboration of a variety of people who are working to reverse engineer the old boards from arcade systems and consoles and reimplement them as FPGA logic. This means that, with the appropriate ROMs (many available from archive.org) you can play a cycle accurate version of, say, original Pac Man. Some of the ports are better than others, but the breadth of the library and the fidelity of the experience is improving at an impressive rate. Because it's done "in hardware", the latency is both predictable and small - there are timing tests where people with a high speed camera showed that it can actually have lower "Mario jumping latency" than the original NES. This includes HDMI output conversion - it only adds something like a 1 frame delay. I built one of these systems at the start of the pandemic (because I figured we were going to be spending a lot of time on the property) and it actually all packs nicely into a box so I've been taking it to various places we've gone as things have opened up - it's quite fun to hook it up to a hotel TV and play old games.
Ruminating on the next generation, I'm really curious to see how things will go. My kids (twins, age 8) are both growing up with varying interest in video games and the old systems. One son really likes actually vintage old stuff - he has a whole collection of Tiny Arcade cabinets, including some vintage Coleco ones from the 80's. The other one is much more interested in games like SimCity (though we play Cities: Skylines) where we share keyboard control and play together. But they love playing old games on the MiSTer and playing old arcade cabinets and the like.
Despite liking all the old stuff, however, they also haven't known a time when there wasn't ubiquitous fast WiFi and at least one 3D printer humming away in the background - stuff that was the realm of Science Fiction when we were kids.
Time will tell.
Cheers, all.
omg with the optimo cigar stores LMAOi didn't have one either heh. my parents were technophobes and i couldn't even have toys with batteries!?
remember the optimo tobacco stores with the tiny arcade rooms in the back because they were moneymakers? hehe kids in the cigar/ette shops playing videogames...such a fond memory
(wait...do we know eachother? lol) And their competitor TEAMO tobacco stores with arcade games in the back LOL