Crippled by Nostalgia: The Fraud of Retro Gaming

[tezza]

Some of you old gamers might be interested in this article (long but worth reading). Some truth in it I think.

[kevman3d]

I think there's perhaps a LOT of truth in it, rather then just some...

After reading that, it made me think about my past for clues.

As a kid (geesh, scarey just how many decades ago that was! ) I wasn't the smartest in Maths. The maths teacher at school didn't regard anybody not being good at maths as having the skills to program a computer - therefore only a small handful of "smart" kids got access to the schools Apple ]['s. So, a few months later and a years worth of pocket money savings got me a 1k ZX81 for $199, and it was all go from there once I made a point of being able to program to the teachers who seemed to suddenly pay more attention. As a psychological reason, I'd say that whole "I proved them wrong" thing made a big impact on my reasons for never throwing all that stuff away.

In the end, all those smart kids eventually spent more time playing sports outside while I sat in a dark room obsessively coding and learning machine code. You kinda wonder where peoples lives went after that - Mine never strayed from computing, though the last 20 have been spent focused in the 3D animation field rather then my initial "programming" career path I'd planned as a kid (though I did have a few programming/IT jobs as well along the way, just didn't end up being the main career focus).

So, maybe that's why I have never thrown away 30 years of history. Or I'm just a sad hoarder who can't throw anything away without feeling guilty. lol!

[SpidersWeb]

Yeah I've built up all my machines, loaded them with games and software. But if I play a game, its for 5 minutes of nostalgia, often they only get powered up for making boot disks or my 'checks' which I do every few weeks to make sure they're all still healthy. Wouldn't be without them, but that excuse of 'so I can play old games' isn't really true

kev - have a guy in our building here with a similar story to yours, his was back in the PDP/11 days. They said he wasn't smart enough, he couldn't work with computers even if he wanted to, but he showed them. He actually says the whole reason he got a career in IT was because they said he couldn't.

He doesn't admit it much, but he's actually got a stockpile at his house as well. Many machines from his history, some with names.

[kevman3d]

I think it was amusing back then at the way in which people would consider Mathematics as "necessary" to know how to operate a computer. Heck, I'm still crap at maths...

[matsondawson]

I remember our intermediate school had computers, but only the class with the high scoring kids was allowed to touch them.
I also remember in 3rd form desperately wanting someone to teach me computer science, but no one would/could.
High-schools suck in general for taking kids interests and fostering them, just tab A in slot B stuff there.
If it weren't for my dad being a teacher at a school in my pre-teens and allowing me to use the school apple ][s I would never have got into computing.

[tezza]

Our school had slide rules

[Carcenomy]

Yeah I've built up all my machines, loaded them with games and software. But if I play a game, its for 5 minutes of nostalgia, often they only get powered up for making boot disks or my 'checks' which I do every few weeks to make sure they're all still healthy. Wouldn't be without them, but that excuse of 'so I can play old games' isn't really true

Polar opposite. Cripes we've had a few nights of 'drink all the beer and go through the huge box of floppy disks I bought on TradeMe for the Commodore 64' recently. One friend got so into it that he bought his own Commodore 64 even. It's one way to attract younger folk to the vintage computing scene, and it's a load of laughs. Every LAN party we've held in the last year has had either my Amiga 1200 or my Commodore 64 present to provide stand-in games between main tournaments. Wizard Of Wor remains a crowd favourite, and it was a first party title from very early in the 64's life even.

[SpidersWeb]

I think with beer, and someone else or people who were interested too, I could definitely retro-game all night. That'd be awesome.
But I haven't had much success just sitting by myself doing it sober.

In saying that I did get quite a bit of playtime out of PoliceQuest recently.

[Carcenomy]

Police Quest has the same problem as Leisure Suit Larry. You get nearer the end of the game then they feel the need to pad it with a card game simulator. Leisure Suit Larry had a blackjack game that you had to beat in order to make enough money for all the crap at the end, Police Quest had a poker variant which was a real pain. The rest is fun though... don't forget to check all four tyres

[EmulatorCoder]

To many words, my attention run out after a page of reading