Okay guys. I was born in 1976. I admit that I’m 48 years old and damn proud of it.
Growing up in the 80’s, I realize that the best games were from the 1980’s and to this day it still is.
Retro gaming for me isn’t just about game play and getting from one point to another. To me it’s about the friendships that I made while playing the games.
From Pac-Man to Super Mario Bros. It’s about the human friendships that we made along the way. Not like the disconnected way we play games now.
So here’s the question that I would like to pose to those of similar age… Do you feel the same way I do? Do you think that the way we played games then is a stark contrast now that we’ve grown up?
Let me know in the comments.
Also, if you have any stories about video game friendships, I would like to here from you as well.
Guess I’m an outlier. For me, games were the way to disconnect from the stress of relationships. I’ve been an introvert since the beginning, and so games’ positive associations for me are a safe place away from social pressures.
I also imagine every “retro” generation thinks its games are the best. Like, there was a meme post about joy at finding a PS2 torrent recently with strong implied nostalgia, and that’s ok. People usually experience video games at an age where the games teach them archetypical feelings of intellectual pleasure, the first time they experienced joy at solving complex problems for example. That becomes a core association through life.
So I think we’ll all have strong feelings linking the systems we played at our formative years. And again, that’s ok. That we can form such strong associations is an expression of the basic human value of video games, as an art and modern cultural necessity.