Noticed this thread here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68940-really-old-player-here/

.. and like many others, felt 29 isn't really all that ancient to be quite yet.

 

But I can't remember (that's age for you) if there's been a poll of average PoE forum dweller age.

And if there has been, what is the age bracket now anyway.

 

And then when making the poll, figured I'll as if you discovered gaming yesterday, or have been gaming since rocks were invented.

 

 

--

 

And then I was going to go up to 40+ yrs of gaming in poll options,

but mucked it up because of age-unrelated reasons.

 

PS. if you happen to feel very old and prone to going on and on and on about ancient history,

feel free to tell how you get on the gaming train. But do skip the interesting bit about prostate treatment...

Edited October 21, 201411 yr by Jarmo

Jarmo: Please, change the second poll. I can't pick my option "36-40", and the last should read "41+"

I am twenty five years old. Not one day more.  I swear.  What do you mean that cant be Karkarov?  You say I have made claims of playing BG 1 when still in highschool and I couldn't have been in highschool at a young enough age to be 25 now?  Poppy*deleted expletive thanks to stupid teenagers*, I graduated from school when I was uh.... five.... yeah five.

Edited October 21, 201411 yr by Karkarov

The watershed is: Did you play Pong and became mightily impressed by its potential and never since looked back? 

 

Semi-watershed: Did you get the "Vectrex is great"-easter egg in WL2?

Edited October 21, 201411 yr by IndiraLightfoot

Old enough to remember my parents and their friends playing the original pong.. but not enough to have played it then myself.

Begun my gaming career with Vic-20. The Count, Pirates Cove.

Hat's off to Scott Adams, good enough stuff to play with english-finnish dictionary on one hand.

When did the Atari home console debut? I was never particularly impressed with Pong, but some of the other cartridges were great fun, Space Invaders and what not.

It began with borrowed Amiga 500 + Settlers I game, to a family own'd C64 with games played from casette (freaking long loading time, screwdriver was your best buddy..) and 5¼ inch & 3½ inch floppy disks, leading to the era of 386 & 486 computers, Pentium 1 (75 MHz rocket!), Nintendo 8 -bit & Playstation 1, to finally owning PC by myself (from components, of course ^^)

I remember playing my first 256-color(!!) VGA game: Quest for Glory III. I was absolutely blown away by the graphics.

Noticed this thread here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68940-really-old-player-here/

.. and like many others, felt 29 isn't really all that ancient to be quite yet.

 

But I can't remember (that's age for you) if there's been a poll of average PoE forum dweller age.

And if there has been, what is the age bracket now anyway.

 

And then when making the poll, figured I'll as if you discovered gaming yesterday, or have been gaming since rocks were invented.

 

 

--

 

And then I was going to go up to 40+ yrs of gaming in poll options,

but mucked it up because of age-unrelated reasons.

 

PS. if you happen to feel very old and prone to going on and on and on about ancient history,

feel free to tell how you get on the gaming train. But do skip the interesting bit about prostate treatment...

 

Good post, there have been several polls around age but nothing wrong with another one. Demographics change, so always  interesting to see the results. But Indira is right your 36-40  option is broken, please fix so us "old-timers " can update the poll correctly

I'm 31. Can't recall exactly when I first started playing games but it was somewhere between 20-25 years ago. First game I remember playing was Space Invaders on C64.

I turned 30 in June. The earliest games I remember playing were on my father's Atari ST.

I played consoles at friend's homes, but never owned one of my own. Mostly SNES games, that sort of thing. Things didn't really pick up for me until I was nine and fixed up my dad's old x386....complete with turbo button. First it was the old "gold box games", like Dark Queen of Krynn. A few years later I acquired a broken AST which I then fixed up and moved into the big leagues with games like Betrayal at Krondor and Mechwarrior 2. Having already been bitten, my fate was sealed with the releases of Starcraft, Diablo, Age of Empires, and Baldur's Gate. There was no turning back.

 

Oh yeah. Recently 27.

Edited October 21, 201411 yr by Mr. Magniloquent

26, started my gaming career with my dad's Atari version of Pacman somewhere in my third year.

 

EDIT: It was Atari, not Commodore 64.

 

Edited October 21, 201411 yr by TrueNeutral

34. One of my earliest memories is coming home from (presumably) kindergarten and playing River Raid and Pitfall on the Atari, but I suppose that doesn't count for computer gaming. 

 

So for computer gaming, dredging my memory, the earliest I can remember is playing Oregon Trail at school. And getting really irritated that I kept getting my entire family killed.

 

Also, not surprised by the results so far. I expected a good portion of the people who would have nostalgia for the Infinity Engine games would typically be around their late 20s-early 30s.

Edited October 21, 201411 yr by Death Machine Miyagi

Great, a geezer's convention.  The first time someone threatens to beat me with his cane, I'm outa here!  <.<

 

I remember Pong.  I remember tape drives, "why would you need 64K of memory?", Adventure on the 2400, Space Invaders the Arcade game, etc.  I lived on Guam during the late 70s and my brother in law worked on arcade games, so we could play them for free.  How primitive by todays standards!  Still, I have very fond memories of ol' skool games like Sun Dog, M.U.L.E., Temple of Apshai, Zork, and so many others.  In fact, the Zork trilogy is still one of my favorites.  Just think, it once took a mainframe computer to run the adventure game on which Zork was based and all of Zork 1 was included in... CoD Black Ops?  It was a tiny *tiny* smidgeon of the code.  lol

I'm feeling ancient up here all alone. Lonely, so lonely...

Mt first RPG

 

 

My first 'puter

 

My first games

 

 

My first car

 

 

I would post an image of what pubic hairstyles were like when I first started dating, but not only would I be banned I think I'd shock some of the younger forum members into some sort of PTSD.

Mt first RPG

 

 

 

 

That's a cool picture, I remember back in the mid 1980's we couldn't get anything like D&D in South Africa because of sanctions but my dad use to travel overseas for work and he bought me  a similar D&D boxset to that one but it was newer. It was the picture of that single fighter taking on that massive dragon on that gold pile. That picture blew my mind and that was my introduction to D&D and I became a DM. We didn't really understand what RP was as we were use to Steve Jackson books  so I was waiting for the rulebook to tell us what to do, not realizing everything happened in our imaginations. Only  a few months later did we start realizing what RP was and how you organised  a proper campaign.

 

Great memories

I remember an old blue and white paperback rulebook from the late '70s.  Good Lord, that brings back memories.  Later, I got the basic set, advanced, and expert sets which were full color.  At least I remember it that way.  Memory is the second thing to go.  I can't remember the first.

 

I'm trying to remember the module with the crashed space ship in the mountains.  Damn, so many first experiences are wasted on people who just don't understand their significance.  ...But, to be fair, I knew how world changing some of those things were at the time, even if I didn't fully understand how or how much.  That was Dungeons and Dragons and it was Zork.

I remember an old blue and white paperback rulebook from the late '70s.  Good Lord, that brings back memories.  Later, I got the basic set, advanced, and expert sets which were full color.  At least I remember it that way.  Memory is the second thing to go.  I can't remember the first.

 

I'm trying to remember the module with the crashed space ship in the mountains.  Damn, so many first experiences are wasted on people who just don't understand their significance.  ...But, to be fair, I knew how world changing some of those things were at the time, even if I didn't fully understand how or how much.  That was Dungeons and Dragons and it was Zork.

 

Wow, nice story. Fond memories for you  as well

 

Imagine going in time to the mid 1980's and trying to explain to people the concept of online gaming or how games would develop to this massive multi-billion dollar industry....they would think you were smoking some good stuff

18/F

18/F

Yeah, right!  Your fb pic might show a sweetie, but after I send in my credit card info, I find out your a middle aged uni-sex truck driver from Des Moines!  Bastard!

I'm 28. I'm trying to remember my absolute first game... I think I actually started on Atari. Then we got a PC, I think? I can't remember. I was 4 when we got it. All I know is, my brother is 7 years older than me, and he and his friends used to play his NES all the time. I was their NES pitcrew, because only I could blow into the cartridges in such a way as to get them to work properly, heh.

 

I think the first PC games I ever played were Gorilla and Donkey, in Qbasic. Then we got some games for DOS. Can't remember what I played first, there. We had Wolfenstein 3D, and King's Quest 6 (on diskettes). I played a few games on 5 and 1/4 floppies, but the only one I can remember is F19 Stealth Fighter. No, wait... I think Humans (very much like Lemmings, but with cavemen) was on there, too. I remember playing the original Duke Nukems (before 3D), and Commander Keen. Can't remember the formats, though. I also remember playing Betrayal at Krondor right when it came out.

I'm 25 years old, and have been gaming for roughly 23 of those years. The first game I remember playing was Commander Keen, followed closely by Duke Nukem, Lemmings, and Zork. I also played a lot of Nibbles and Gorillas, and kept trying to write my own Adventure-style games in QBasic, but never got very far with it (such an incredibly large amount of spaghetti code should not be seen). We always had a lot of computers in our house as I was growing up, so I went straight to PC gaming and have only ever even used consoles once or twice at friend's houses. I still have the floppies for all the Commander Keen games somewhere, even though I haven't had a floppy drive in my computer for eight years now.

 

I didn't end up playing any CRPGs until Baldur's Gate came out, but started playing AD&D in '94 -- first edition; my mom started playing with the boxed set when it came out, and her group at the time was running mostly first edition with a few second edition bits thrown in. The first adventure I remember going through was Keep on the Borderlands. The first character I played in AD&D was a cleric named Nedla after a misreading of the intro to Duke Nukem II -- I misread "Neo LA" as "Nedla" the first time I played that game (I'm still not sure how in retrospect), and decided to use it as a name, since for whatever reason that was the first thing that came to mind when I was making the character.

32.

 

My first game was Mario 2. I saw the commercial and my first thought wasn't "I need that", it was "we can do that?".