Loving Video Games In My 60’s

I am retired and just ready to turn 65 as of this writing and I love video games.

I have been playing video games on and off since pong came on the scene when I was in high school in the early 70’s. We used to play it in the bowling alley which we frequented on the weekends in Elkhart Indiana. What an amazing full concentration experience it was! It rivaled the intense sports that I loved to play. I loved it at first site.

Later when I was married and working at a custom paint shop I would live for the moments when I could play Asteroids or the vector graphics 3d game Tank Zone. These consoles were right there in the shop and unlocked. I never finished either one, I have never been that dexterous or able to think fast enough to finish the type of game where you go back to the beginning after losing x number of lives, but I loved them all the same. Hours would melt like butter and I would have to mumbling something about having to work long hours when I finally showed up at home.

One year a coworker and I stopped at an arcade and played frogger almost every day after work. I saw that frog get flattened hundreds of times but what fun.

When my kids were old enough to play the floor model consoles, we had a tradition of going to God Father’s pizza almost every Friday. We would order and eat our pizza and then play 10 dollars or so of video games afterward. What great fun and bonding time with the kids playing Pac Man, Galaga, Space Invaders and more!

Around this time in the 80’s the Atari console was created for home video gaming. The beat went on with Intellivision. Intellivision had the most frustrating controller’s I have ever experienced. I may still be mad. Then there was Sega and Sega Genesis where the games became more 3d. My kids still have nostalgic memories of those days. One of my sons was a killer at Street Fighter.

In the early 80’s I started buying computers also. (This lead me to college and becoming a programmer, but that is another story.) My first computer was a Commodore 64 which had many good games. My favorite by far was Ghost Busters. I can still hear that tinny Ghost Buster theme playing in my head and see the ambulance turned Ghost Buster vehicle racing through the fat pixeled streets of New York. Then came the Mac and later a Mac SE with 64k of memory and a 10Mg third party hard drive, nirvana! All for the low price of 3,000 bucks! The kids and I would play games on that for hours. We were huddled around the tiny black and white screen with heads leaned in playing a Winter Olympic Games game with 10 sports and others.

As life got busier I didn’t play much for a long time. Missed out on Playstation 1 & 2 completely.

In the mid 2000’s while working for IBM and after my 3rd divorce I picked up a Playstation 3. I was interested because IBM had helped develop the specialized RISC chip for Sony. I immediately fell in love with the new games. Here were ‘real feeling’ worlds and adventures that I could live in for awhile. My troubles would fall away as I became a character fighting and conquering and becoming a hero while NPC’s stroked my ego. Dragons fell, space was explored. I began to think of the games as ‘Total Recall’ style vacations. Sometimes while on vacation I thought of getting home to take a more fun vacation in virtual.

I moved on to the Playstation 4 and retired from work awhile ago. I now sometimes spend entire days playing. I am not fast and would never win a competition but I so enjoy the games. I sometimes have to wear a brace on my left elbow from holding the controller too tight and my finger joints get sore from time to time but I am still going and plan to play as long as I can.

I really enjoy playing by myself. I can move at my own pace. Some games are so beautiful that I may stop playing and take in the scenery for awhile and rest my old aching fingers.

Onward to more adventures, as long as my old bod holds out…

BTW: My hat is off to those clever developers, writers and artists who come up with clever and beautiful games year after year. Keep it up, I’m counting on you :-).

A few of my favorite games: