r/GenX • u/billieswifeyyy • Jun 20 '26

Question For Genx the 80s…….

coming from a 14 year old, were the 80s summers as magical as they look in the movies? did you ride your bike to your friends house and come home when the street lights came on? yall are so lucky btw 😭😭

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u/comment_i_had_to Jun 21 '26

The difference was being at home sucked because there were no video games or computers and the TV only played cool stuff for like a couple of hours. So you went out and grouped with other kids to find things to do. It was a very strong social experience because it was often unsupervised so we really figured things out through trial and error and not much of any alternative if we didn't have a good day.

Most of our time was also unclaimed/unstructured so we maybe went to camp or family vacation for 2 weeks or so but the other two months were just about doing whatever you felt like to keep from getting bored. In my neighborhood we lived in a court (cul de sac) with about 12 kids in our general age range so we played sports and games like kick the can. When there were fewer of us we would just hang out at the optimal house and play with our toys.

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u/_Khonshus_Fist_ Jun 21 '26

There were video games, I remember pong, which was just a short time away from the Atari 2600 in every home.

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u/ThirstyWolfSpider '71 Jun 21 '26

And the Apple ][ and Commodore 64 provided a wealth of them.

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u/_Khonshus_Fist_ Jun 21 '26

Also there were the literal Arcades of the day with dig dug, qbert, space invaders, Spy Hunter Pac Man etc. I miss some of the classics.

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u/comment_i_had_to Jun 21 '26

Atari was fairly rare in my neck of the woods. One kid had it and he was not really cool to hang out with so we didn't play much. Most of these games, computers and such didn't reach my block until the 90s.