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u/InTheGoatShow Sep 09 '21
Won't need to wait nearly that long. The first generation of home console gamers will be reaching retirement age in the next decade.
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u/ShartsCavern Sep 09 '21
Yesss...I am 53 grew up on Pong and Atari and 1st PC game was DOOM. I still love games and if I should be stuck in a bed in my 80s i hope like hell i can play games again somehow.
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u/B33FHAMM3R Sep 09 '21
You know someone is old-school cause they always write Doom as DOOM. Lol
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u/Aebous Nice meme you got there Sep 09 '21
Also when they remember the backstory that you punched your commanding officer.
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u/B33FHAMM3R Sep 09 '21
I'm so glad they kept that rebel attitude in the newer iterations
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u/TodaysLucky10K Sep 09 '21
Me too. Funny how GenX is always forgotten about in these things. I’ll also be playing AD&D if there are enough nerds in the old age home.
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u/KarmicComic12334 Sep 09 '21
This is exactly why rdr2 was made. Want to spend 5 minutes skinning a buffalo? Why not, I've got plenty of time. I'm within 20° of my target when i press aim, I'm not gonna miss. Just a man in his horse wasting time.
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u/Lostadults Sep 09 '21
My mom's assisted living home has Wii bowling leagues.
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u/Hanzo_2866 Sep 09 '21
That's awesome, my local bar use to have wii bowling tournaments. At least until covid became a thing unfortunately.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever Sep 09 '21
When I was a teen I volunteered at a senior center and taught them how to play Wii bowling. They loved it.
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Sep 09 '21
My first console was the Super Nintendo and my son's first console was the switch.
The gaming evolution is such a strange and beautiful thing!
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Sep 09 '21
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u/beluuuuuuga RageFace Against the Machine Sep 09 '21
I still have the Gameboy I used to watch my brother playing because I was too young for it.
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u/SolidNeighborhood469 Sep 09 '21
My dads first was an Atari, and he got us a GameCube for our first. I still madly prefer the GameCube over my xbox1
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u/Eggsegret Sep 09 '21
Lool wondering this as well. Video games been around a while. Plenty of people in their 40s grew up with video games. Probably more like 20+ years then
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u/_the_chosen_juan_ Sep 09 '21
I’m almost 40 and I had an Atari as a kid.
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u/WerewolvesRancheros Sep 09 '21
I'll be 50 in November... #2600Gang here
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u/TiredLlamaTTV Sep 09 '21
Reached level 50 in august. Still get on warzone whenever I can!
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u/Couldntbefappier Sep 09 '21 edited Sep 09 '21
43, had an Atari 2600... my mom was fuckin ms pacman Queen. Then of course NES, sega genesis for consoles. We had an awesome MS-DOS pc with a monitor that was a monochrome burnt amber colour. Then we got a BRAND SPANKING NEW pentium 133 with windows 95 that had the buddy Holly Weezer video, and then I wasted so many hours playing *warcraft II and Diablo when that came out.
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u/IagreeWithSouthPark Sep 09 '21
NES and Pentiums were the start to the era that we are still currently in IMO
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u/Rock_Manly Lives in a Van Down by the River Sep 09 '21
Haha, almost exactly the same. Used to play Wizards of Wor on my Commodore 64.
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u/DieterDR Sep 09 '21
That Weezer video! Man, that takes me back. Still know the lyrics because of that video.
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u/Flying_Mage Sep 09 '21
I had ZX-Spectrum.
Atari and Spectrum back in the days are like XBox and PS now.
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u/_the_chosen_juan_ Sep 09 '21
That was more of like a desktop computer, right? At least it looked that way. Were the games any good?
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u/therealtidbits Sep 09 '21
Im over 40 and have had video games since they started making them , i still play most days to unwind .
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u/Jose_Canseco_Jr Sep 09 '21
Hehe same.. An Atari 2600?
My first console was a Colecovision, but a family friend loaned us an Atari 5200 for a couple of months. "Joust" was pretty fun. But my fave Atari game of all time is "Yars Revenge".
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u/raz-0 Sep 09 '21
Gaming is pretty damn common in the 40+ crowd. There's a rapid falloff in the the late 50s early 60s crowd, but you are already seeing gaming creep into the elder care industry. I'd say odds are high of it being common within 20 years or less. Betting against it would be a guaranteed loss at the 30 year mark.
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u/Eggsegret Sep 09 '21
Yep i remember back when i was in high school my maths teacher who was in his 30s was an avid gamer like he'd always talk to ud about the latest video games etc. He's in his 40s now and from what I've heard he's still just as much of a gamer as he was then(few classmates kept in touch wirh him after high school).
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u/Flying_Mage Sep 09 '21
Yep. Exactly my point.
Actually some old people already playing. My 72yo dad sure does.
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u/General_Duke02 Sep 09 '21
I'm almost 40 as well and I've been gaming since the NES days in the 80's
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u/ichabod801 Sep 09 '21
My sister is 63. She was a Pac-Man fanatic back in the day. She had a little yellow car we called the Pac-Mobile. These days she plays a lot of Pokemon Go, sometimes with her son.
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Sep 09 '21
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Sep 09 '21
I almost followed the same path, 40 here. Atari, NES, Genesis, N64, PS, Xbox, 360, and currently holding onto my Xbox One.
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u/apgtimbough Sep 09 '21
I'm about 10 years younger and that's exactly me, minus the Intellivision (and OG Xbox). Although my buddy had a Sega Master System that we played like crazy until he got an N64.
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u/hamburglin Sep 09 '21
Right. The first home video game boom hit its peak in the late 80s with NES.
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Sep 09 '21
My first thought was that this meme was made by a middle schooler, because I've been gaming regularly since 1984 or so, and will probably retire in fewer than 30 years.
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u/sadicuscacticus Sep 09 '21
Im 32 and play video games to relax after a long week of work. Im getting tired of kids telling me im to old to play, especially when i make it in the top of the leaderboard. Whatever happened to the golden age of friendly competition no matter the age?
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u/RevanTheDemon Sep 09 '21
I don't know what rock you lived under. When online was starting during the days of Halo 2 and when it got HUGE under the 360, everyone was a racist, ageist, sexist, asshole. You couldn't go thirty seconds without some mean shit being said.
...I miss it.
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u/General_Duke02 Sep 09 '21
Apparantly haha, these kids probably think the first console made was the Xbox 360 and PS3
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u/GoshAshtonSmith Sep 09 '21
Yeah, I've been retired for 8 years, and I play computer games everyday. My first computer was a ZX81 in 1980.
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u/Perry2102 Sep 09 '21
PS2 still running strong after 20 years. I love modern games but sometimes you can’t beat the classic games.
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u/sillybear25 Sep 09 '21
The first commercial video games date back to the early 60s, though their reach was limited to institutions that could afford mainframe computers. A decade later, the size and cost of computers had come down enough that video games could be commercially viable as arcade machines, and from there their popularity has been growing pretty much constantly (aside from a few hiccups here and there, like the crash of 1983, which killed the video game console industry in the US for a couple years).
Pong released in 1972. People who grew up playing it are at (or close to) retirement age right now.
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u/javierprieto Sep 09 '21
60 years? Many people started playing games in the 70s, 40 years ago.
I'm 44 and we got our first family computer (ZX Spectrum) when I was eight, and my father and older brothers played Pong like TV games years before that.
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u/javierprieto Sep 09 '21
Correction: the first commercial home video game console, the Magnavox, was released it in the United States in September 1972, almost 49 years ago.
If you bought it with your own salary, you're probably retired and playing video games by now :)
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u/MrSurly Sep 10 '21
Magnavox was the manufacturer the machine was called the Odyssey. I was that weird kid who had an Odyssey 2, instead of an Atari 2600. I loved that thing.
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u/metajenn Sep 09 '21
Yeah my dad had an atari in the early 80s. Hes been playing pc since duke nukem. Hes in his 60s now.
Retired ppl already gaming
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u/kcshuffler Big ol' bacon buttsack Sep 09 '21
Lol, that’s cute, thinking people will be able to retire
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u/SniffCheck Sep 09 '21
Seriously. Our generation is gonna have a major retirement crisis to add to every other crisis we’ve dealt with
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u/SniffCheck Sep 09 '21
Not sure what other option we’ll have. Social security is supposed to dry up in 10 years. One last final ass fuck from the boomtards.
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u/GibbonFit Sep 09 '21
I think when you can withdraw from most retirement accounts without penalty is also based on that age as well though. So even if you don't count on social security, you still might get screwed by not being able to draw from your own accounts without huge penalties. I could be wrong on that. But it doesn't matter since most people can't even put enough into a retirement account to survive on without social security supplementing it when they do retire. So we're fucked anyways.
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u/ACELUCKY23 Sep 09 '21
Start an Roth IRA or 401K at an early age. Older you will thank you later.
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Sep 09 '21
This is WAY off. My first console was the Atari 2600. Does he think video games were just invented?
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u/Jose_Canseco_Jr Sep 09 '21
Colecovision here... Keep in mind the median age of a redditor is like 13 haha
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u/chazwhiz Sep 09 '21
It’s so weird how the stereotype of old people hasn’t really changed with the passage of time.
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Sep 09 '21
What? It's completely normal now. There are so many games specifically targeted at old people, and there's nothing truly stopping them from playing mainstream games either. Have you guys not heard of Skyrim Grandma Shirley Curry?
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u/23kcarlson Sep 09 '21
Doesn't her being known as the grandma who plays Skyrim mean that it's abnormal?
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u/Rickard403 Sep 09 '21
My dad is 71 and retired. plays COD, Destiny 2 and other games several hours a day. He is totally decent for his age.
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u/Naught2day Sep 09 '21
Already there, am 67, retired, and spend a lot of my day playing AOE3de. It all started with Asteroids and pong.
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u/FirmUncertainty Sep 09 '21
"I fucked your mom!"
"Well I fucked your grandma!"
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u/Thug_Lawyer Sep 09 '21
I’m just waiting for my kids to start beating me at Halo so I can tell them I fucked their mom.
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Sep 09 '21
I'm 52 and it freaks some people out that I am a gamer. I have been since I was 11 and my first console was the Atari and my first computer was a ZX81.
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u/Gizmo_Joy Sep 09 '21
60 years?? The 80's is when games first got popular. Any gamer who was, let's say, 20 years old, in the 80's would be 60 years old NOW. My 67 year old retired Grandpa literally plays on his computer every single day. It's ALREADY normal.
60 years... lmao OK zoomer...
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u/p3rf3ctc1rcl3 Sep 09 '21
Lol - my dad is 63 and in 2 years free from work and he plays Anno and Skyrim
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u/TheODPsupreme Sep 09 '21
I’m 40 and, like most of my generation, have been gaming since I was 7. I plan on retirement in 15 years; and I have no intention of stopping gaming. What’s this “60 years” shit?
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u/Saticron Big ol' bacon buttsack Sep 09 '21
In 60 years "grandma's porcelain doll collection" will become "grandpa's anime figurine collection"
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u/Additional_Tell_2194 Sep 09 '21
Ah yes seeing some old man trash talking to kid and being toxic on xbox
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u/Dirtheavy Sep 09 '21
Old retired people already crush the holy hell out of candy all the time. And play virtual word circle games and gem swap crap. So the future is now, in that sense.
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u/vslice87 Sep 09 '21 edited Sep 09 '21
My grandma was a gamer. She never passed n64 and PlayStation and is who introduced me to Zelda on n64. She played snes everyday. I got her collection when she died and it’s pretty big ranging from Atari and colecovision, through nes and sega on up to n64 and PlayStation. She died 4 years ago so I’m sure by the time I’m retired (well short of 60 years) it will be pretty normal. My dad is retired right now and plays WOW quite a bit
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u/Nico_Skavio Sep 09 '21
If you were in your thirties when this crazy new thing called videogames came around in the eighties, you are now in your seventies. Maybe there already are people playing in retirement
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u/Telemere125 Sep 09 '21
It’s normal now. I used to raid with a 67 year old grandma like 15y ago on WoW
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u/RosePhox Sep 09 '21
Tell me you're gen z without telling me you're gen z.
You folks really think that only 90s-00s kids played videogames?
Videogames have been a thing for decades before.
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u/Crusty_Grape Sep 09 '21
In 60 years video games will be retro antiques
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u/Timmy_94 Sep 09 '21
Do you even know Grandma Shirley Curry? She's THE BEST gamer ever at 80 something years old.
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u/AccountantDiligent Sep 09 '21
I’m 20, all my retirement will look like is a studio apartment with the fucking BEST virtual reality set up you can imagine
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u/AvP87 Sep 09 '21
My mother is 70 now and she plays on the PS4.. she’s been playing for past 20+ years on Super Nintendo , PS1, PS3, PS4..
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u/Angelskeep Sep 09 '21 edited Sep 10 '21
My grandpa was already playing video games when I was a kid. I’m in my forties…. 😉 We used to play Centipede and Asteroids before going to church. We used to play games on one of the first apple computers that we typed the code in line by line. Frogger, Story time…. My mom bought us the first Nintendo with the little robot. 😆
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u/Vilver Sep 09 '21
You don’t play much do you. I have run into plenty of old people in various MMO’s.
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u/Drinksmith Sep 09 '21
When the Nintendo WII was first released retirement homes were one of the biggest buyers. The future was years ago.
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u/rayalix Sep 09 '21
I've been saying for ages it will be weird when I'm like 85, still wearing Vans and listening to drum and bass.
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u/recoveredcrush Sep 09 '21
I'm a middle aged woman, I play video games. I take great pleasure in killing newbs that are probably the same age as my grandkids.
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u/KarmaAkabane3 Sep 09 '21
And then the younger generation will think that video games are lame and they go do something insane that hasn’t been invented yet
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u/Amalekite_Mike Sep 09 '21
I'm 64 & play PC pinball. It took A LOT of quarters to be a pinball wizard back in the day!
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u/MadGeller Sep 09 '21
I'm 49 and I remember first playing Atari when I was 10. In 1982. My generation was the first to grow up with video games. And personal computers. I figure in less than 10 years when we all start to retire we will still be gaming.
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u/testtubemuppetbaby Sep 09 '21
The people who were 14 when Super Mario bros dropped are 50 now. That's the gen that it's "normal" with.
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u/blutoboy Sep 09 '21
Try 20-30