I found it really funny that this actually happened to me. I walked into GameStop today to look for Guild Wars: Faction's pre-order pack. To my surprise, I saw two old fellows with gray hairs walked out of the store with a game in their hand. Well, maybe it's not that funny, but it did reminded that my own grandpa(Who just turned 90 this year) is playing PC games on a 286 my family gave him years ago. Old peeps gone wild!

Nothing wrong with old(er) people playing games...I'm one of them ;)

Maybe it was a game they were buying for a grandchild? Its hard to teach an old dog new tricks if they don't want to learn... and most seniors are put off by the apparent complexity of vido games (though some older turn-based games I'm SURE they'd enjoy more than things like bridge and gin-rummy).

light:
>To my surprise, I saw two old fellows with gray hairs walked out of the store with a game in their hand.

Prof.:
>Maybe it was a game they were buying for a grandchild? Its hard to teach an old dog new tricks...

You young whippersnappers think everything has to be about you. Read the news. Get out to a game conference once in a while. Your eyes shall be opened!

Quote: Original post by tsloper
Get out to a game conference once in a while. Your eyes shall be opened!

That would require me to leave my computer. Which I would assume I am physically attached to at this point, I'm not sure since I haven't left it since about 2004. Its a good thing there's direct2drive and whatnot or I'd have to stop gaming.

Speaking of which, can someone please change my diapers?

Yeah, what business do old retired people with all kinds of time and money have with playing video games? Don't they have something better to do?

Video games that take hundreds of hours to complete should be the exclusive domain of students whose lives are already flooded with classes, friends, homework, jobs to pay for their basic living, and so on.

[oh]

I've got gray hair (what is left of it) and still buy and play the latest games.

My granddad was an avid PC gamer and was responsible for getting me into games in the first place. He created a monster. :D

Just because my hair's lost pigment doesn't make me not want to have fun. You young "peeps" (I always conjure up an image of those marshmallow ones, for some reason) and your idea that everything started with you. Why, I recall when Pong came out and we were fascinated, and we used to go to the old arcade and put a quarter into Pac-Man (walking, uphill both ways in the snow). The early BBS games, when you had to put your rotary phone's handset into a cradle modem. When we got our Commodore Amiga 2000, it had a HUGE 40 Meg HD and "We'll never use that much space!!"

A lot really depends on what the person was into. My maternal grandmother (still alive) was using computers back in the punch card and giant tape days and she uses them now, often complaining that she wants one with more speed. My husband's grandmother (also still alive) refuses to try to use one and we have a dandy time trying to fix her typewriter when it breaks or trying to find the one place that might have ribbons for it. :)

I've always loved computers and games. My sister doesn't, and is very outdoorsy. So, I could see us getting older, and I'll be the "grey haired old lady" with a walker coming out of Gamestop (actually, ordering online is more convenient) and she won't be. And yes, I'm female, too, so get whatever "zomg lolz a gurl, an OLD gurl" is in your head out, too. ;)

Quote: Original post by ellis1138
... it had a HUGE 40 Meg HD and "We'll never use that much space!!"

I'm glad I'm not alone there.

First I bought a 10MB hard disk promising "no more floppies!" Those were the days when I had (literally) rubbed off the sticky labels on floppies from swapping them so much. But "no more floppies" was a lie! What happened was that I had a nice fancy Le Menu package installed on the HD and batch files that said 'Please insert disk 17', and a nice big box full of numbered 1MB (wow, so huge!) floppies. Some of the biggest games took three of the high density floppies, but it was so worth it.

Then later I was buying a 40MB hard disk only to be informed that there was a limit of 32MB, and I had to pick a nice way to partition it. I reworked all my menus and managed to get all my floppies on to the hard drive. It was amazing! I could even install all 7 disks of Turbo C++ (they were low density floppies) on the machine, and not have to switch floppies as I wrote code.

Of course, you just HAD to have TeleMate installed in order to play the BBS games well. And you also had to make sure you kept your UL/DL ration good (or pay for BBS subscriptions), which meant finding rarer shareware games and uploading them to the boards.

But then I needed a copy of Windows/286. It took a *huge* chunk out of the disk, but allowed the few windows apps to use the (fairly expensive) 2MB of RAM installed. Of course, we needed all that memory for the nicer games, but it was about time that Windows 2 took advantage of it. It barely left room for Dangerous Dave and Commander Keen!

The only good thing about Windows at the time was the solitare game, Word for Windows, and Pagemaker. I still preferred WordPerfect 4.2 (and later 5.x) because it was so much faster --- but the Word GUI was fun to look at even if it did take a second before it drew the letters you typed. Microsoft Word on the Mac still ran circles around the Windows software, but at least now you could run it all on your DOS box, if you were unfortunate enough to have the beast taking up about half of your precious disk space.

Even later, buying two 4MB sticks of ram for the bargin price of $200 each. It felt incredible to be able to use the maximum size of maps in games like SerfCity (=See its sixth-or-so-great-grandchild, The Settlers: Heritage of Kings), get better perfomance from Dune II (the basis for most of today's RTS games) and enjoy a couple of other Apogee games.

~sigh~

And I don't even have gray hair yet.