I started with AppleSoft basic around 10 years old. It was fairly simple to achieve "stuff". But if your dream was videogames (and when you're 10 years old, well, you see :-)), then you ended up in front of the assembler/machine code wall. And there your dreams vanished (or you were crazy enough to learn by yourself and books).

So I think Pico8 or Scratch are cool in the sense that they give you an environment to start programming. But OTOH, if what you look after is AAA games, then you'll soon be confronted to a brand new wall, ie : DirectX, GPU, C++ whatever. Now I rememeber of Processing which is cool too.

Don't feel old.

My first Basic experience was on a VIC-20, and I later got my own C64 in 85.

Great computer to learn on but I don't think I would have got far without the Programmers Reference Guide.

I started with Cosmac ELF 1802 with 256 bytes of memory 128x64 graphics. I would have thought I'd died and gone to heaven if I had something that ran pico-8.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF