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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Parents play video games as well as their kids. This never used to happen if we roll back to when Space Invaders was the latest and greatest.

Nowadays you can have the 50 year old dad spending his quality time in bed next to his wife blasting enemies with the teenage/student kids doing the same.

With another generation it will be the folks in retirement homes too.

With music you get stuck on the stuff you discovered and made your own. Into punk? Probably born way back in the 60s. Techno? 70s.

Will it be the same with games? The guy in the retirement home still playing World of Warcraft? Or that copy of Diablo that came out in 2003?

Story in video games therefore has to be good enough to not just last a week or a summer, but a lifetime.

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Space Invaders and arcades in general seemed more popular with adults than with children in 1980. I’m not sure when or why video games came to be regarded as a juvenile pastime. Possibly coincided with the kid-friendly characters and home consoles promoted by Sega and Nintendo around 1990.

Or maybe games have always appealed to nerds of all ages, but what happened in the 90s is they began to appeal to normie children too, and as you point out those normie kids continued to play them when they became normie adults.

>With music you get stuck on the stuff you discovered and made your own. Into punk? Probably born way back in the 60s. Techno? 70s.

I don't listen to particular genres of music or music from a particular period of time.

As for gaming, I would rather watch a film, read a book, go outside, watch a play, meet people, do something else, because I don't have much free time and gaming is not a priority.

I would probably play some games if I would have more free time.

As a matter of fact I worked for 7 years as a game programmer and during that period I never played other games than our own stuff and some stuff from the competition where we wanted to understand some mechanics.

People still play HoMM 3 from 1999 - both as a hobby in large numbers, and professionally. New content is being created.

Master of Magic gets a new life with bugfix/balance patches and addons. It's from 1993.

50 years old dad was in his twenties when Doom was out. Older people that plays videogames are mostly the ones that played videogames at a young age.

It did used to happen. Really. And it does not happen super often now.

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