I see video games, and by extension, computer games, as the same thing as board games or puzzles, an activity that marks a time period of youth, while simultaniously being family activity once upon a time.

From the dawn of the Magnavox Odyssey through the era of the Atari 2600, 5200, Colecovision, and Intellivision. Video Games were no different than playing Pinocle or Cribbage at the kitchen table. There's a reason Paddle Controllers come TWO to a cable. You'd have mom, dad, and your sibling gathered around the Atari playing Warlords against each other. That's how it was. It was a family thing. My two half-sisters would make pancakes and then play Atari most of a Saturday morning. Same thing with connect 4, monopoly, or Trivial Pursuit.

But simultaniously, these things were seen as kids toys because of the fact that the ones who wanted it the most, and were still using it when dad had to go balance the family budget, and mom had to do the laundry, were the kids! The kids wanted it for xmas, they got it for xmas, mom and dad found some fun in it, but overall, it was still considered the "kids" thing.

And who were those kids? Gen X and Gen Y of course - this includes me....smack dab in the middle - what some call the Xennial...just gen X enough not to piss off Gen X, just Millennial enough for them to say "c'mon man, don't be g*y....follow us!" Yeah, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder considering the generaton I'm the most lumped in with (but share the LEAST with).

When the NES came out in 1985, that's where the paradigm shift came. See, the Atari 2600 looked like something your sixteen year old son would have, it had just the elegance of HiFi woodgrain, and the black leather plastic and chrome off a Judas Priest stage. Badass and classy all at once. Then came the NES. This thing looked like a toy, gray plastic, red buttons, it screamed "this is only for the kids, and it's 1987". And that was that shift, the shift to only the kids playing Nintendo, and the parents instead, participating in their own versions of some kind of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner romance movie when they were not whining about things my irritating generation calls "Adulting" (yes, it's hard, but you're doing it, stop cheapening the activity with your try hard bullshit).

This is not a diatribe on the history of video games though, this is a diatribe on how we ended up playing these old things in our fourties. See, at the dawn of the 1990's, Atari anything was a joke, or an also-ran, Sega vs. Nintendo was king, the PC Engine - Turbografix 16 - was the rich kid console with a handful of fun titles for it (to our limited American knowledge), and the SNES and Playstation were headed for the future....but on the internet, there were some rumblings of the now defunct Atari company and others startingaround 1992 or so...

In 1992, many bored college students (predominantly male), wanted cheap entertainment as they sat alone in their dorms, too broke to afford the bar, and too smart to waste their money on new shit that'll get broken at the next keg party. So what do you get? Where do you go? You got a $20 in your pocket. So you go to the local St. Vinnies or Goodwill or Value VIllage, and snag up an old 8-bit console from the early Regan presidency to entertain yourself with. They were cheap, they were unloved, unwanted, and the butt of many jokes.

And also mid-90's, what do you do when you're an outcast loser 12 year old kid who just discovered Yahoo! and want to troll the platform (before "troll" was an internet term) by asking about the most ardious, ridiculous, oldest game console you could think of.....the Atari 2600....and lo and behold, I came back around to "zero". What I got to watch, was the DAWN of Retro-gaming from it's very inception practically. Back then "retro" was not even a word in the vernacular, it was, at the most esteemed, called "classic gaming" or "vintage video games", and most of the people I was reading, were older Gen X college students trying to get a good grade on HTML in college IIRC.