I recently gave a talk to a group of undergrads. Not one of them knew about Pinball Construction Set, Adventure Construction Set, or any of those early Electronic Arts titles.

One of them later came up to me and said, "You know, I think I heard about that..." The tone was about the same as if he'd said, "Yes, of course. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. That's very interesting from an academic standpoint."

I think that when game developers talk like this, we speak with some sense of irony. But I'll be darned if I can figure out where it comes from. I'm getting older -- the lower back pain doesn't lie.
 

It's interesting to me that you mention this. I'm thirty-one now, and on both sides of the fence there. My chosen profession (UNIX Systems Administration) seems to be composed mainly of people much younger than me, fresh out of college and excited about the Linux thing, and people much older than me that like to talk about dropping their stack of punchcards back in college and what life was like on a PDP-11.

I'm kind of in-between. I can talk about the fun of my old VIC-20 and Commodore 64, and in the next breath talk about having fun playing around with installing Linux on my Xbox.

I was yakking with a co-worker the other day, and realized that he had no concept of original 8-bit Nintendo gaming. I remember losing a whole weekend to that thing (Dig-Dug, oh yeah!) with my buddy Jon back in junior high.

I suspect we'll be talking about "back in the day" in our eighties. For contrast, someone who is eighty today:
* Will remember the Great Depression vaguely
* Might have served in the military in the waning days of World War II
* Was probably raising his own kids during the fifties
* Their 9/11 was Pearl Harbor. They received news of the only atomic bombs ever dropped during warfare shortly after it happened.

Where I'm feeling it? Most of the actors on TV shows seem to be younger than me. Yeah, I know, it's stupid, but there was a day when most of them were the same age as me. That day has pased :)
 

Yeah - I have been really getting into the history of videogaming because so much of it happened during my lifetime - videogames literally changed my life, and I got to be there (at least as a spectator) for much of it.

I guess that's the thing - videogaming has a relatively short history, but I guess it's actually history now, not "recent current events." But dang it if I still don't feel the need to boast about the capabilities of the Commodore 64, and ward of attacks from Apple ][ users...

I think some of the irony comes from the fact that we geeks were the "whiz kids" of our time... our elders were mystified by this technology that we just took to so easily. Now we are the elders, and that same ease with which we took to this technological revolution has made it "old hat" and taken for granted by the new generation.
 

(I know this is an old post but I had to comment)

I'm a painfully old school gamergirl...I remember playing on a Pong console. For hours. Good grief were we strapped for entertainment.

Recently over some after dinner wine my husband mentioned being blown away by Castle Wolfenstein at a school science fair (he mistook the game for some other kid's project, no less). Talk about making me feel like I'm robbing the cradle! *^_^*

Now he's helping make a much anticipated title for the Xbox and I do art for casual games. I feel like we manage to represent two recent steps in game development (well-funded AAA titles and the emergence of indie game companies) as well as how the industry grew into what it is now (and how it's continuing to evolve).

At any rate, it makes for some interesting after dinner conversation. ^o^
 

Merry Calliope:
Was it Castle Wolfenstein, or Wolfenstein 3D? The original was an Apple II game, not TOO many years after Pong :)

I think know how you feel. I'm doing the indie thing, and ... well, my console effort at the day job isn't quite a AAA production, but it's not indie. But it's kinda fun having a foot in both camps.

Great to hear from ya!
 

I am a big fan of Adventure Construction Set and would like to see if anyone here who mentioned it has created any user-based adventures. I am trying to catalog all I can at www.AdventureConstructionSet.com

I would love to find any adventures out there. I am DanElmaleh@hotmail.com