We have a list in the apolyton forum of about 250 Apolytoners with their ages... and the average age is about 25

But then my mental age has always been about 652 years older than my actual age.

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I got bored with my Churchill quote (and was tired of people telling me I misquoted him).

I got hooked on the Mac version of the original Civ when I started college in 1990. I've been playing Civ games ever since . . . and love it!

I'm 31. I have been playing Civ games since Civ 1 on my old 286. I have a bit of a better machine now. Nice to know I am not the only 30 something that likes this game. TBS games are the only ones that seem to hold my intrest. Everything else just seems so dull. But then I used to play a lot of Chess with me dad when I was still in elementry.

(Warning: the following is a subjective, nostalgic rant that may bore people with short attention spans. It is therefore advised that you simply scroll down to the next post)

My first exposure to video games were the arcade cabinets they had outside fish & chip shops, and other various shops around my town. My interest in playing them began with Space Invaders, and declined around the time Double Dragon ushered in the era of fighter games. Competition for playing these arcade machines was intense, and the politics involved around the local video machines was incredibly complicated. It was common to have a crowd of spectators huddled around you whilst you played, thus perfecting such games became an incredible badge of prestige in your community, and failure to achieve even average levels of competence earned such unfortunates scorn and ridicule. There were usually an elite group of bevan bullies who dominated such machines and mini-pinball palours, so a generation of nerds like myself had to endure many violent encounters, and cigarette burns in order to fight for our right to video game.
In the city there was a huge video arcade that was paradise for someone like me, and I only had access to such a Mecca if I waged [skipped] school. It only cost 20 cents per game, so it was quite affordable.
Eventually fight machines and stupid racing machines began to dominate, and prices rose from 20 cents to $3 for some machines! Asians who loved these simplistic games began to take over the arcade palours in my city, and I quickly lost interest in the arcade machine. And today, Asian gangs hang out in the big arcade palours in my city, and as far as I'm concerned, they are welcome to them. I often watch them dancing on their Disco games transfixed out of morbid curiousity. [Why these morons waste their money when consoles like Nintendo and Playstation are available, I don't know.]

Whilst I was still preoccupied with arcades, home consoles began to become available. I remember when I first saw Pong while my family were visiting friends. Pong was the only game the console played. I was hooked when I saw it, and burned with envy on the way home.

A Christmas or two later, I got my first video game console, but for the life of me I cannot remember its name. It was thrown in the trash ages ago [without my consent or knowledge]. It played various games using cartridges, and a few that were programmed into it also.

Then came along a range of battery operated, scrolling electronic games like Scrambler, and primitive hand held racing games that had moving plastic tracks. I had Futuretronics Scrambler. Great for their novelty of being totally portable.

Then Atari came onto the scene, and I began a relentless nag campaign to secure one for Christmas. We got our Atari 2600 in 1980/81 [?], and I shudder to imagine the amount of time I spent playing games such as Asteroids, Joust, Reactor, Pitfall, River Raid....etc. [I still have my Atari 2600.]

Around the time my interest in Atari declined, Apple IIE's were all the rage. I remember I would book time at my local library to play games on it like Load Runner, and dumb educational games which I never the less found fascinating at the time. But getting an Apple IIE was too much to expect for my Christmas wish list. Instead I got into Nintendo Game & Watch handheld LCD games.

Then came the great Commodore 64, which I was obsessed with for many years. Heaps cheaper than Apple's, or the IBM computers that were becoming trendy at that time; and ten times better. Plus fully colour: monochrome monitors were not needed, cause you could just connect it up to your t.v. like regular video game consoles. Commodore games were the closest thing available to proper arcade machine graphics, and the best thing of all: there was a great network of other users in my area, so as long as you had a disk drive, you could have as many games as your heart desired. I ended up collecting way too many games that I could ever possibly hope to fully explore, so I guess this is when my first collector instinct concerning video games kicked in. Out of hundreds of games, I only had a half dozen I actually had paid money for

After this period I hit a period devoid of gaming, where I became interested in other things like girls, drugs, rock music and booze. Eventually I came to my senses and bought an IBM compatible 386, and my first exposure to complicated strategy games like Civ.

I've since played what Nintendo and Sony has offered up these days, but playing arcade games is little challenge anymore. Playing Quake or Half-Life on a network is about as close as I come to really being absorbed by action games these days. I almost exclusively play solo strat games on my own now.

So, with so many other friends equally obsessed with video games, I have never considered myself to be abnormal because I'm still interested in such things.

Anyway, even when I'm an old man of 80, I shall always be interested in the latest technology in entertainment, which will probably be full blown virtual reality then. I guess my parents generation are still intrigued by television, but because I have witnessed the advent of the video game era, it will always interest me.