Age

[Wastrel]

37, and all alone in my bracket! There's got to be more....

Well I have a birthday in a few weeks, so I rounded up to the next bracket when I answered the poll.

[furiosity]

I'm 24, though will be 25 this year. My friends are all around 28-29 and they close their ears and wonder about my sanity when I start talking about ToME. They call it 'pixel-wars' (translated from Hungarian)

I think it's not really about age as such, but about the presence or absence of access to computers when the roguelikes were more widespread and not so different from the other games. Though I do remember playing Alley Cat (a game with pixelated graphics, but graphics!) even before I played Rogue.

[Nerdanel]

I had never seen a roguelike until something like two years ago. Around a few years before that I learned something called Nethack existed and it was a game with ascii graphics. (I assumed it was a net game...)

The reason I turned to roguelikes was that I had played modern games and thought they put too much attention to graphics and not enough on depth. Even Castlevania: Symphony of the Night started to lose its charm on my second play-through since there was little randomness involved. I would get bored with most games under an hour. So you could say roguelikes are my natural area and it only took so long because I had never heard of them.

On the other hand, I remember the time when Towers of Hanoi on Commodore 64 was new and wonderful. I had access to computers, starting with the ancient TRS-80, when they were still way rarer than today and so I may more closely resemble older roguelike fans in outlook than I know.

[Arioch_Arioch]

Does anyone here remember the depth of gameplay in the classic "Mugwump" game? Oh those were the days! How I miss my old ZX-81

[Hunter]

Does anyone here remember the depth of gameplay in the classic "Mugwump" game? Oh those were the days! How I miss my old ZX-81

Oh wow...someone remembers that little Basic program? It was like keno, or even precursor to Minesweeper. Gotta tell you, that dates you badly. Course, it dates me too...thirty here, actually, but got my first computer in 1980. Sigh, I miss those days a little, but I prefer to be of legal drinking age, so it's all good.

[Armada]

18, too old to get away with breaking the law, but old enough that you can do most of the things that broke the law when you were younger

[Wolfe]

The reason I turned to roguelikes was that I had played modern games and thought they put too much attention to graphics and not enough on depth.

I agree completely, and I could, at least from a personal perspective, narrow down when the games companies really started doing this. Something I've just named 'The day the Amiga died'.

It'd be somewhere about 1992, 1993, and whilst that particular home computer was never hugely popular in the US, they were very common in the UK and Europe. And they had a lot of games available, practically anything produced for an IBM clone, if it came from a big company like Sierra, or US Gold. But it had a lot of support from up and coming little companies, like Core (who went on to do Tomb Raider), Team 17, and Sensible Software.

And then suddenly, all these companies dropped the Amiga like a three week old fish. Games stopped coming out within months. The monthly Amiga magazines had about enough reviews to fill a dozen pages, and people started buying Segas and SNESes for their gaming fix. Which was where all these companies were now working. It was a conscious decision by them, and a money-based one, as there was more profit on a cartridge than a bunch of floppy disks (apparently), and they were harder to pirate.

A couple of years later, Windows 95 emerged and suddenly everyone started buying desktops, but I still think this is where the rot set in. Prior to that point, a lot of software houses coded games because they it was fun to do, and the money a big hit made was kind of incidental.

I think the last thing I actually bought commercially was Morrowind, and if that's an example of the quality control on games nowadays... So, yeah. I'm never amazed that open-source stuff like Angband is popular, just amazed that it isn't more popular.

Wow. I think the forums here need some sort of <cut> tag like livejournal. Sorry for rambling a bit, but the games industry is something that annoys the hell out of me

[Neil]

To me, the big-time game producers stopped being interesting years ago. Right around Myst and the mass-market introduction of the CDROM drive (remember the MPC standards?), games stopped being games and started being Hollywood.

We're just lucky that the FSF and the Internet produced the environment we have today, where the library of free software we haver today is available along with the community that created it. That's waht has allowed small-time game development today to thrive.

[Serin]

To me, the big-time game producers stopped being interesting years ago. Right around Myst and the mass-market introduction of the CDROM drive (remember the MPC standards?), games stopped being games and started being Hollywood.

We're just lucky that the FSF and the Internet produced the environment we have today, where the library of free software we haver today is available along with the community that created it. That's waht has allowed small-time game development today to thrive.

I agree with Neil, even though I sometimes like a game with graphics and sounds, I still prefer free games that take forever to complete, (I never liked myst but that is another thread topic that doesn't belong here!)

[Bill]

Unless my vote didn't get recorded I AM the 46+.

Just remember, you can't escape growing old but you can stay immature forever.

[Canderel]

24 going on 25.

I have downloaded The Elder Scrolls: Arena (now available for free download), but no manual. Playing that at present. Quite nice, but the
random dungeons aren't random enough (though it's hard to put flavour into a randomly generated dungeon). Also a bit buggy, but in general quite a nice game.

Nice thing about Angband/ToME is: Play it... go on to your new game (like Arena), and come back to ToME.

[Serin]

Unless my vote didn't get recorded I AM the 46+.

Just remember, you can't escape growing old but you can stay immature forever.

thank you for giving us all permission to stay immature forever!

[feathin]

19 now, but started playing around 14 or so with Vanilla, so I consider it odd that no one in that age category seems to be playing now. *tisk tisk* Youngsters these days...

[Darklaw]

26, here.

I've always said I'm a firm believer that you're as old as you feel. Perhaps I should revise that philosophy to, 'you're as old as the Rogue-like to which you first sold your soul', which would thus make me 12 years old, and a child of UMoria...

[TheKnightofMirrors]

I'm the zero to ten here. According to the judgement of many, I must be five.