OT Businesses that you grew up with that no longer exist

[GL_Storm]

Crazy thing to me is the dude in there 20s and 30s stay up all night long playing these days. I haven't played a video game since I was 13 yo when I discovered girls. lol Actually I first kissed a girl in 1st grade.

I got back into video games in my 40's, bought a PS4 and did some all night sessions. I have a PS5 now, but I don't use it as much. My favorite games are Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5, The Last of Us, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I'm an ADHD person and these things can really trigger my hyper focus superpower like nothing else. The one that did it the worst was Horizon Zero Dawn. The virtual world is so amazing. I would play all night long until my controller went dead and I was completely exhausted. Then I would basically take a long nap, maybe three hours or something, and get up to play some more.

[D-train]

Crazy thing to me is the dude in there 20s and 30s stay up all night long playing these days. I haven't played a video game since I was 13 yo when I discovered girls. lol Actually I first kissed a girl in 1st grade.

I got back into video games in my 40's, bought a PS4 and did some all night sessions. I have a PS5 now, but I don't use it as much. My favorite games are Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5, The Last of Us, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I'm an ADHD person and these things can really trigger my hyper focus superpower like nothing else. The one that did it the worst was Horizon Zero Dawn. The virtual world is so amazing. I would play all night long until my controller went dead and I was completely exhausted. Then I would basically take a long nap, maybe three hours or something, and get up to play some more.

Wild so is it like a drug or alcohol addiction???

[Sibelius Hindemith]

Pacman was just memorizing boards, so that never appealed to me. Donkey Kong was revolutionary and a really fun game. Frogger was fun but I was never really good at it. Tetrus I found really boring.

Now an interesting thing about Galaga. If, on the first wave, you leave one of the two left-hand bees as the last thing on the wave, and let that bee fly and recycle through the screen top to bottom for 15-20 minutes, NOTHING will ever shoot at you for the rest of the game. It's a bug, and we used to use it to play that game forever and turn it over. We'd have dozens of spectators watching us thinking we were good at the game, when really we just exploited the bug to make everything stop shooting at us. The bug is still in the arcade machines today, and can still be exploited.

My personal favorite was Defender, and I got really good at it. When you get to 990,000 points, everything you hit from there until 1,000,000 would give you an extra life, and then stop giving you extra lives for permanently. I believe it was the game requiring the most skill to perfect. Was the first side-scroller arcade game and required you to fly with precision while also handling quite a few buttons.

I also didn't like Space Invaders as it was slow and kind of boring, but Asteroids was a completely different story. For when it originally came out (late 1979), nothing could touch it for how challenging it was. The strategy for that game was to blow up everything but a small little asteroid piece, and then you would fly as fast as you could bottom to top, waiting for the little ship worth 1,000 points every kill. Hopefully, the little ship wouldn't blow up your last asteroid piece or you'd get a new wave of asteroids that was more challenging. You could repeatedly kill the small ship to get to 99,900 and turn that game over.

My God I had know idea you were a video game Scientist! So glad that I started this thread.

Like I said, I spent thousands of hours when I was at the UW 1981-1982 playing in the arcades. It made me drop out after two years, and I had to go down to Phoenix to finish my C.I.S. degree. So video games almost derailed by career early on. Lol........But talk about the golden age of gaming. Between arcade games and MTV being brand new, I'm not really sure how I made it through honestly.

Where were you when i posted those arcade video game polls a year ago?

[GL_Storm]

Crazy thing to me is the dude in there 20s and 30s stay up all night long playing these days. I haven't played a video game since I was 13 yo when I discovered girls. lol Actually I first kissed a girl in 1st grade.

I got back into video games in my 40's, bought a PS4 and did some all night sessions. I have a PS5 now, but I don't use it as much. My favorite games are Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5, The Last of Us, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I'm an ADHD person and these things can really trigger my hyper focus superpower like nothing else. The one that did it the worst was Horizon Zero Dawn. The virtual world is so amazing. I would play all night long until my controller went dead and I was completely exhausted. Then I would basically take a long nap, maybe three hours or something, and get up to play some more.

Wild so is it like a drug or alcohol addiction???

They can be. For me, I think it helps that I'm older, that I have other interests, and my favorite games are in-between releases. I'm also not actively seeking out new ones to dive into. For younger guys though, it can be a real problem.

Technologically, I think much of entertainment will move into various types of AI driven immersive simulations and the ones that hit will be the most addictive experiences we've ever encountered. The technology for this exists now, but the hardware isn't quite there yet from what I understand.