My son is around retro consoles quite a bit. He recently found my Gameboy Color with Pokémon Blue in it. He really wanted to play the game (was ecstatic, in fact), but complained right off the bat that he couldn't see anything and put it down after 1 minute. Absolutely no persistence. When you had one game, one console and all the time in the world, you explored. Now you have an infinity of games and you don't play anything anymore.
This is very insightful. I do find myself overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer amount of stuff there is available to me. Between the retro games I own, the new game systems, TV with 200 channels, phones with unlimited apps, internet with unlimited information, etc.
I wonder if I were to be a kid in the 2010s, rather than the 1980s, if I would have the same appreciation for things that I do now. I feel like an old bastard, but "back in my day we had a few new games a year, and we were happy with them."
Makes me nostalgic for the days of shared experiences. When there were three TV channels, everyone watched the same shows. There was a time when baseball was America's game. A few new movies came out a month and that was all there was to watch. Part of why the fabric of this nation is becoming unwound is that there isn't really a shared identity anymore. You have 300 million people doing their own things and no one knows or cares about what anyone else is doing. There's a really good book Bowling Alone that I recommend people read, basically talks about the falling apart of a communal society.
Sorry for the rant and off topic, that post had a mind of its own.
I think part of it is the amount of stuff out there now, and how quick and easy it is to access. Though, even in the 90's, I did visit IHOR and such, I never got too into it because I think all I had to play with was a gravis gamepad and Nesticle, I still preferred the actual hardware. Still, there are some younger people interested in the older stuff.
Older people can be similar, I've met some that refuse to play anything from when they grew up, because the graphics bother them.
Myself, there is so much out there, and so much time, I can only add so much to it. Also, newer games seem to be more like interactive movie/stories. Not much strategy to them.
I have enough to keep me busy, when I have the time. No problem with some of the newer stuff, but I know what I like, much like some of these younger kids know what they like.
For short games of fun, I had lots of fun, up through the end of the 90's with someone and an Atari 2600. If we wanted some quick gaming, we'd play Warlords (Mentioned here), maze craze (I think that had the 2 player option where the other player tried to catch you), Combat, air sea battle, and so on. Good games, that we could kill 10 minutes with while waiting for a ride someplace, a television show to air, whatever.
Ernest Borgnine said it best, nearly 15 years ago. Pac-man video games..
..
