What is your age group?

45, I actually get less grumpy and more open minded with age though. I play stuff now that I wouldn't have touched with a 10 foot pole 10 years ago.

37, er, I am catching up to you old farts.

21... About as old as Bethesda's engine.

Somehow I now have an itch to watch Logan's Run.

BoboTheMighty said:

Somehow I now have an itch to watch Logan's Run.

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Or Soylent Green!

Do you want the first two digits or the second set? -)

Approaching mid 30s

No comment, but my name's in the Poll!!

I will be 53 in June. That makes 3 of us who are 52. Weird.

I want to thank you guys for making me feel not so old.

38

Alright. When I voted yesterday, I was one of only two to be in the 30's category. Everyone else was older. Now that more of us have voted, I can see that a lot of us are in our thirties. That seems more like what I was expecting.

For you older guys, I'm wondering how you got into RPGs, and specifically cRPGs. Those of us currently in our mid-late thirties were kids and tweens during the heyday of the Gold Box RPGs. Did you guys get into those during college, and then stick with it? Or did you as teenagers start with Zork before we were even born?

36. Probably some kind of average on the Watch.

Edit: No, looking at the poll so far, I'm young...

For myself, regarding getting into role playing games in general, it was all about D&D.
Regarding computer role playing games, Baldur's Gate is what caught my attention (in a huge way) when it was first released, and brought me into crpgs.

There was a huge D&D boom starting in the late 70s, and then really getting popular in the early 80s…at my middle school, many boys were into playing D&D sessions, at lunch and after school. I'm thinking that for a lot of us in our 40s, that is where it all started.

There were also older guys in the neighborhood who were into playing regular D&D sessions, and us kids would go over to their houses to do that, leveling up our pet characters over time…I'm assuming some of the oldest people who responded probably got started playing a game called "Chainmail" in the 70s, I believe that was the precursor to D&D, and then later moved to D&D when that came out. Which as most people know, went through several versions, like "Basic Dungeons and Dragons" then later, "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" and 1st and then 2nd edition.

My favorite edition remains second edition, that is the one I grew up on.

Updated: My history is off, just looked it up. I grew up on the one before 2nd edition, that one actually came out when I was in high school as a senior.

I also was off about when D&D first started, it came out a lot earlier, in 1974.

Nathaniel3W said:

Alright. When I voted yesterday, I was one of only two to be in the 30's category. Everyone else was older. Now that more of us have voted, I can see that a lot of us are in our thirties. That seems more like what I was expecting.

For you older guys, I'm wondering how you got into RPGs, and specifically cRPGs. Those of us currently in our mid-late thirties were kids and tweens during the heyday of the Gold Box RPGs. Did you guys get into those during college, and then stick with it? Or did you as teenagers start with Zork before we were even born?

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I'm not sure text adventures really have a whole lot in common with CRPG's IMO, but I actually started with the original text adventure, the one that came before Zork. Wikipedia says it's called Adventureland, which sounds right. I played it on a friend's VIC-20. What really got me into CPRG's though was buying Might & Magic 1 at Babbage's one day.

It's kind of amazing that (as of now on the poll) only 6.67% of this site is under age 30.

Stingray said:

I'm not sure text adventures really have a whole lot in common with CRPG's IMO

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Yeah, they really don't, not by today's Venn diagram anyway. But the way I kind of imagine it--and anyone correct me if my sense of history is wrong--is that anyone in the 70's or 80's who was interested in any kind of Tolkenesque fantasy setting would have been at least loosely connected to the progenitors of today's RPG staples.

In other words, I kind of assumed that anyone who liked Zork, Adventureland, Chainmail, Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and Wizards, was likely to become a CRPG player if only because of the ubiquitous fantasy setting of early CRPGs.

Edit: Also, my earliest D&D memories were of some boxed set that a friend of mine had, that had a big foldout map. It was Basic D&D, where elf and dwarf were character classes, and you wanted to have a low THAC0. At some point, D&D progressed and the most popular version by the time I started college was one that gave you a bunch of options for nonweapon proficiencies. Remember those? I still think 3e was my favorite though. I haven't tried 5e.

49 in a couple of weeks. I started with CRPGs on the ZX81, and then on the C64. Started playing D&D with the first edition in 83. I played D&D solo for a couple of years before I found a group, so that probably solidified my preference for solo CRPGs.

Codger memories....

I started out playing games on a mainframe. The first text game was called Collosal Cave Adventure or just Adventure sometimes. This was 1978 for me, though the game came out earlier. I bought a Commodore Vic20, A TI94?, and every other computer over the next few years. Unfortunately, I could only hook one up at a time in my room, so the C64 took pride of place most times. I used Commodore stuff for a decade before moving to the IBM stuff after the Amiga titles died out.

I was fortunate enough to visit the U of I as a freshman. I picked up what later became Dungeons and Dragons while visiting a shop near the campus. So my love of AD&D actually came a little after my first exposure to gaming on a computer, but not by much. I do remember that there were no dice for the games when I first started. You actually cut out paper chits and shook them up in your hand to simulate a die roll

46 - soon to be 47 I came to gaming late, sort of. I had a c64 as a kid, and then played games on and off until I was about 17. Then moved onto PCs with monochrome graphics, when I went to university, and stopped gaming for some years.Then started up again when Baldur's gate was released (I played some games before, like DOOM, Descent etc, but not many) and that was where my love of cRPG,s started. Now I don't play much else, and I have become more curmudgeonly as I get older, especially w.r.t. gaming ;-) Even have a t-shirt …don't ask. (by which I mean, of course, please do ask so I can jabber on some more

crpgnut said:

I will be 53 in June. That makes 3 of us who are 52. Weird.

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It must mean something - bring forth the numerologist!

booboo said:

Even have a t-shirt

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You could tell us, or a picture might explain things better.