Forty years of playing video games
Added 2025-10-28 07:01:01 +0000 UTC
As of this week, both of The Resties have entered their 40s. What's it like growing older alongside video game culture? Frushtick and Plante reflect on the four different gaming eras of their life.
Speaking of walking corpses: the pair shares their thoughts on the latest version of Frankenstein!
Stuff discussed:
Electronic Gaming Monthly archive
GameSetWatch on the Gamasutra network
1990 Nintendo World Championships NYC
Comments
Love the library shoutouts! Some libraries even carry video games to borrow which is super neat. Thanks for sharing about your lives and relationships with video games, great episode!
Rachel Leigh
2025-11-03 21:36:49 +0000 UTCThank you!!
Chris
2025-11-03 02:28:27 +0000 UTCI know you mentioned a hesitancy to have too many personal conversations on episodes, but this was one of my favourite episodes in a long time. I listen for the games, but most of all I listen for you guys, your knowledge and the stories you have to tell!
Kieran O'Brien
2025-11-02 12:27:43 +0000 UTCReally appreciated this episode - such a lovely chat! I didn't grow up playing games, but I'm a similar age and grew up in what sounds like a kinda similar culture to Chris (albeit on a different continent). His comments about feeling that enjoying specific forms of art was kinda taboo really resonated with me, especially the point about this feeling being largely a matter of self-policing. For me it was reading, and even though I now *literally work in a field in which I spend most of my time being publicly enthusiastic about books* I still feel that prickle of embarrassment when talking about texts I love, because I was so scared to do that when I was a teen for fear of being judged - even though I think, with hindsight, that there was nothing really there to be scared of. I'm still at what I would call a very early stage of learning about games, and the conversations on Besties/Resties are such an enjoyable guide. Thank you!
Kirsty
2025-10-29 15:21:01 +0000 UTCIf you want to compare with someone who is very nearly 50: * First games were almost certainly at the arcade. I can't say what was first, but I remember Tempest and Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man. And Dragonslayer! * First home games were on a TI-99/4a, which had games on cartridges. Must have been about 82. A year or two later I had an Apple IIe, which I gamed on until 1990. My first game on that was a game about driving a rabbit through a maze, but soon after, an older friend brought me a cracked version of Karateka! Absolutely seminal. * I also remember my uncle showing me Zork on his first-run Macintosh, so that must have been before the Apple II. A couple of my friends and I would obsess over Infocom text adventures and Sierra games. * I got an NES about the time it came out. Besides Mario and Duck Hunt, I bought Excitebike and Castlevania, and borrowed Metroid from a friend. We'd rent games if we wanted to play something different. * Got a PC at the start of high school and then I was a PC gamer primarily for the rest of my life. (Speaking of magazines, I got a PC Gamer subscription in college.) * Didn't own another console until I got a PS2 right about the time the PS3 was released. I've basically followed that pattern with Sony consoles ever since--get the old console when the library is huge and you know what the classic games are. * In 1999, I started working in the games industry. One of the reasons I bought a PS2 was because the MMO company I started at pivoted to console games, and I had very little understanding of that world. * Now I play almost entirely indie games! In fact, this week I am judging games for the Independent Games Festival competition (along with hundreds of other devs and journalists), which I've been doing for about five years. Last thing, and I can't believe I have to tell this to a person who worked there: Gamasutra was the website of Game Developer Magazine. They are still around: They rebranded to gamedeveloper.com. Great episode, gents!
Christopher Floyd
2025-10-29 15:01:15 +0000 UTC
