Whether on consoles like PlayStation, Nintendo, Sega and X-Box or PC games or stuff on smartphones these days - how did they manage? Like, what did they do instead to have fun whether they were available or not in spare and private time, thanks. :)
shareVideo games have been around all my life, but we also played outside and did other things. Skateboards, sports, played in bands/musical instruments, and so on. I think that's how kid spent a lot of their free time in the pre-video game era.
Kids don't play outside much anymore nowadays, but all things said, I don't think it's that different from before video games existed in regard to what kids do for fun. Meaning that kids still play sports and in bands and those kinds of activities too.
Also, I think not playing outside has more to do with the "stranger danger" phenomenon that blew up in the '80s and '90s -- like the ‘milk carton kids’ thing in the US – which made parents more protective of letting their kids roam freely. Also, I believe social media has been more of a disrupter in how kids spend their free time than video games -- although that's kind of off topic.
Parents should be more overprotective now, because we have sex offender registries, and we can see exactly where the convicted sex offenders live.
shareI was around seven or eight when the first game systems started showing up in my neighbors homes. We got an atari 5200 when I was around ten.
You really couldn't put that much time into those early games, IMO. They were fun but repetitive. After an hour of Pac Man you started looking for other things to do.
Movie related, I liked to read novelizations. They would usually come out before the movie, so I'd know what happened (the books did differ from the movies, but usually not too much). I couldn't resist telling people that Vader was indeed Luke's father if people started arguing about it. I remember the adults usually thought it was true, but the kids didn't believe it.
So did people from the older generation manage well without say Duke Nukem and DOOM and Wolfenstein type of shoot them up, or Mario Bros or Sonic the Hedgehog? Was their life outside of it really quite fulfilling?
shareDid none of those people ever suffer or get too curious to play those games?
Also, does anyone know. You know actor Samuel L. Jackson, he himself and his character in "Snakes on a Plane" (2006) film? In that film, he is 57 or so years old and in the film's SPOILER happy ending, he talks happily about praising a Play Station, yeah, because his "co-pilot" used to do a plane simulator game on it, but still, does anyone know, did Mr Jackson ever play consoles in his life, in young or adult ages?
We were always outside. Even in winter. We had a skating rink in the back yard and would build snow forts. If the weather was really bad we might watch tv, but even then we still had indoor play as well.
I also read a lot of books.
When I was young (I am 72 as I write this) we would get home from school and go outside to play until the streetlights came on. We would play cowboys and Indians, but as we got older, there were softball games, basketball games, and my personal favorite - playing Frisbee for hours!
The only time we were inside after school was when 4 o'clock came around and us horror fans were watching "Dark Shadows"
You played spin the bottle
shareThere was plenty to do.
Watched TV, played outside, went to the movies, played with toys and games, went to museums parks and other fun places, belonged to different clubs like scouts, read comics and books, etc.
The major difference is now kids are more isolated or interacting with others through a device. My friends and I hanged out in person. A kid could go outside to a playground or carry a ball and easily make new friends.
I had a blast!